Mozilla's VP of Engineering On H.264 675
We recently discussed news that YouTube and Vimeo are each testing their own HTML5 video players using the H.264 format. Firefox does not support H.264, and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, has now made a post explaining why. Quoting: "For Mozilla, H.264 is not currently a suitable technology choice. In many countries, it is a patented technology, meaning that it is illegal to use without paying license fees to the MPEG-LA. Without such a license, it is not legal to use or distribute software that produces or consumes H.264-encoded content. Indeed, even distributing H.264 content over the internet or broadcasting it over the airwaves requires the consent of the MPEG-LA, and the current fee exemption for free-to-the-viewer internet delivery is only in effect until the end of 2010. These license fees affect not only browser developers and distributors, but also represent a toll booth on anyone who wishes to produce video content." Mozilla developer Robert O'Callahan has written a blog post on the same subject, following a talk he gave on Friday about the importance of open video on the web.
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet even with a perfectly legitimate, reasonable, intelligent argument against H.264, tons of /. comments will go against FF's decision to promote an open, free (for everyone, not just the end users) and sane video standard over a proprietary one, ensuring that only people with lots of money can create browsers, run video sites, etc.
It's pretty damn simple, yet no one gets it. Just like seemingly everything else these days. Misguided loyalty to one thing because it's been promoted to the end users by those with lots of money as being "obviously" superior wins out over good things simply because people don't want to use common sense and for some reason trust people/companies with greedy motivations simply because of the idea of "they are famous and rich, they must know what's best for me".
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you underestimate how much commercial influence is being brought to bear on tech networking sites these days.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
Insisting on fighting H.264 will be exactly like refusing to support MP3/AAC and only play Ogg Vorbis files. You know those right, the popular files you see everywhere? H.264 is the standard for all forms of modern video and both Windows 7 and OS X support that out of the box, Theora is if possible even more obscure than Vorbis. All this will do is kill their marketshare and return the market to the proprietary browsers.
Mozilla think that they can bend a whole market of decoding, encoding, streaming, recording and editing by refusing to add it to their browser. They're not that important. There's fights you can win, and there's fights where you can only mitigate the damage. First time you try to play a HTML5 video, it should give you a nasty disclaimer, put the responsibility of getting a patent license if that applies, and install/cancel buttons.
Re: (Score:3)
Final note: The best solution ofc would be for google to release a better codec than ogg theora for free, with no patent risk, and with video quality at least comparable to h264's.
For a second there I thought this was the dumbest thing ever, but upon further reflection I decided that you're absolutely right. There must be SOMEONE out there with a great experimental video codec that just needs some love.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
There must be SOMEONE out there with a great experimental video codec that just needs some love.
There are already a lot of video codecs out there [wikipedia.org], because there's a lot of ways to implement it. They all try to balance numerous factors within performance and quality. It's not easy. There's no one "holy grail" that produces perfect pictures while using a smaller number of resources than all of the others.
Also...
The editors of HTML5 are Ian Hickson (Google, Inc.) and David Hyatt (Apple, Inc.) [w3.org] Apple uses h264 in almost everything, so they would probably like to see it as the standard.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
There is someone: Google. They bought On2. It is still unclear why, and what they are going to do with On2's technology.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
They just hadn't bought any companies for like, 2 whole days, and so they said "screw it" and bought one at random. That's whole Google rolls these days.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
Look, they can quit whenever they want. It's not like they have a problem or anything.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For a second there I thought this was the dumbest thing ever, but upon further reflection I decided that you're absolutely right. There must be SOMEONE out there with a great experimental video codec that just needs some love.
It's more in the "and a free pony" department. There are at least 100 patents covering H.264, I know for MPEG2 there was like 600 patent claims. For H.264 pretty much all the usual suspects are on board and part of the patent pool, If a new video format were to arise, you can bet there are patent holders just waiting to see it become great, and be one of the few patents covering it and get a bigger share of the cake.
There really should be a process, though I don't mean a cheap one to fly under the radar and
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
All of your arguments are irrelevant if the licensing issue can't be solved. Firefox can only use codecs that are not covered by restrictive licensing, no matter how good it looks. (And I agree with you, H.264 does looks good) Their choice is basically:
Theora is the best of these options. It doesn't matter how good H.264 looks, it's simply impossible for Mozilla to use it without dealing with the licensing issue.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox can only use codecs that are not covered by restrictive licensing, no matter how good it looks
Nonsense. Firefox can use any codec that is already installed on the user's system. It's only because they have decided that they should try to force Theora on people that they are rejecting that solution.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That would include using OS libraries to play h.264
The article states that the majority of deployed copies of Windows do not come with OS libraries to play H.264 video.
Video decoders in OpenCL or CUDA (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing stopping them installing one...
Except price.
Also, most video cards these days support h.264 in hardware
True, some mobile and set-top-box video cards implement the entire MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 stack on an ASIC. But Firefox is targeted at desktop and laptop PCs, and as I understand it, PC video cards support signal transforms that are useful for video decoding in general, such as cosine transform (IDCT), deblocking filter, and motion reconstruction. A Theora decoder written partly in OpenCL or CUDA would run on a video card just as well as an H.264 decoder written partly in OpenCL or CUDA.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It is patented, and in exactly the same way as h264 will form a toll both on the internet
All known Theora patents have royalty-free license. Only thing that is "exactly same way" here is risk of submarine patents.
The Theora bitstream format is frozen (Score:3, Informative)
You know that Theora is a work-in-progress, right? That right there says GO AWAY
The Theora bitstream format is frozen since the beta. All the work in progress is directed at 1. performance of the decoder, and 2. quality of the encoder while producing bitstreams that still play correctly on all conforming decoders.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
I by contrast can come up with three (at least) legitimate, reasonable, intelligent arguments against Ogg Theora: [...] It is patented
What is the number of a U.S. patent covering Theora that hasn't been irrevocably licensed to the public for all uses by On2? The leaders of the Xiph.Org Foundation want to know.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with the center of the world comment, but...
"It's a free and open standard, just not there..." isn't completely free and open.
I see nothing wrong with Mozilla taking that into consideration.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
> H.264 is a free and open standard, just not in the US.
Or France or Germany, last I checked (as in, there are H.264 patents that have been granted by those countries; these are not _software_ patents but patents on the design of the codec). I haven't looked into detail for other countries, but I think you're making some unjustified assumptions here (like "h.264 patents are software patents").
Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
My prediction? Canonical will fork it as Mark Shuttleworth's vision of Ubuntu is that "it just works".
Haha, yeah right. Anyway, I'm not sure what you're talking about with regards to the US software industry having disappeared into a black hole or become irrelevant. Last I checked, the software industry here is still very much active and relevant, and I haven't seen any real evidence to suggest that that will change any time soon.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And every single one of the companies you list is deep in litigation at this very moment and spending millions (perhaps billions) fighting lawsuits. You think that situation can carry on forever?
Those companies are lucky in that they have a decent warchest in order to keep trading. I sus
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't worry. No matter how much astroturfing takes place the fact won't change that any video service who fails to support Firefox would lose a share too large to be underestimated.
They will support FF in exact same way they will support IE (which doesn't have any implementation of VIDEO element, and is too big to be ignored) - via Flash.
Just open up the video architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just open up the video architecture (Score:5, Informative)
roc has explained why using DirectShow in Mozilla's Gecko won't happen in the foreseeable future [mozillazine.org].
Re:Just open up the video architecture (Score:4, Insightful)
At least other browsers would have a standard and didn't need to rely on flash. Firefox already kind of is addon hell, where you have to try to find all the plugins you would want from a browser and some of them aren't really that up to par with quality.
Re:Just open up the video architecture (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you just reply without even trying to understand the point? Flash became the de-facto web video standard *because* you couldn't rely on having RealPlayer, Windows Media or Quicktime being installed and have the codec in question. Just using whatever codecs are on any given machine leads down exactly the same path.
Browser extensions and content plugins are completely unrelated, web sites don't rely on extensions, so whatever problems you personally have with those is irrelevant to the discussion.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you just reply without even trying to understand the point? Flash became the de-facto web video standard *because* you couldn't rely on having RealPlayer, Windows Media or Quicktime being installed and have the codec in question. Just using whatever codecs are on any given machine leads down exactly the same path.
That's not really as relevant here as you might think.
There's a difference between being unable to rely on a particular piece of software being installed when webmasters are given carte blanche in terms of format (as was the case in the early days with object embedding) and simply relying on a platform-specific implementation to support a clearly-understood de-facto standard.
A better analogy would be the 'img' tag. There are three or four common image formats that quickly became the de-facto standard (desp
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you just reply without even trying to understand the point? Flash became the de-facto web video standard *because* you couldn't rely on having RealPlayer, Windows Media or Quicktime being installed and have the codec in question. Just using whatever codecs are on any given machine leads down exactly the same path.
It all depends on the time frame.
See, OS X already has H.264 support out of the box. Windows 7 has it out of the box. The biggest problem is that neither XP nor Vista do (and Linux issues will be ignored in any case).
Now, any HTML5-based streaming service is going to be "experimental" until there's IE support for this. Even if IE drops down below 50%, it's still too big. And that support will most likely come, eventually, but if past history is anything to go by, it'll take a few more years. Again, looking
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No one has to install anything to just view websites, you need to install the Flash plugin (which is not a Firefox add-on as such) to play certain games and watch videos. Mozilla wants to bring the videos back into "no additional installation" land, not into "install Flash and a, possibly shady H.264 codec, unless on Win7" land.
Not to mention giving people like me the ability to actually t
Re:FFmpeg (Score:5, Informative)
Mozlla's concerns don't seem related at all to the implementation of the video. Rather, they're concerned about the licensing issues related to their usage of it. According to the article (and the summary, at that), the only reason H264 is even legally embeddable in current software is due to a free-to-viewer clause, and even that may permanently expire in 2010.
Currently, most of the web (Flash excluded) is free to generate. I can make an HTML document, or a tool to generate HTML documents, and render those HTML documents without paying or owing anybody anything. To legally generate H264 files, you must pay for a license. To build software that generates H264 files, the software company must pay for a license. And (possibly) after 2010, a viewer or viewer software may have to pay for a license to watch the content. These are some pretty huge issues to overcome.
Re:FFmpeg (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you use H.264 instead of Ogg Theora to create your videos? What we're talking about here is how you would play videos created by someone like Youtube. The standard doesn't mandate H.264. It just fails to mandate Ogg.
If you only put Theora videos on your site, they won't be viewable in Safari (using default Quicktime components), iPhone or Android.
Professor Markup says [diveintohtml5.org]:
There is no single combination of containers and codecs that works in all HTML5 browsers.
To make your video watchable across all of these devices and platforms, you’re going to have to encode your video more than once.
As long as there are mainstream platforms that don't support Theora, either you have to encode to H.264 yourself (and pay) or have someone else (e.g. YouTube) encode and host it for you.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That may be correct in a technical point of view and a very simple solution to this problem. Unfortunately, the world is a bit more complex than that, thanks for the mess of convoluted rules which each jurisdiction imposes on it's citizens. In this case, if you take a look at ffmpeg's patents min-FAQ" [ffmpeg.org] you will notice the following disclaimers:
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The need to "license other codecs" is exactly the problem. You shouldn't be forced to pay a toll to be able to perform basic, every day tasks such as watching web videos, particularly when you are supposed to be following an international standard. You aren't forced to deal with any of that crap if you happen to rely on a format which is patent-free. And that's why Mozilla is pushing for Theora, which is clearly the best solution to this absurd problem.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I entirely agree with you, however it's irrelevant to the fact that if Mozilla doesn't provide a way for people to license other codecs if they want they're going to watch their market share go back to where it was ten years ago.
Right now there's two bad choices if you want to watch Yotube videos. You can use a proprietary plug-in that's already had a devastating effect on web usability (to the point where one of the most popular browser plugins is Flashblock), or you can use an open API that incidentally r
Re:Just open up the video architecture (Score:4, Insightful)
Soon enough, most users will be on an OS that supplies h.264 decoding by default, and won't need to rely on any plugins. That is, if Mozilla would actually use the OS-supplied h.264 decoders, which they say they won't.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They can't do that as they explain in the blog entry a) that most windows users don't have an H264 codec and b) It's pissing on their principles (my words, not theirs)
The first is a silly argument: Is it somehow better to play on NO computers, than to play on only SOME?
The real reason is the second, that they are ideologically opposed to it. And that stance is only going to hurt them, and they should just get over it. It is not a fight they can possibly win.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The real reason is the second, that they are ideologically opposed to it. And that stance is only going to hurt them, and they should just get over it. It is not a fight they can possibly win.
Deja vu. That's what people used to say about Linux and Open Source. They still appear to be around. Anyway, define 'win'.
Phillip.
Ideology meet reality (Score:3, Insightful)
All of the bitching about the patent/royalty situation ignores the following facts:
There are two alternatives here - Flash-based video and H.264. Don't kid yourself that Ogg is a third, because it's not going to happen. Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license as Apple and Google have done. Otherwise, watch Chrome really destroy Firefox.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Flash is H.264.
Re:Ideology meet reality (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone's ignoring those facts. In particular, no one is under the illusion that ogg is a suitable replacement for h.264 in all cases. The hope is that a better codec than either will appear with more suitable licensing terms; in the meantime a premature standardization on h.264 would hurt the chances of that codec being adopted when it appears, no?
On the other hand, you seem to be ignoring the fact that Wikipedia, say, has no plans to put its video in H.264 (so Safari, say, can't very well view it).
> Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license as Apple and Google have done.
As a side note, Apple and Google did not have to pay for a license separately here. They already had the licenses.
> Otherwise, watch Chrome really destroy Firefox
If that were to start happening (and it's nowhere close yet), the calculation might have to change, of course.
Re:Ideology meet reality (Score:5, Insightful)
Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license
Yeah, that'll happen right after you start paying $5.99 to install the browser.
Re:Ideology meet reality (Score:4, Interesting)
All of the bitching about the patent/royalty situation ignores the following facts:
This is a "chicken Vs egg" problem. There are hardware decoders for Theora out there and the only thing that stops you from getting hardware support for a format is the OEM's decision to add it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Ogg produces inferior video at the same bitrate as H.264, or larger video for the same quality.
Sorry, back here in reality Theora's quality is at least on par with H.264 with the same size [xiph.org]. But thanks for your attempt at FUD, though.
YouTube, DailyMotion, and Vimeo have spoken in favor of H.264. Watch the dominoes topple.
How exactly do "dominoes topple" if not only they can easily support Theora but also it is a very easy way to avoid licensing costs? Support for H.264 is not free, you know? Didn't you even read the part in the summary that reads "the current fee exemption for free-to-the-viewer internet delivery is only in effect until the end of 2010."?
There are two alternatives here - Flash-based video and H.264. Don't kid yourself that Ogg is a third, because it's not going to happen. Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license as Apple and Google have done. Otherwise, watch Chrome really destroy Firefox.
Just because you try to repeat "Theora isn't an option" as a mantra of sorts it doesn't mean that it's anything remotely close to true. There is a whole world out there that happens to enjoy watching videos online and no one in their right mind wishes to start paying money to keep doing that, neither the video providers nor the audience. So please pick up your poorly conceived FUD and go waste it elsewhere.
Re:Ideology meet reality (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, back here in reality Theora's quality is at least on par with H.264 with the same size [xiph.org]. But thanks for your attempt at FUD, though.
Someone from Xiph.org isn't exactly an unbiased source - maybe you could cite someone who doesn't have a vested interest in one or the other. If you actually look at the videos on the site, you'll see that Theora performs a fair bit better than H.263 (not surprising; most things do these days), but watching the 17MB files next to each other it's immediately apparent which is which. The colours in the Theora version are washed out and details are fuzzy.
Now, if Flash would add support for Theora, then GooTube could easily ditch the H.263 versions and serve both Theora and H.264, rather than H.263 and H.264...
Re:Ideology meet reality (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, back here in reality Theora's quality is at least on par with H.264 with the same size. But thanks for your attempt at FUD, though.
So... you linked to the Theora developer's site to support a Theora developer's claims that Theora was superior to competitors. And then you accuse him of FUD?
Nice.
The test you linked to, BTW, is crap. No triangle tests, no A/B testing, etc. Just one guy who uploaded and downloaded a sample from YouTube (the encoder and encoding parameters of which he did not know) and compared it to a Theora encode that he did using some rather... "interesting" settings, most notably this: "A keyframe interval of 250 fr
Re:Ideology meet reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license as Apple and Google have done. Otherwise, watch Chrome really destroy Firefox.
Time for Linux users to face reality and just give up and use Windows, as most other people have done.
Oh, we didn't do that in 2000 and we have a strong, functioning, free as in freedom operating system now? I wonder how that could have happened.
Re:Ideology meet reality that's why FSF will win (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a relevant quote from Geore Bernard Shaw [elise.com]. Quote:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man."
So you're asking the Free Software People to give up their principles in favor of expediency and thus promote no progress. I think not. I prefer to live in a world of Freedom than one ruled by expediency. Expediency might win a battle but in the end principles win the war. Considering the progress of GPL software for the past 26 years I would say they are doing a damn fine job of promoting positive progress. Better for the reasonable man to use free and open standards codecs than the Free Software People piss away their principles.
Obligatory (Score:3, Interesting)
It is so utterly archaic and unfair that this is allowed to continue; MPEG-LA have the industry by its consumers by their collective balls.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Informative)
It is so utterly archaic and unfair that this is allowed to continue; MPEG-LA have the industry by its consumers by their collective balls.
Err, not really. Nobody forced anyone to adopt h.264; it just happens that it did get adopted because it actually is a good codec. There are alternatives of varying quality and success, and even if there weren't, nothing is stopping someone from designing one and marketing it.
More patent abuse (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that's ridiculous. Unlike many other technology subject to patents, it's pretty clear that H.264 is useful, novel, and non-obvious. But allowing claims that cover not just the encoder and decoder, but the actual bitstreams they produce, is completely abusive of the patent system. A fancy new saw to cut complex curves in wood might be patentable, but allowing that patent to cover the product would be silly on the face of it. This is no different.
Re:More patent abuse (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the patents can't cover the bitstreams. Case law such as In re Warmerdam indicates that nonfunctional descriptive material (such as a picture or a song) isn't a process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, so it doesn't meet the requirements of 35 USC 101.
However, the patents can potentially cover (modulo any prior art issues) the process of transmitting the bitstreams. It may sound like some really thin slices of salami to you, but that's how the law works.
By the way, your example about the "fancy new saw" and the resulting cut wood is wrong. As long as the cut wood resulting from using the fancy new saw has a specific, substantial, and credible use (for example, it's not merely ornamental, although there's something called a design patent that covers ornamental designs), it is patent eligible under 35 USC 101, because it's an article of manufacture.
How to silently kill firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
How to silently kill Firefox:
* Support Firefox trough funding (so that nobody can call you evil)
* Buy one of the most successful video sites.
* Implement a technology on this site that you know for sure Firefox can't use.
* Reduce competition on this site by using a video format not everyone can use on their site(increasing linking and video embedding to your own site)
* Support this video format on your own browser.
*Profit.
DON'T PANIC! (Score:3, Informative)
Mozilla is going to implement gstreamer backend for html5 video element. See Bug 422540 [mozilla.org].
Also, Opera developers are going the same way. See this blog post [opera.com].
Using gstreamer as a backend will eliminate ALL the problems with codecs. Forever. It will be able to play just the same as a usual desktop players, and that means, it will be able to play Ogg Theora, H.264, DivX, whatever you like - it's only a matter of plugins installed.
We shouldn't wish to be forced to... (Score:3, Interesting)
... pay to create and distribute video content or having to upload it on the few big sites that have enough money to pay the royalties to MPEG-LA.
We might decide to use h.264 anyway because it's technically better but what I expect is that customers and content creators should be happier to see a totally free codec succeed over one that will cost them money.
Youtube, Vimeo & Co are trying to use h.264 to become the new majors. I understand why those companies don't want a free codec to succeed: that would lead to more competition and less ways to profit from their position. I'm afraid that in this case their best interests are our worst interests.
Think if it happened to images. You could only legally upload graphics to Flickr, Facebook and a few dozens of other big sites with the money to pay royalties. All vacation pictures and UI buttons would have to go there. Figuring out what the web would look like is left as an exercise to the reader.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Youtube, Vimeo & Co are trying to use h.264 to become the new majors. I understand why those companies don't want a free codec to succeed: that would lead to more competition and less ways to profit from their position. I'm afraid that in this case their best interests are our worst interests.
They're using H.264 because of the bandwidth costs. When you're looking at saving hundreds of thousands of gigabytes, the savings add up to very real amounts. It's not about stifling competition - that's a side effect. It's about cutting costs.
Think if it happened to images.
I thought it did happen to images? Aren't JPEG/GIF - the most widely used formats online - patent encumbered? I don't recall anything apocalyptic happening with them, but I have a feeling MPEG-LA will be more pushy. After all, they want money so they can work on H.265
software patents are immoral (Score:4, Insightful)
and contrary to the concepts of a free market
we should actively rip off h.264, not because we want to use the codec for free, but simply to undermine the status quo that some people, for whatever reason, respect this bullshit called software patents
those who created the codec need to depend upon ancillary streams of revenue, such as hardware prodcuts that depend upon the software ideas. meanwhile, patenting a simple arrangement of bits is contrary to the free exchange of ideas
you should only be able to patent physical objects
everything else is abstract representation: this should never be protected. do we respect the idea that the church of scientology has a copyright on its sacred texts? of course this is bullshit, just as much as it is bullshit that the RIAA attempts to control the flow of bits, or that the chinese autocracy attempts to control the flow of information: the entirety of the phylosophical concept of putting roadblocks on the flow of ideas is a form weakness, failure. it leads to a less rich society
ip law must be actively fought
luckily, this is all too easy, because the internet is the disruptive techology that destroys ip law, whether some people like it or not
Mozilla H.264 Fees = $5,000,000+ per year (Score:5, Insightful)
If Mozilla were bundling H.264 support right now, it would be closed source (so forget about seeing it in Ubuntu by default) and it would cost them $5,000,000 this year. Next year, the fee will be even higher. So, Mozilla would have to allot 6% of their revenue (revenue, not profit) to supporting this one proprietary video codec.
H.264 is only supported by Chrome and Safari (less than 10% of those online). Let's keep it that way and keep the barrier for entrance into the browser market from reaching insane proportions. Otherwise we'll be left with fewer choices in the browser wars since lots of people can't pay $0.20 per unit for a product they give away for free. Mozilla and Opera certainly can't. But for Google and Aple, supporting H.264 in their browsers is free since they already hit the $5,000,000 cap this year (Google due to all the encoding and streaming of it, Apple due to licensing it for iPods/iTunes).
So, it's EASY for Apple and Google to support it since it's free and they already ship closed source products (Safari is closed source even though the underling webkit is open, Chrome is closed source even though the underlying Chromium bits are open). Mozilla would have to pay a ton of cash (and increasing) and add closed source bits to Firefox.
Greed will fix it (Score:3, Interesting)
It was greed and corruption that brought about this situation and it is greed and corruption that will fix it. In particular:
Google wants Microsoft's desktop monopoly to break, and at the same time they compete directly with Apple's iTunes. As a consequence their only realistic shot at this is to help Linux flourish.
Microsoft sees Google as a threat to their monopoly and hence they can't let Google kill Firefox as Firefox users would likely prefer chrome to IE, thereby strengthening google further.
RIAA, MPAA etc... don't want google to grow to strong since they don't want google dictating terms to them, something they could do if they become the de-facto only site to serve video.
MPEG-LA will try to squeeze every penny from the patent licenses while the party lasts, something google and vimeo very much dislikes.
Essentially the usual short-sighted greed over quarterly profits amongst companies will cause them to push the situation until it breaks. It may take a few years but eventually the very greed that made a patent encumbered format the de-facto standard is the same greed that will kill it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:4, Informative)
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:4, Funny)
If only there was a company who had licensed H264 and distributed a plug in for free that worked with all major browsers - their business model would be to make money from the authoring tools.
In fact, since this is going to be used for video, wouldn't it be even better if that plugin supported a Javascript like language, perhaps compiled to byte code and JITted to native code to get decent performance. Perhaps a custom graphics library that allowed people to make players with custom controls show a list of related clips once the video ended.
Then open source browsers could use the plugin to show H264 videos.
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if people insist on using it. I can't see that it would be in YouTube's interest to use H.264 exclusively.
But in any case, it sounds like a misnomer to call it "HTML5 Video", which sort of implies a standard. If the "standard" involves coughing up a whacking great licence fee to use it, lots of people just won't be interested, and H.264 will be consigned to the same back shelves as some of the ogg codecs.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Don't people have to cough up a license fee to implement USB? PCI? AGP?
For USB the only fees are for using official logos to show a product passed certification testing. For PCI you pay 3K/year for a membership to get a PCI ID assigned, but there is no licensing fee I am aware of. I don't know about AGP.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, you generally BUY SOMETHING with USB, PCI, or AGP, therefore you give the company money to pay the fees with. Mozilla is given away freely, recouping some money with advertising links. They can't promise to pay lots of money and MPEG-LA has already cut the "loss leader" deals with big companies.... gotta get the money from the little guy. Worse yet, the MPEG-LA is notoriously fickle and as soon as fees kick in we'll have another situation like MP3 where everybody THOUGHT they paid up, but companies in the patent pool use loopholes to revoke MPEG-LA's consolidation of license fees.... then go after everybody "again" just like happened with MP3.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There is a $2000 fee to buy a unique USB Vendor ID, and the right to use the USB logo for two years, which is pretty much mandatory if you want to make a commercial product.
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention USB/PCI and AGP implementations are all hardware devices, presumably to be sold. Your comparison is horrible.
The day Firefox is "taken" by commercial software will be a sad day indeed. The Mozilla Foundation could probably get a reduced price on a license easily enough, but that's not the point.
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
Debian used to have the "Non-US" repositories. I can't see why they couldn't go back to it.
As much as everyone hates it, Ogg isn't going to win this. As far as I know there isn't a single hardware decoder for it yet. Almost any newer Nvidia card will do it. VDPAU under Linux works AWESOME. It will even upscale SD content (feature set C). Broadcom has their MiniPCI card that a ton of NetBooks run. I bought one for my AppleTV so that I can do 1080p. XBMC supports it. OS X should support it soon.
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
You apparently didn't read the article. The issue is not that Mozilla can't get a license; it can. The issue is that it sees doing so as actively harmful to the web and to users.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
By the way, has any of the Mozilla folk sat down at the table and talked with the folks that own whatever IP needs licensing? Have they, you know, said "dudes, we have 33% of the browser market and our business model isn't structured for this sort of thing". My hunch is they could probably get some kind of deal hammered out. The Mozilla foundation does have some political capital you know--this is a good use of it.
The GPL and patents intentionally mix like oil and water. Directly from paragraph 7 of the GPLv2: "For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program." You can get around this by covenant not to sue *cough*Novell*cough*, but that's abusing a loophole really.
That works out great in certain circumstances, for example I can't patent something, add that to a GPL project and control distribution by selling patent licenses. But neither can Mozilla, they can't license it from MPEG LA just for themselves, the GPL basically requires them to license it for everyone. That is why you can download the Chromium source, but you will not get a patent license from that either. Only binary builds of Chrome gets the patent license, since a right to sublicense would destroy MPEG LA's revenue model.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, but yes it is [mozilla.org].
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
People license stuff all the time, even standards. Mozilla needs to get over themselves and provide a way to play standard H.264 videos.
Licensing something like h264 is very different. Its not just the fee (about 5Million pa for FF popularity) its the restrictions that the contract has. Like promising to enforce DRM or not permitting redistribution. These licenses are simply not compatible with GPL 2 or 3. Since I am not free to redistribute FireFox without getting a license from MPEG-LA.
And proving a H.264 *content* will require licenses after 2010. Have fun with that
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, I would imagine they would be open to it for a very favorable rate. If the license for free streaming content expires, anyone who wants to use h.264 online will need to pay for an encoding license. The only reason you would want to pay for a license to encode (when there are alternatives that are free on both ends) is if the tech is good and your viewers can all decode the content
If the MPEG-LA wants to sell to content distributers (who are more willing to pay since they actually depend on the content), they will want firefox's 33% of the market. They might not do it for free since mozilla also has some amount of willingness to pay but I doubt they are in a position to gouge them (and a "donation" to the nonprofit mozilla foundation might be a nice annual tax writeoff).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Which is exactly what will happen if a proprietary format becomes the standard."
That argument doesn't work even through beer (as in free) goggles. Pretty much every media standard on your typical electronics device like a PC, your Television, and your iPod all contain proprietary licenses. MPEG-2 for DVD's, MP3, AC3, H.264. All huge successes, and all standards in their time. Companies wouldn't be interested in investing in new technologies if they can't profit off of it. Even patents have their place.
It w
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Love it or hate it, it will inherit XP, and by such, it will support H.264. This would solve a huge slice of their problem which would only get smaller as Windows 7 adoption increases.
You misunderstand what their "problem" is, even though you quote it in your post. It's not that they would have difficulty supporting H264. It's that their raison d'etre is to promote a free and open Web.
They don't want or need to kill off H264, since HTML5 makes it easy for a site to support both at once. With this you end up with the equitable solution where you can say "If you want to use a browser with a proprietary codec, you can. Maybe it'll even look better. But if your browser only uses free codecs, you're OK too.
They just want to promote a Web where a user without access to H264 can take part in a meaningful way. So, a child in India/Brazil/Namibia/etc. who can't afford an H264 license (nor a Windows license) can still view mainstream video sites. So the same kid can create videos and share them on the Web.
If they didn't pursue those ideals, they might as well pack it in today and let everyone use IE.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No other browser supports NoScript-like functionality except for, usually ignored in such "only FF supports that" rants, Opera. For a long, long time...
BTW, Opera also stands behind Theora (and generally a web accessible to everybody), they proposed the tag.
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:5, Informative)
Remember that Opera proposed video element in the first place [opera.com] and they've chosen Theora from the start. They're not fond of patents, and may not want to choose H.264, especially if Mozilla doesn't.
It's not a funding problem ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Very few companies could afford a license compatible with the LGPL ... hell, I'm pretty sure the MPEG-LA isn't even authorized to issue such a license, so you'd have to make private deals with everyone. Going to take 100's of millions of dollars easy, maybe more.
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't Mozilla just implement a plugin framework, and leave it up to the user to decide whether he wants to install the h264 plugin, which may or may not be illegal in his area. Some Linux distros ship without MP3 support because it requires licensing, and it's usually just one command to enable MP3 support. It seems like the same thing should work with h264.
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:4, Insightful)
Because their opposition to h.264 is ideological, not technical, so a technical solution is not enough for them.
They are definitely muddying the waters by coming up with weak technical excuses for not doing it too, though. Those excuses are mostly easily refuted, and just makes the whole thing even more confusing. They should be more honest about it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's mostly just problem for Mozilla
And every site that wants to host their own video content. H.264 also requires a license for hosting content. All those sites will probably stick to Flash if other browsers don't support Theora.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugh, quicktime ... I'd even rather have flash.
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:5, Interesting)
Installing quicktime puts some stupid icon in the systray that annoys you every now and then. If you're not careful while installing quicktime, you might get itunes bundled along.
Adobe hasn't got around to making flash as annoying as quicktime yet (but they have made Acrobat Reader annoying thus I no longer have it installed).
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Vorbis and MKV (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, hello? (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox users will just get routed to the old flash interface on YouTube. YouTube isn't gonna transcode the whole damn library into some silly format when they can just treat Firefox like a legacy browser and feed it H.264 wrapped up in a .flv. If anything, they wouldn't bother with the whole Video tag at all when Flash worked fine before.
Re:Vorbis and MKV (Score:5, Informative)
Ogg/Vorbis/Theora are unencumbered and free. No "deals" need to be worked out.
Ogg/Vorbis/Theora has reasonable quality and compression.
It can be placed into a MKV container http://matroska.org/ [matroska.org], also unencumbered and free.
You are kind of comparing wrong things here. Both MKV and Ogg are merely containers (and H.264 can be placed inside MKV container too, and is usually done so).
Also, Theora and H.264 aren't technically equivalent. Theora is kinda there, but it misses many features, is more heavy on hardware and requires a larger bitrate to get the same results. It also completely misses support for B-frames, variable frame rates, interlacing, and larger than 8-bits bit-depths. It also loses out because the creators have chosen to maintain backwards compatibility in cost of being technically superior.
Another thing that manages to create more support for H.264 is that blu-ray, PS3, DVB (digital television in europe, including cable) and several other services and devices already support it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's the patent minefield that is preventing theora from becoming the vorbis of video codecs. The developers can't implement some features, like those you've listed, for risk of patent litigation. It's not about backward compatibility.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Any benchmarks out there comparing Theora and H.264 CPU only encoding and decoding? Visual quality for web video only need to be "good enough".
True, completely false and the last two are irrelevant for web video.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they just have money.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. On2's (soon to be Google's) patents on VP3 / Theora are totally harmless:
Re:So are Google and all the bunch just dumb? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is not dumb. One major effect of a broadcast licensing fee for all web video is to make it harder to set up a Youtube competitor. Sure, Google has to pay the fee too. But it might well be worth it to them given the stifling of potential competition.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't it better to use the native video player infrastructure on each platform? Quicktime on OS X, gstreamer/whatever on Linux?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone wins.
Well apart from anyone who wants to host video on the web, who will have to either transcode on the fly (is that even possible?), or store 2 copies of the video, taking up around twice the space (assuming both formats produce the same filesize for the same quality , which as I understand they don't). And then what happens when Microsoft brings out IE X.X (Now with HTML5 video tag support!) which will only play back wmvs, thus requiring a third copy of the file.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
pretty much every format universal on the Internet today, got that way because the player/viewer was offered free of charge.
Not really; MPEG-4 (aka "DivX") is patented and requires royalties; you just didn't notice because either someone paid the royalties for you or you're infringing the patents.