Firefox 33 Integrates Cisco's OpenH264 194
NotInHere (3654617) writes As promised, version 33 of the Firefox browser will fetch the OpenH264 module from Cisco, which enables Firefox to decode and encode H.264 video, for both the <video> tag and WebRTC, which has a codec war on this matter. The module won't be a traditional NPAPI plugin, but a so-called Gecko Media Plugin (GMP), Mozilla's answer to the disliked Pepper API. Firefox had no cross-platform support for H.264 before.
Note that only the particular copy of the implementation built and blessed by Cisco is licensed to use the h.264 patents.
Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:2, Interesting)
Even though the codec source code is available, it is compiled by Cisco and provided to Mozilla. Something in me doesn't 100% trust that Cisco won't use this as an opportunity to put hidden spyware on everyone's computers. The US gov't can force American companies to secretly implement spyware, right?
Re:Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:5, Insightful)
But with access to the source code, it's easily possible to verify that the binary supplied corresponds to the source.
That's how we know that TrueCrypt has no "binary" backdoors - we just try different combinations of compiling, noting the differences, until we find the one that Cisco used. If we never find the exact combination, the differences between a "known good" compile of the original source and the final binary make the amount of code to blind-check almost negligible in comparison.
It's when people DON'T provide source that you should be suspicious, or when you can't get close to their source providing their binary.
Re:Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:4, Insightful)
But with access to the source code, it's easily possible to verify that the binary supplied corresponds to the source.
Is it that easy? My understanding was that you'd at least have to have identical versions of the compilation tools to have any hope of coming close to a bit-for-bit match on the binary.
Re:Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like a problem with a simple solution: Cisco needs to publish their build procedure.
Re:Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:5, Informative)
No. In fact it's absurdly difficult to reliably create reproducible builds [debian.org]. Debian has been working on this since at least 2009 (afaict) and has been plowing through issues but you still can't get an identical Kernel [debian.org] as the .deb. Heck, it was 8 weeks just for the Tor browser [debian.org].
It's not just the compilation tools, it's the entire build environment that needs to be homogenized. All kinds of components will insert uname/hostname and paths into the binary, filesystems list the contents of a directory in undefined order, timestamps and permissions are embedded into tarballs and documentation, different locale produces other weirdness.
tl;dr: it's much harder than just installing an identical version of clang and hitting make.
[ And, as an aside, this goes back decades. The infrastructure around builds was never designed with reproducibility as a design goal. We are basically retrofitting this new requirement on decades of legacy code that never even considered that we would want such a thing ... ]
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No. In fact it's absurdly difficult to reliably create reproducible builds.
Yes and no. Yes, absolutely, its absurdly difficult to create identical binaries, for the reasons you mentioned.
But you can pretty reasonably get close enough to make manual inspection of the differences easy enough. And as you said the differences are usually filepaths, hostnames, timestamps etc so one can identify the difference as benign pretty easily.
That's not good enough for general build reproducibility, but for one off code t
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The only thing you can cryptographically sign is a binary. The rest is inspection by hand which won't scale.
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Once you remove the strings from the app in question and look at the code, no its not really all that difficult.
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I don't think you understand "trusting trust". If you have the binary, and you are verifying it. that's not the same process at all.
However, no, you can't trust it. It's not because you can't verify it, it's because you can't do it without violating their patents. Also because it's quite difficult to verify large code bases. But if I understand things correctly, even to translate the binary into assembler code would violate their patent.
P.S.: Trusting trust was about a compiler that compiled itself. A
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Who modded this troll, it should be modded insightful? Are the NSA operatives getting in quick these days ?
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They sure seem to be, or at least groveling apologists if not operatives.
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Are the NSA operatives getting in quick these days ?
Operation Frist Post
Re:Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:5, Informative)
Cisco heard your concerns and has responded: Development and maintenance will be overseen by a board from industry and the open source community.
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How do we know that the board members have not been served with national security letter gag orders?
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How do we know that we haven't been served with national security letters??!?!?!?!
Seriously, nothing will make you happy. Sad part is you're whining about this sort of thing, but you still use a computer that boots from proprietary code on a proprietary processor. The BIOS/EFI is the easiest place to insert a back door and is in fact the place that many motherboards emulate physical hardware using system management mode of the CPU.
But hey, you worry about cisco back dooring your video codec used by the br
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It's a reasonable thing to worry about, but not to fixate on. As you pointed out there are worse problems.
OTOH, this is a plugin that directly manages communication over the net, so it's quite appropriate to be somewhat concerned.
Re: Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:2)
They're probably the same people who signed off the switches I bought. The same switches that conveniently changed into a hub* after a couple of months. Maybe they expected them to be rebooted constantly.
* Entries weren't being added to the ARP table, probably because of a timestamp overflow.
Re:Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:5, Funny)
That's why I know I'm safe. I use OS X, which is a closed-source OS. And since it's closed, the government doesn't have access to it.
I love the smell of bad logic in the morning.
Re:Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:4, Insightful)
how about "-1 whoosh"?
Re:Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only will it be your choice to accept the binary, but Mozilla also shares those concerns. Hence why they're sandboxing the CDM plugins to limit their access and ability to do anything except what they advertise. We'll have the choice to trust Mozilla's work, disable it, or partake in an effort to confirm that it's as legit as we want, so I honestly fail to see any major issue here.
Re:Trusting a binary from Cisco (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't forget that the GMP only have access to a certain number of firefox functions and runs inside a sandbox [mozilla.org]. That code is treated as insecure and as it have a very defined objective, is easier to sandbox (ie: no filesystem access, no network, etc).
Yes, is not perfect, but it's a good workaround for those software patents and DRM.
Those that still don't trust it, can choose to not install the Cisco OpenH264, its a "plugin" after all
Great (Score:4, Insightful)
I always wanted a backdoor in my browser.
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I always wanted a backdoor in my browser.
I really did try searching for how this plugin retrieval works but must not have use the right search terms.
To stay license compliant *AND* safe, Mozilla should sign the modules as they become available, and Firefox should only download them if both Mozilla's and Cisco's signatures verify.
That being done, there's very little difference between Mozilla shipping the code to you as part of a Firefox update and having the browser fetch it afterwards.
But if Mozilla is _on
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Why should Mozilla use their own key to sign code they did not compile themselves?
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I always wanted a backdoor in my browser.
You must be new here. Posting a link to an open backdoor, to be viewed in your browser, was once a slashdot tradition.
Is anyone left to care? (Score:4, Insightful)
They've already destroyed FF and changed it from a browser with its own identity into Chrome's obsessed former friend who mimics her every move and style and is planning to kill her and assume her identity some day.
Honestly, there's nothing left to call Firefox now. If I want a browser like Chrome, I'll run Chrome. If I want a browser like Firefox, then I have to use an old one or a fork.
Stop punching your users in the face, and give them back the control they had over their browser.
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You have control. As the article says:
> Users will have options to activate or deactivate it
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You have control. As the article says:
> Users will have options to activate or deactivate it
It sounds like the person to whom you're replying deactivated Firefox quite some time ago.
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I may have control over this plugin, but I don't have control over my whole browsing experience the way that I did 8 versions ago.
AKA "last month". Mozilla really lost the community's goodwill with that move. There was no compelling rationale to support FF after that. Their insistence on using a single-process model really destabilizes their browser, for example. Every release seems to remove functionality or force you to change the way you use the browser in ways you don't want. It's like they hired Gnome 3/Unity/Windows Metro program managers and asked them how best to fuck up their main product.
Thanks to this change to their support model I relegated FF to rare use when I need to check to confirm if another browser is being flaky or if the site itself is to blame.
Re:Is anyone left to care? (Score:4)
"Living 4 years ago" is a claim that's incompatible with you referencing features that aren't officially released yet. Thanks to your flame I actually googled again about it, and like the past 7 years I have checked, there are "plans" to multiprocess Firefox.
However, multiple process Firefox doesn't actually exist in practice yet. Go ahead and enable your multiprocess flags in about:config. Spawn a bunch of tabs and windows and admire the "pretty underlining" on the tab titles. Now check your task manager and count the number of Firefox instances. What's that, you say? There's only one?
Now kill the single Firefox process that's there and see how many FF windows stay open. Zero is the answer.
Fail.
Instead of astroturfing for FF, perhaps you should sit down at your desk at Mozilla and get back to coding your has-been product.
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Firefox's strength was always a large library of plugins, never it's User Interface.
Arguably Firefox's User Experience has degraded, as it is not as configurable as before.
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Unlike Chrome, you can get the normal UI of Firefox. I have customized it such that My Firefox 31 looks almost exactly like Firefox 3.6.
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Version number confusion (Score:4, Informative)
(reads summary)
Hum, Interesting...firefox 33 integrates, mumble, mumble...wait, something's not right with this picture.
(Scrolls back a few lines on the RSS feed)
Firefox 31 Released [slashdot.org]
Aha! I knew it. Latest version is 31! Must be a typo...
(One angry RTFA later)
Oh, hang on...They are referring to the yet unreleased, possibly future version of Firefox. With no indication whatsoever of that fact in the summary, even though a (stable?) version of Firefox was just recently released, as highlighted on this very same website less than 24 hours ago.
Would it have killed anyone to point this out somewhere? You know, for those of us at home who don't keep up with Firefox's versioning madness?
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You don't have to keep track of Firefox version. By this time next month they'll announce FireFox 40, with H.265 support.
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Version 31 was yesterday's version. 33 will be tomorrow's version.
At fucking last (Score:2, Interesting)
Can we finally use the tag with H.264 files and just forget about the rest?
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Always really preview before clicking submit.
Can we finally use the the <video> tag with H.264 files and just forget about the rest?
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Always really preview before clicking submit.
Can we finally use the the <video> tag with H.264 files and just forget about the rest?
No, since Firefox is currently limiting the use of this plugin to WebRTC - which basically means it's not available for anything actual users want to do, such as watch html5 video.
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Another stupid idea by the Firefox team, then.
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The article mentions Youtube, without giving any specifics. Seems they're shipping the plugin greyed out, disabled etc. and then WebRTC stuff will work (does anyone have either used that?) and then maybe you'll be able to use html5 video in some future version, maybe.
Setting the politics aside, and even whether they intend or not to provide html5 video support, it feels better to do that staged release. I sure would want that the kinks, bugs, networking and security issues are worked out before it is unleas
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You don't need H.264 for Youtube. You can watch everything there, and at several other sites using the "Video WithOut Flash" plugin:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
It works pretty damn well.
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Thankfully, that is incorrect. The OpenH.264 decoder can be used for HTML video elements. Though the last I heard Mozilla is still working on AAC audio licensing.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/10/30/video-interoperability-on-the-web-gets-a-boost-from-ciscos-h-264-codec/ [mozilla.org]
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OpenH264 only ships with a video decoder, no AAC audio decoder. The hack Cisco made with OpenH264 won't work, as the AAC licensing pool company removed [livejournal.com] caps. For WebRTC, this is no problem, as opus will be used as audio encoding.
But MP4 won't work. Perhaps there is potential for a matroska-based h.264+opus format, as when IE and safari (which don't have opus for the audio element yet) implement WebRTC, they need opus encoders and decoders. Then its only a small step to support this mixed format.
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No video for you.
NEXT!
bad for standards (Score:5, Insightful)
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This has nothing to do with the "tag" itself, which does not specify codecs.
IIRC at one stage it specified vorbis/theora as a baseline which every implementation should support but under pressure from apple and MS they took that out.
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I'm all for open standards and less patents, but H.264 videos and H.264 decoding hardware has been used everywhere for almost a decade now. Even if something free and open-source had been able to replace it, we're on the verge of switching to H.265 which is about twice as good as H.264.
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I'm sure the transition to H265 will be at least a decade long (do unreleased AMD and Intel CPUs even support it? I think not). H264 will stay for a long time. Even MP3 has been outdated for like 10+ years but still is massively used.
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H.264 videos and H.264 decoding hardware has been used everywhere for almost a decade now.
Make it two decades and we'll talk.
we're on the verge of switching to H.265 which is about twice as good as H.264.
Not so fast though. When I made a similar point [slashdot.org], people mentioned that video providers will continue because they have the choice of decoding H.265 in battery-gulping software or H.264 in battery-sipping hardware.
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If the open source world releases something (unencumbered with the GPL - i.e., BSD licensed) with encoding and decoding tools that actually works as well or better than the closed alternative, in a timely manner then I'm sure people will use it.
It will never happen. Get used to it. There is far, far less complex stuff in the free desktop that has been broken for the past 20 years and still not fixed.
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I'm also under the impression that there are,absurdly, potential patent-license issues with the .mp4 file format that h.264 video is most often stored in.
Finally, of course unless the usual obstructionist Apple and Microsoft ever implement opus codec support, this also
Re:bad for standards (Score:5, Informative)
If you have a camcorder, the license to create h.264 is present as part of the camcorder. This includes phones and everything else people submit to YouTube, for example.
The only constraint is that if you post content online, you cannot take payment on the content itself - i.e., you can put it online, you can put ads around it, but you cannot force someone to pay to view that content (commercial activity). So those videos on YouTube where you have to pay in order to view them come under a different license.
As for the Mp4 format being patented - it's RAND by Apple ages ago (MP4 is a subset of the QuickTime MOV format). If Apple's asserting any patents on the format, that is. But since people mass-license the h.264 patents through the MPEG-LA, that means any patents Apple has on MP4 are included in the license fee you pay to create or display the content.
Sound is licensed under a separate agreement - MP3 or AAC. Again, your typical MPEG-LA license for h.264 will probably include use licenses for AAC (most typical format) so you can have a soundtrack.
If not, there's always PCM as well - handled by the format just fine.
Licensed encoder for video editor (Score:2)
If you have a camcorder, the license to create h.264 is present as part of the camcorder. This includes phones and everything else people submit to YouTube, for example.
It doesn't include video game footage or anything else that's edited because as I understand it, the video editing software needs to have its own licensed encoder.
In an imperfect world... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, some websites wanted to use H.264 for video encoding, but Mozilla shouldn't have abetted them.
H.264 is here.
HEVC not far down the road.
The geek sees everything in terms of the "open" web.
But there is more to digital video than video distribution through the web.
Which is why the mainstream commercial codecs dominate here.
Why hardware and software support for these codecs are baked into the smartphone, tablet, PC, graphics card, HDTV, video game console, Blu-ray player. The prosumer HD camcorder, medical and industrial video systems and so on, endlessly.
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The "distribution" is orthogonal to the codec being used. Most of the things that make a good "digital video" codec for the "web", also make it exceptionally good for physical media, dedicated hardware, etc., etc.
No, MPEG codecs dominate, because they had NO open competitors, until *just now*.
VP3 was okay at the time, but
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Code implementing software patents can still be Free/Open Source Software. I mean, isn't that what x264 and VLC is? The un-FOSS-like restriction is one enforced by the government and patent trolls, not the software project.
Just because one country makes it illegal means you should, or even have to, spread it all around the world.
Mozilla isn't even offering people the option to enable h.264 in some alternative fashion (maybe a user could provide it themselves, maybe Firefox searches the OS or hardware for an
So what's the best way to do video on the web? (Score:3)
Serious question: What's the best way to handle video on the web given a few requirements? First, the content needs to be hosted on the same site as the website. Why? Because sites like Youtube and Vimeo have control over it. They can unilaterally decide to take something down. They will also present related video. For someone trying to market product, you shouldn't make it easy for a prospective customer to find your competitors. Second, the video has to work on both Macs and PCs. Third, the video has to work on Internet Explorer as early as v.8 because too many users don't know any better.
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mpeg4, with link too if embedded (Score:2)
Virtually all of the popular file formats for video are essentially containers that have mpeg4 video inside. Therefore, essentially any player can play mpeg4. The difference is which package files they can open, so just use a plain .mpg file rather than a proprietary package like .wmv.
If you want to embed the video that's fine, but also provide a link to the mpeg file itself. A plain link to a mpg file is like a plain link to an html page - it will work for anyone.
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Not exactly a valid assumption. Government users tend to use IE primarily because they have to access other government sites that were built by the lowest bidder who often only work on Windows and only works on IE. Hell, while most of the world uses Acrobat for forms, the feds contracted with IBM to build some IT stuff and they're using this goofy holdover from their acquisition of Lotus.
Still depends on what the video is of (Score:2)
sites that were built by the lowest bidder who often only work on Windows and only works on IE
All supported Windows desktop operating systems can run IE 9 or later. Besides, whether and why government employees on government equipment and government time would be watching your video still depends on what the video is of. It might be better in a specific case to download the video to watch in a native, non-web application, or to have the IT department authorize installation of a second browser for "general interest" web sites.
Latest version (Score:3)
So thats whats gonna be in FF33, which is 2 versions from now.
FF31 has just been released AFAIK
So whats new (or broken) in FF31 - should I upgrade from FF30 ?
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https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/... [mozilla.org]
CSS3 variables I think has been getting the most attention.
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FF31 has just been released AFAIK
So whats new (or broken) in FF31 - should I upgrade from FF30 ?
Unless you like Australis, you may want to 'upgrade' to Pale Moon 24.
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Welp, then downgrade or whatever can be an option if-when that happens. For now, I'd prefer using the addon over dropping back that far.
Hell, there's always ESR to drag that window out even further if indeed the addon gets abandoned.
But given how many people (me included) are annoyed with Australis, I expect the addon will have a reasonable shelf life.
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Haven't noticed that personally. Have you tried killing off pulseaudio? I occasionally get weirdass audio problems with pulse that get fixed by that.
I guess a full on logging out and logging back in might do the trick too.
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https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/p... [launchpad.net]
Source packages are on that page, follow the links to the builds for the binaries.
ActiveX again. (Score:3, Interesting)
So, at least on Linux this 'thing' doesn't come packaged with the browser in a package. Instead browser DOWNLOADS this crap from the net. ActiveX, anyone?
Very-very-very disappointing. Looks like Mozilla have forgotten what their mission was behind all those gay-rights fights.
Flash support (Score:2)
I know some will mock this, but there is a heck of a lot of Flash content out there, and Firefox really should work with Adobe for an unloadable plugin for getting an up to date Flash player on all platforms. There is really far too much Flash content out there to ignore this need. Make it something that can be disabled, and unloaded as a plugin, sure. If you don't want it, you won't have to have it loaded, so it keeps everyone happy. I think that getting Ogg support into the browser and other open codecs w
As will Flash moving to HTML5 instead of a plugin (Score:2)
>I think that getting Ogg support into the browser and other open codecs will help us transition away from the Flash over time,
Also, Flash Cc, the authoring tool, can now output HTML5 rather than SWF, so all the existing Flash projects can be recompiled to no longer require the plugin. Support isn't 100% yet, but that's the direction Adobe is going. The programming language within Flash has always been a dialect of JavaScript/Emacscript, so it is pretty simple for Adobe to start using the browser's Jav
Hurry up (Score:2)
Re:So Kind of open? (Score:5, Informative)
The source is open: you can read it, you can compile it and compare binaries, etc.
In fact, it is BSD licensed.
But that only covers the copyright. The patent is not opened (nor owned by Cisco), and seem to prevent derivative works.
Cisco paid the fees to use the patent in this one application, and open-sourced it to the world. Seems like a great solution, security-wise, and clever legally.
And, it becomes just more BSD code when the patent expires in... what, a decade? Or if the new Supreme Court ruling is found to invalidate the patent.
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It would be kind of ironic if it were a software-only patent, since one of the reasons H.264 is amazing is the hardware acceleration built into everything.
Re:So Kind of open? (Score:4, Informative)
... all software is implemented on hardware. Even the instructions you send to your processor get translated into other software (microcode) which is what actually gets executed.
Hardware acceleration still runs software.
H.264 isn't 'amazing' because of the hardware acceleration built into everything, its extremely convenient. If OGG was built into everything, we'd be using that instead because thats what would allow us to have long battery life and lower heat dissipation.
H.264 isn't software anyway, its a collection of algorithms and protocols. There are multiple software implementations of H.264, of which cisco's is only one.
Patent upgrade treadmill (Score:5, Insightful)
And, it becomes just more BSD code when the patent expires in... what, a decade?
A decade from now, most major web video streams will be in H.265 (HEVC), and H.266 will be the Next Big Thing(tm). By the time the patents on one codec have run out, bandwidth constraints cause providers of non-free media to switch to a new freshly patented codec. Users end up stuck on a treadmill, from H.261 to MPEG-1 to MPEG-2 to H.263 family (Sorenson Spark, DivX, Xvid) to H.264 (AVC) and so on.
Re:Patent upgrade treadmill (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe maybe not. Once a format is deemed "good enough" it can stick around for a long time. See mp3, jpeg png etc. Furthermore bandwidth prices have dropped through the floor in recent years,
Re:Patent upgrade treadmill (Score:4, Insightful)
Once a format is deemed "good enough" it can stick around for a long time.
True, if it is impractical to deploy a new codec in the field alongside the existing codecs, a first mover will win. This is why U.S. OTA digital television is stuck on DVD/SVCD era codecs, but some countries whose digital transition happened later use H.264.
Furthermore bandwidth prices have dropped through the floor in recent years
Long haul yes, last mile no. Satellite and cellular ISPs tend to charge on the order of $10 per GB. Even wired home ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon have been practicing "congestion by choice", refusing to peer with L3.
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It's not true that H.264 is significantly better than MPEG-2 video, when used at high bit rates as in HDTV. Every video codec developed since MPEG-2, and every audio codec developed since MPEG-1 Layer II, has been focused on low-bit rate video that needs to
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Long haul yes, last mile no.
Depends on where you live. I get 500mbps* symmetric connection today, for about the same price I used to get a 4mbps/768kbps connection 4 years ago and a 1mbps/128kbps connection 8 years ago.
*They throttle to down to 80-90mbps a few hours per day (during peak), but I get full 500mbps in other times, with no cap whatsoever, the average bandwidth is about 300mbps, which is good enough for me.
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That seems silly.
Bandwidth is one of those commodities (like processor cycles) that gets cheaper as time marches on. Bandwidth now is easily a couple of orders of magnitude higher than a decade ago (and moving towards gigabit), and that was several orders of magnitude higher than the decade before that.
Further, its a cost center now. If you could halve Netfli
1 Gbit per second vs. 5 GB per month (Score:2)
Bandwidth now is easily a couple of orders of magnitude higher than a decade ago (and moving towards gigabit)
Gigabit per second just means you blow through a month of last-mile data in 40 seconds.
YouTube never implemented Theora (Score:2)
Is a compression factor of 2 compared to a free codec worth the license trouble and the additional development?
Yes. This is why YouTube never implemented Theora, waiting until VP8 (which roughly compares to AVC baseline) before adding any free codecs.
What matters is that the existing standard doesn't empty the battery where a new codec wouldn't.
Why wouldn't the new codec be GPGPU-accelerated too?
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Why wouldn't the new codec be GPGPU-accelerated too?
GPGPU acceleration doesn't really save battery in most cases as there aren't a whole lot of low power GPUs out there.
Dedicated hardware with just enough circuitry to perform a specific task will when over anything with GP attached to it.
GPGPU is for high performance computing, not low power computing.
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Bandwidth is not that scarce.
It is when you're trying to send 2160p video to subscribers behind local monopoly ISPs that routinely practice metering, congestion by choice, or both.
Archiving your own or someone else's? (Score:2)
True, but if you save all your files in H.264, you are guaranteed an archival data format that can be read by software that won't suddenly stop working.
If you are archiving a video that you produced, what's the big advantage of H.264 over VP8? VP8 is rate-distortion comparable to H.264 baseline, and VP8 is free today. An archival copy needs to be read by software, not necessarily read by specialized hardware in a battery-constrained device.
If you are archiving a video that someone else produced, most streaming video providers have a policy of implementing technical measures to prevent just that, backed by national anticircumvention legislation.
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If you are archiving a video that you produced, what's the big advantage of H.264 over VP8?
Being able to play it on more devices.
Transcoding isn't fun or fast. I'd rather have my files in such a format that I can actually use instead of some format that I would need to convert before being able to play.
After all, my archived analog media does not need any conversion - I can just grab and play a VHS tape or a record.
Also, my country does not have software patents, so h.264 is (legally) free to me.
Emigrating isn't always practical (Score:2)
Transcoding isn't fun or fast. I'd rather have my files in such a format that I can actually use instead of some format that I would need to convert before being able to play.
If you archive a 4K video, you need to scale it down anyway before it'll play efficiently on a handheld device, no matter what codecs that device accepts. Besides, if you produced video, you may want to archive the source footage in its original format and a non-destructive edit decision list.
Also, my country does not have software patents, so h.264 is (legally) free to me.
But does it have anticircumvention legislation (DMCA, EUCD, etc.)? Besides, the process of finding a country with acceptable living conditions and visa requirements, finding an employer to sponsor a work visa, and fina
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Isn't there patents on GIF and JPEG? And the web is full of images in those two formats anyway.
Unlike copyrights, patents expire. (Score:2)
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Fixed.
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Mozilla are not there to do cater to everyone's precise whims,
No, they're there to cater to a couple of UI designers' whims, which is how we got an interface that none of the users wanted.