Ogg Vorbis / Theora Language Removed From HTML5 Spec

Rudd-O writes "It's official. Ogg technology has been removed from the HTML5 spec, after Ian caved in the face of pressure from Apple and Nokia. Unless massive pressure is exerted on the HTML5 spec editing process, the Web authoring world will continue to endure our modern proprietary Tower of Babel. Note that HTML5 in no way required Ogg (as denoted by the word 'should' instead of 'must' in the earlier draft). Adding this to the fact that there are widely available patent-free implementations of Ogg technology, there is really no excuse for Apple and Nokia to say that they couldn't in good faith implement HTML5 as previously formulated."

Ogg mad!

Ogg the cavemen break Apple and Nokia heads with open source CD!

Figures

And once again the public loses

Huh?

I have news for you: HTML is a format!

By being half-assed and not specifying a standard for a widely used aspect of the web browsing experience, what is in effect happening is a de-facto endorsement of all of those pet proprietary formats at the expense of clarity and allowing the various companies to rape the public with a million of buggy plug-ins, each with its own flavour of the week. The very anathema of a "standard".

It does not matter if Ogg/Theora were not the most advanced and efficient of technologies as neither is the whole concept of HTML. What mattered was estabilishment of an open standard which would cut down on the chaos of inane plug-ins and made it impossible for companies like CNN to purposefully block all web browsers other then IE from accessing their video contents, as is the case now.

Re:Huh?

Have you quite finished? Geez, it's a wonder multimedia-based services like YouTube even work on... just about every browser on the planet.

No, they don't. Try a 64-bit Linux, any distro, amongst many other examples. And no, writing entire 32-bit emulator plugins so that the stupidity which is Flash can run in them does not constitute "working" anymore than running VMWare makes Autocad work on Linux.

The Web-using public has proven itself quite capable of adopting new technologies that serve their purposes, and working on the basis of popular de facto standards. If any proprietary technology ceases to serve the needs of the Web-browsing public, that technology will most likely be replaced in fairly short order by another that does serve the public need. This sort of thing has been happening since the dawn of browsers and the old IE vs. Netscape browser wars.

Bullshit. The "web-using public's" 95%+ membership is comprised of people who would upon seeing "this website needs the The Up-Your-Ass Shit-o-Matic Plugin to Enhance Your Experience" would go "Duh, I better click OK!".

Quality or needs of the public have nothing to do with any of it. Needs of the various idiots attempting to control the public via means such as Flash-only sites have everything to do with it. That is why the public is not involved in protesting Ogg, corporations are.

There are advantages to having a truly open standard, but for something that evolves as fast as the Web, we've seen time and again that de facto standards that are technically sensible and practically useful are way more valuable than any formal document produced by a standards body.

More bullshit. If it weren't for open standards, the only "web" browser in existence would browse Microsoft "enhanced" HTML. The de-facto, secret, proprietary, patent-encumbered standards, with players available for only a small fraction of platforms are not "sensible" in any way, shape or form.

This whole discussion sounds a lot like people who like a relatively unpopular format bitching because they were hoping their preference would be forced on the rest of the world based on politics rather than technical merit, and they lost the argument.

Politics? Your entire argument can be summarized as "Everyone should use IE and commercial plugins on either Windows (or possibly, grudgingly, Mac)! Everyone who doesn't is a bitter, unpopular political loser!"

Re:mod parent up.

100% correct.

I liked the idea of OGG being recommended for HTML5, but realistically, there are a lot of problems.

As a container, OGG is pretty heavyweight. It's not going to be good for mobile devices.
All off the Vorbis and Theora decoders I've seen have been extremely resource-intensive. This may well be because more attention is devoted to other codecs like XVid, and so they are more highly optimized. Nevertheless, again, mobile devices will suffer.
Quality-wise, Vorbis is pretty nice. Theora, however, is a generation behind, and rapidly losing ground. HTML5 isn't expected to be ratified for over a year. In that time, Theora's generation of codecs will be even older and less efficient to the then-current codecs. For a field as rapidly evolving as streaming video, it doesn't make all that much sense to include it. It would be like suggesting that Indeo be implemented for HTML4.

The biggest benefit to recommending OGG in HTML5 is that it would get a free format out there, but at the cost of efficiency. While bandwidth continues to grow, and computers get faster and faster, waste is still a concern, and mobile devices are becoming more popular (you have to treat these as if they were 10 year old computers with equivalent bandwidth!) OGG misses the mark in most categories--too big and bulky for mobiles, too old for new computers. It's the worst of both worlds.

Re:Figures

I'm not sure if you are trying to be ironic here or if you are actually serious.

Where would we be today if the HTML spec didn't specify jpg, gif, and png as baseline standards for the image tag?

No HTML specification does that. The farthest any HTML specification goes is mentioning that they are common formats.

Can you imagine a huge mishmash of competing proprietary image standards, many of which wouldn't even render in free software browsers like Firefox?

Yes, in fact that's precisely the state of the world today. For instance, Firefox doesn't support JPEG 2000 [mozilla.org].

That would be a nightmare

Not really, because all major browsers support JPEG and PNG, despite the fact that the HTML specifications haven't recommended them.

HTML is a standard; it only works when it specifies exactly which formats are to be used

It does no such thing. For instance, it doesn't require browsers to implement JavaScript, it provides scripting language-independent hooks that can be used to support JavaScript or any other scripting language. It doesn't require browsers to implement CSS, it provides stylesheet language-independent hooks that can be used to support CSS or any other stylesheet language. It doesn't require browsers to implement JPEG or PNG, it provides image format-independent hooks that can be used to support JPEG, PNG or any other image format. And the HTML 5 specification is taking the exact same approach by not requiring Theora or Vorbis, but providing codec-independent hooks that can be used to support Theora, Vorbis or any other codec.

The choice of video and audio codecs is outside the scope of the HTML 5 specification. Attempting to more tightly couple independent formats is myopic.

Re:Figures

You correctly note that current the HTML 4.01 recommendation doesn't require JPEG, PNG, etc., but you fail to note that it does specifically mention three image formats, and they are "GIF, JPEG, and PNG".

Yes, it mentions them, it doesn't recommend them. Look at what it says:

src = uri [CT] This attribute specifies the location of the image resource. Examples of widely recognized image formats include GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

It mentions them as examples to illustrate how the <img> element type is used, not in order to promote them and certainly not to "specify them as baseline standards" as Ignorant Aardvark was claiming.

And how in hell did I "fail to note" that it mentions them? I explicitly said it mentions them.

Of course, if you did mention that, it would be a lot harder to use the current recommendations treatment of images to argue that removing the mention of Ogg formats from the HTML5 draft is consistent with the way prior HTML standards have treated images.

That's simply not true. There is a world of difference between mentioning popular formats as examples and saying that vendors should implement them.

An alternative...

Instead of specifying a specific format, just specify the salient details...how about "...MUST use a non-patent-encumbered format that is released under an OSI-approved license...". Well, not that, per-se, but you get my drift.

...now that I read the changes...

I see that what I just suggested is exactly the change they made. I'm fine with that...off to tag the front-page article with "badsummary"

Re:An alternative...

So... are you a developer for inkscape or something? Beyond the first few sentences that just turned into an inkscape advertisement.

If HTML5 gets adopted

there are bigger problems than Ogg!

For one, it will mean the death of any lightweight web browser. Web will become something like a TV where you are fed with content you cannot filter (because the TV is too complex to hack). Monopoly through complexity.

A simple new format that is designed from the start for vector graphics and that doesn't try to be backwards compatible with HTML would be the best way for the new web.

Re:If HTML5 gets adopted

Having the web be just like TV is exactly what large companies want. The marketting tards want you to see their company website exactly the way they think it's supposed to look. They certainly don't want people filtering content or anything like that. Why do you think Flash only websites are becoming so popular? The problem is mostly due to management and marketting types having no idea how the internet works.

On the plus side, it might be a pretty good filter all by itself. The second you see a site using HTML5, you automatically know it's probably not worth browsing.

Well, these companies show their true colors

MSFT isn't the only one who pulls crap like this. AAPL and NOK would gladly do the same things if they can get away with it.

Re:Well, these companies show their true colors

I've always said that Apple is just like Microsoft, only not as good at it. Of course, saying so is a ticked to -1 as Apple apologists empty their clips of mod points into any post that doesn't hail Steve Jobs as the savior of computing. But I've got the karma :).

Doesn't make sense...

If the format is free of patents, and is essentially open source (released under the BSD license)... how can Nokia shake its finger around and threaten people?

This wouldn't be a story if Microsoft had done it, trying to force WMP codecs into the standard - I'm actually kind of surprised they hadn't yet... but Nokia? wtf

Not a requirement

Note that HTML5 in no way required Ogg

So what's the point in having it in there then? The vendors who don't want to implement it won't, and the people wanting an open baseline won't get one. The recommendation did nothing for openness or interoperability, it just gave people an official excuse to bash vendors that won't implement it.

All other things being equal, a smaller specification that everybody can agree on is better than one with unnecessary, contentious recommendations. There was never any need for this recommendation, it just bloated the already massive specification.

Wierd.

From the page [html5.org]:

It would be helpful for interoperability if all browsers could support the same codecs. However, there are no known codecs that satisfy all the current players: we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies. This is an ongoing issue and this section will be updated once more information is available.

What part of initially suggesting Ogg Vorbis doesn't fit with the new quote? It just seems wierd. Like they could say what they mean, but not explicitly suggest Ogg.

Re:Wierd.

What part of initially suggesting Ogg Vorbis doesn't fit with the new quote?

The submarine patent threat. Ogg claims to be unencumbered, but until somebody big starts using it and lawsuits start flying in the Eastern District of Texas, nobody actually knows whether it's unencumbered. And companies which are already carrying a significant risk of submarine patents from other more popular/profitable codecs don't have much incentive to assume even more risk for sake of a codec that's hardly used and doesn't present compelling technical advantages.

Some people think this is FUD. I think those people don't pay attention to patent-related news in the US; the only safe position right now is to assume something is encumbered until someone else has spent millions of dollars litigating it to be sure, which is why you get development models like SQLite: SQLite refuses to accept or use any code based on algorithms or techniques that are less then 17 years old, so that they can prove they're using technologies which couldn't possibly be patent encumbered.. Patent reform would be a nice thing to have for cases like this...

say ogg WAS official

why does anyone think that would actually carry weight? reference microsoft browsers and previous standards

make ogg official, and business will ignore it, and marginalize the standard. do we really want the standards ignored?

so allow the businesses their moronic formats, and use ogg anyways

it's silly if anyone thinks the war against proprietary formats is going to be won by a standards body. at the very best, business will embrace standards because the standards body play footsie with business desires, which is what happened, which is good!

at worst, the standards body ignores business on some ideological crusade, so businesses just ignore the standards as well, and we have a worse tower of babel on our hands

folks: this is the best possible outcome, where best possible outcome = ugly begrudging accomodation of moronic business desires. you can't do any better than what happened, unfortunate, but true

The actual mail on the HTML-wg mailing list...

Just to point out what it currently happening, here is the mail from Ian Hickson from this morning:

"I've temporarily removed the requirements on video codecs from the HTML5
spec, since the current text isn't helping us come to a useful
interoperable conclusion. When a codec is found that is mutually
acceptable to all major parties I will update the spec to require that
instead and then reply to all the pending feedback on video codecs.

    http://www.whatwg.org/issues/#graphics-video-codec [whatwg.org]
"

The title of the news is a bit misleading :) In other words "temporarily removed until a consensus has been found".

attention that mpeg4 guy

In the last story about this there was a guy who made a really good comment about mpeg4 and how Ogg/Theora isn't actually that good for HTML5. He basically said that the video codec was patent encumbered but the company who owned it made it available to the public under a free nonrevocable license since it was DOA anyway when compared to mpeg4. see here:


"Ogg's video codec is Theora, which was proprietary. On2 developed it as its closed competition to MPEG-4's H.263 (DivX) and H.264 (AVC) codecs, alongside other competing proprietary codecs from Real and Microsoft (WMV). The winner to shake out of all that competition has been the MPEG-4 standard, which includes both a container and different sets of codecs. MPEG-4 is open and supported by lots of companies, and is also supported by FOSS (x264 is among the best implementations)." - DECS


I get the feeling that if people would actually sit down and look at the issue objectively then it would be obvious that Ogg/Theora being included in the HTML5 spec isn't that great of an idea. The problem is the Ogg crowd has a huge chip on their shoulder since no one has really given them the time of day. So, here's a chance for them to get some validation for all their hard work but they've been cut out yet again so everyone's all up in arms.

Re:Microsoft, Google, Apple

Google = Chaotic Neutral
Apple = Lawful Evil
Microsoft = Chaotic Evil

Me = Nerd

FUD FUD FUD

This is a point by point reply to your FUD.

• Theora is almost an order of magnitude better performing that H.261 and this is a critical difference for web video.
• No one actually knows what the patent status of any software is! ... In fact, several paid up licensees of mpeg codecs have been sued for patent infringement over these codecs *and lost*, so it's hard to argue that those codecs are better off.
• It's true that Theora isn't very widely adopted, but it has been shipped by Linux distributions for years, so there has been plenty of opportunities for people to sue over patents. Theora is used by Wikipedia, one of the most viewed websites in the world. Of course, Vorbis is orders of magnitude better on this point.
• What are you Nokia? An expensive and heavily patented codec like H.264 is not "open" in any meaningful sense. It's true that Ogg/Theora+Vorbis is not yet amazingly popular, but that is part of the point of standards. There is a chicken and egg, and first-mover takes all problem for file formats and standards help fix that problem.
• Why does HTML have an image tag? What would the world be like if images on the web required various incompatible proprietary plugins? Why should video and audio be any different from still media?

Re:FUD FUD FUD

And countering yours:

• From it's inventor [mit.edu]:

  Unlike Vorbis and Speex, legitimate best-in-class codecs, Theora's coding quality is obviously poor relative to contemporary competition. This poor performance stems both from implementation and design deficiencies. As a seperate problem, Theora is also poorly integrated with Ogg due to incomplete multiplexing software and documentation on the Ogg side. Without guidance from Xiph.Org, outside development and implementation of Theora-in-Ogg has been chaotic and of low quality.

• It's safe to say that MPEG4 and it's codecs have been more thoroughly researched than Theora. Remember the FOSS mantra: "many eyes make all bugs shallow"? That applies to lots of things, such as many video producers' legal teams checking this stuff out.
• I absolutely, positively promise you that Youtube serves more video than Wikipedia, and they don't stream Theora.
• You're imagining that Theora is equivalent to H.264, etc. It's not. There's no first-mover advantage to it because it's already been overtaken by, well, pretty much everything.
• There's no standard web image format. By convention, most people use GIF and JPG (with a few PNGs sprinkled about for good measure), but that's just the way it happened to work out. I'm not sure why people have this wrong impression, but it's simply not true. Don't believe me? Read the spec [w3.org] yourself. If that isn't clear enough, W3 explicitly states [w3.org] that

  The HTML specification does not prescribe or limit which graphics format you can use.

I'm a huge FOSS buff, but that doesn't mean I have to blindly love everything pushed out the door as "freedom friendly". I don't have anything against Theora except that it's just not very competitive. I wouldn't want to see it as the official video file format any more than I'd want to see ASCII text as the official document file format; both have clear limitations when compared to their competitors.

The W3 made the right choice. As much as I like the idea of Theora, I'm glad we don't have to be saddled with the reality of it.

Yeah, that's FUD

Hi. I'm the 'inventor' (not really, On2 originally wrote vp3 and we're riffing from there. I'm the hacker working on it now).

1) That is in comparison to h264. And I call it 'embarrassing' because Theora *could* easily be just as good, but it isn't right now. That document is a call to arms and because of it, a new encoder is rapidly taking shape. Its improvements are already making it back to mainline. We'll catch up rapidly.

2) "It's safe to say that MPEG4 and it's codecs have been more thoroughly researched than Theora" Bullshit. MPEG is simultaneously inefficient and narrow in their focus. MPEG-4 / h.264 is a decades old chassis with a few recent research papers tacked on. _Several of the items I identified as 'embarrassing' and 'obsolete' ironically apply to MPEG-4 too_.

3) "I absolutely, positively promise you that Youtube serves more video than Wikipedia, and they don't stream Theora." Irrelevant. This is an argument against Google (Altavista dwarfed them), Microsoft (IBM and even Apple dwarfed them), Toyota (GM dwarfed them), etc.

"As much as I like the idea of Theora, I'm glad we don't have to be saddled with the reality of it."

Why does everyone here think this is a battle of individuals? These are huge multinationals and your puny insignificant selves don't even appear on their radars. Sure, the public will indeedy benefit from a standard multimedia codec set with no proprietary/encumbered strings attached, but that is entirely irrelevant in the process of making money. They're *for profit corporations* doing what for-profit corporations do. Making money. And that is entirely orthogonal to morals, public good, or even competent engineering. They don't have any interest whatsoever in what you think.

Although we're a non-profit (and exist on behalf of the common good), our argument in this battle happens to concern rallying all the sub-$100M companies that will be frozen out by the very biggest players getting their way. When big companies win, little companies generally lose. Although the little compaines greatly out-mass the big companies, they tend to be fragmented. If we can get them all together to fight for a uniform technology recommendation, way more people win.

But you might want to run for cover, 'cause Godzilla has his squishin' boots on.