Mozilla To Support H.264 249
suraj.sun writes with a followup to last week's news that Mozilla was thinking about reversing their stance on H.264 support. Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker and CTO Brendan Eich have now both written blog posts explaining why they feel H.264 support is no longer optional. Eich wrote, "We will not require anyone to pay for Firefox. We will not burden our downstream source redistributors with royalty fees. We may have to continue to fall back on Flash on some desktop OSes. I’ll write more when I know more about desktop H.264, specifically on Windows XP. What I do know for certain is this: H.264 is absolutely required right now to compete on mobile. I do not believe that we can reject H.264 content in Firefox on Android or in B2G and survive the shift to mobile. Losing a battle is a bitter experience. I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives. Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance." Baker added, "Our first approach at bringing open codecs to the Web has ended up at an impasse on mobile, but we’re not done yet. ... We'll find a way around this impasse."
Re:Will Googorola sue them? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:not a troll (Score:5, Informative)
So, Mozilla copying Google's version numbering scheme and release schedule made Firefox *worse* than Chrome? Okay, then...
Actually yes. Version upgrades in chrome are transparent to the user. I don't care if chrome updates to version 324...I don't know even know what version of chrome I'm running.
When firefox updates, it make you go through a huge hassle of clicking approve on update boxes, checking to see if your extensions are broken, realizing half your extensions ARE broken, looking for new ones, etc. If they made their upgrades as transparent as chrome does, it wouldn't be a problem. But a rapid release schedule is a terrible idea when upgrading is a hassle.
Many people aren't thrilled with the idea of silent updates, for sure, the hassle of updating past versions was horrible. Fortunately, it's pretty easy now, and I haven't had any add-ons break since v8 or so. v13 will bring silent updates.
Re:Will Googorola sue them? (Score:4, Informative)
Because Motorola is suing Apple and Microsoft over standards essential patents with exorbitant fees, in the classic way of bait-and-switch once the standard is in place.
And Google specifically declined to make the same promise as Apple and Microsoft about this issue.
Re:Will Googorola sue them? (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox isn't implementing h.264 though. They're simply going to call the system codec if the OS has one. Typically the OS vendors that do that also offer patent indemnification for their users, so if someone sues you for using h.264 in FIrefox on Windows, Microsoft would get involved because they already paid to license it to Windows users.
Re:Will Googorola sue them? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, that's the point of the pool (Score:5, Informative)
Key patents are also held by... actually, there's a list [wikipedia.org]. A long one. Will all of them agree not to sue too?
By joining the pool, the ones on that list have put their patents under a common license. So as long as you buy a license from the pool, then yes, they have agreed not to sue you.
(That's no help against Google/Motorola, or patent trolls that aren't in the pool, however.)
Why can they not comprehend system codecs? (Score:1, Informative)
Seriously? WHY are they figuring out licensing issues on Windows or OSX? JUST SUPPORT THE GOD DAMN SYSTEM CODECS YOU FUCKS.
Its hard to find a video card that doesn't have h.264 support for windows, OSX does naturally, so really all you have to consider is Linux where you don't really have a set of system codecs in the first place, and even if you did, you'd still not have most people with an h264 codec installed anyway due to the license flaming.
So again, WHY ARE YOU CONCERNED WITH LICENSING , just let people use what they already have instead of reinventing the wheel every 3 weeks.
Re:Hardware Acceleration (Score:4, Informative)
You're funny.
A specialized part is always going to trump the "jack of all trades". That's rather the point of having the specialize part.
Claims of this kind are especially funny considering that ARM CPUs simply don't have the ability to deal with the vast bulk of video content already out there. That's why these SoCs have special GPUs to begin with.
An ARM would be dead in the water without special purpose silicon for video decoding.
Re:Hardware Acceleration (Score:3, Informative)
You're funny.
A specialized part is always going to trump the "jack of all trades". That's rather the point of having the specialize part.
Claims of this kind are especially funny considering that ARM CPUs simply don't have the ability to deal with the vast bulk of video content already out there. That's why these SoCs have special GPUs to begin with.
An ARM would be dead in the water without special purpose silicon for video decoding.
Not only is that not an axiomatic truth, a GPU is in no way a "specialized part" for decoding an MPEG stream.
Re:OSS advocacy or maybe zealotry (Score:5, Informative)
This was just Google's play to push a standard they define over a standard defined by their competitors.
Utter nonsense. WebM/VP8 are fully open and free of patent license fees. Defined by Google perhaps, but controlled by Google, no, that is the whole point of a patent-free standard.