This week, both YouTube and Vimeo opened up beta offerings using HTML5 video instead of Flash to bring video content to users. Both of them chose to use the h264 codec, which meant that only Safari and Chrome can play these videos, since firefox doesn’t license the h264 codec. Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, explained on his blog why Mozilla doesn’t license the h264 codec.
Shaver explains that h64 is not a suitable codec for Mozilla, because of two main reasons: licensing cost, and the codec’s closed nature.
The h264 codec is patented up the wazoo by the MPEG-LA, and while Google, Apple, and Microsoft have paid for a license to include the codecs within their products, the Mozilla foundation has not, and will not do so. Without this license, it is illegal (in many countries) “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.”
Mozilla has a number of clear and well-argued reasons for not buying the license. First, it’s very limited. Google, for instance, paid for a license that transfers to users of Chrome, but if you build Chrome from source yourself or extend the browser, the license does not apply. What’s even worse is that the license would not carry over towards, for instance, Linux distributors – not acceptable, of course, for Firefox.
“Even if we were to pay the USD 5000000 annual licensing cost for H.264, and we were to not care about the spectre of license fees for internet distribution of encoded content, or about content and tool creators, downstream projects would be no better off,” Shaver explains.
The second important reason not to license the h264 codec is a more ideological one. “We want to make sure that the Web experience is good for all users, present and future,” Shaver writes, “I want to make sure that when a child in India or Brazil or Kenya discovers the internet, there isn’t a big piece of it (video) that they can’t afford to participate in. I want to make sure that there are no toll-booth barriers to entry for someone building a whole new browser, or bringing a browser to a whole new device or OS, or making and using tools for creating standard web content.”
He adds that “the web is undeniably better for Mozilla having entered the browser market, and it would have been impossible for us to do so if there had been a multi-million-dollar licensing fee required for handling HTML, CSS, JavaScript or the like”.
It is very hard to disagree with Shaver on this one. We have seen what happens when we make the web dependant and proprietary – Flash, Internet Explorer 6 – and yet here we are, ten years down the line, ready to fall into the same trap all over again. I don’t care if h264 is better now, what matters is that in the future, we haven’t locked ourselves into yet another patent-encumbered format that alternative platforms can’t make use of.
The specification writers for HTML5 should have the guts to do what’s right. It doesn’t matter if Theora is (arguably!) worse than h264 – the standard is open, patent-free, and developing at an incredible pace. I’d rather we bite through the sour apple now, instead of having to deal with the lock-in down the line. Here we are, loaded with bad experiences with lock-in on the web, and yet we seem to be doing it all over again. I’m sure we’ll blame Microsoft eventually.
Shaver ends his post with a note about using platform-native frameworks, such as DirectShow in Windows, to handle the video format. This solution has been suggested quite often, but Mozilla doesn’t see it as an option, because of a multitude of problems.
“There are issues there related to principle (fragmentation of format under the guise of standardized HTML), to effectiveness (about 60% of our users are on Windows XP, which provides no H.264 codec), to security (exposure of arbitrary codecs to hostile content), and to user experience (mapping the full and growing capabilities of [the video tag] to the system APIs provided),” Shaver explains.
“In many countries, it is a patented technology”
Many countries? I only count one (USA), but it might be due to my ignorance.
Edited 2010-01-24 18:30 UTC
Well, maybe there are patents around AVC decoding in hardware (and hardware patents are common around the world), but unless Mozilla enters the hardware business and starts to manufacture video en-/decoding chips, those patents are of no interest to them.
BTW, while On2 agreed not to enforce any VP3 patents when they gave the source code to Xiph to create Theora, hardware patents are a different issue. Maybe that’s the reason we’ve yet to see any Theora decoding chips.
The previous government of my country, Australia, was foolish enough to sign a patent agreement with the US, so that US patents on h264 would be applicable here in Australia.
Urgh, that’s true for more than just Australia, isn’t it? Isn’t there a free-trade agreement that calls for recognition in all signators of a patent valid in any signator? Or am I making that up?
Edit: I think I might be thinking of the combination of the Berne convention, which calls for international recognition of copyright, and 1996 WIPO copyright treaty, which explicitly allows for the copyrightability of software under the Berne convention. Or I could be completely wrong, and making an idiot of myself. I’m not sure!
Edited 2010-01-25 17:30 UTC
Doesn’t matter, copyrights for software is a f*cking nightmare and should be banned, permanently, by all countries.
Just because software patents are not officially allowed, does not mean the patent offices around the world doesn’t grand them, or the courts occasionally upholds them. Remember MP3 got successfully patented in most of Europe. I don’t know the situation for H.264, but I find it plausible they have found some loop-holes to get patents almost everywhere.
Edited 2010-01-25 15:59 UTC
I like to film and try to get the most out of my camera, but if i have to decide between an acclaimed better quality or a free internet I’m always gonna choose the free internet
If he’s speaking the truth, why is Mozilla happily distributing Flash and other proprietary plugins through its Plugin Finder service?
I have a hard time believing his comments as long as Mozilla continues to spread proprietary plugins.
True,
Also I find the argument “I want to make sure that when a child in India or Brazil or Kenya discovers the internet…” a bit sentimental and strange. Those countries not being the US there is nothing stopping them from including the unlicenced codecs there.
“Why won’t anybody think of the children!”
And what would you have them do? Make a patronizing message appear if a user tries to load flash? The fact is, users want Flash (because, like it or not, many sites unfortunately require it), and the users will get it either way; if you don’t make it easy to install, all you do is hurt the user experience.
Apple decided not to ship any browser plugin / Flash support at all with iPhone’s Safari and yet it’s still the best selling smartphone.
I bet that if YouTube was usable without Flash, many users wouldn’t even notice it’s gone.
Haha, thats funny… good one. Its Adobe, not Apple that can’t get their act together and port it to more than one platform every 4 years. Also, Apple is on record saying there isn’t enough computing power for flash…again, Adobe’s problem.
Apple did not “decide” not to ship a Flash plugin. They didn’t have a choice.
Do you really think Adobe wouldn’t port Flash to the iPhone if they thought, for even a second, that Apple would approve it especially with Adobe’s recent porting efforts to other smartphones? That being said, I hope Flash never hits the iPhone. If it helps, even a little bit, to decrease the usage of Flash then I’m all for it. I’m sick of sites with Flash navigation menus when HTML/CSS would’ve done the job just as well.
Well f*cking said. Die Flash Die!
Android based phones have Flash, and it’s great to see it on there – and having only been out a few months, Android phones are already beating the pants of MS Windows Mobile phones. So you can say that during a time when there was no real competition to the iPhone (and until Android there wasn’t) but we’ll see how well that holds up in the long run.
Frankly I don’t get the Flash bashing. All of the innovation that has come on the web started out as either proprietary extensions to the standards (Ajax/CSS/SVG), or responses to something proprietary (Vorbis/Theora).
Innovation is the realm of proprietary invention. Flash has done it’s fair share of innovating, and I think it’d disingenuous to deny that. I don’t see why you can’t support standards, open-source and proprietary proving grounds.
That said, I’d love to see Vorbis and Theora (and probably Dirac too) take off, no doubt about that. Now let’s see a Silverlight or Flash implementation so we can watch Theora/Vorbis videos on Safari, IE and Opera. 🙂
BTW, is Mozilla’s video backend pluggable?
Personally, my problem with it is not it’s proprietary nature (though it would be nice if it were open). It’s the fact that it basically breaks the basic model of the internet.
The basic idea behind how web pages and browsers work is that pages link to each other, and you navigate those links. Things like flash basically put the entire site on one page and make it impossible to link to anything. If a site is done in flash, and I want to direct someone to some of its content, I have to give them the link to the site and directions on how to find the content. I can’t just give them a direct link to the content. Also, many browser features such as tabs and history don’t really work anymore because you’re really dealing with an application rather than a set of web pages.
Flash effectively breaks the web. Sure, it’s a great way to do some things – like run an application in a web browser – but as far as web pages go, building them with flash just makes things not work. You’re turning the web into a set of applications instead of pages.
And those flash pages/applications aren’t indexable either – which is supposedly one of the reasons that Google created Chrome. They’re looking to push javascript for dynamic content because that is indexable. Flash is not.
I’d hate flash even if it were totally open. Solutions which give dynamic content and fancier pages but still allow the basic model of the web to work properly are definitely going to be better than flash or anything like it.
Well there are solutions to that particular problem (often called deep linking) like my unFocus.HistoryKeeper 😉 – but that problem exists for so many Ajax applications as well. Just take a look at one of the map websites, like google maps.
True. Flash is not the only offender, but I’m going to be just as irritated with any technology which breaks basic browsing. Any technology which attempts to improve on basic html, bringing us dynamic pages or whatever cool thing that they’re supposed to do, needs to still work with things like linking to that page and opening pages in new tabs. If they don’t, it’s a big problem.
Now, I’ve never heard of deep links, so I’ll have to look into that, but if there is already a good solution to the linking problem, then there’s that much less excuse for web pages and/or web technologies to not take advantage of it.
It’s actually already a standard, implemented as part of the w3c (I can’t remember which spec – maybe HTML5), and there is actually already support for a DOM event which does the same thing as History Keeper. So there is progress, but there is still a way to go before developers have the ideal model for how to structure what are coming to be called HTML Applications. We’re all working on it though (we as in web developers). 😉
The Gopher and Lynx crowd complained that modern browsers broke the internet. You probably never had to develop code for six different browsers or you must be a pimpled faced teenager.
same deal for youtube. If mozilla doesn’t support youtube, it will fade into irrelivence pretty fast. Don’t see much of a difference between supporting h264 and flash from an ideological point of view.
I suspect it’s also a timing issue. Mozilla didn’t have the weight to complain about Flash originally. It really slipped in quietly. At first a menu or something shiny needed it on a website but you wouldn’t notice much if the Flash player was missing. From subtle first steps, it’s grown to a requirement for viewing many websites including ones with no real justification for it other than an over-saturation of shiny hollow ornaments.
Mozilla has to now compete in this environment. A browser without flash quickly becomes unusable. A user with a vulnerable plugin blames the browser not responsible party. So, Mozilla is better off providing a way to support existing Flash content. They are also keeping the user better off by notifying them of Flash plugin updates since vulnerable plugins hurts everybody.
Now, we’re up to HTML5 which has not been finalized yet. We have the video tag but the formats supported within it are still up for debate. Browser developers still have the opportunity to get involved in what codecs will be standard browser components.
Mozilla can’t say “we won’t support Flash” because it’s already here. They can still say “we won’t support H264” because <video> is not a finalized spec that can only be used by H264 supporting browsers.
So how about if they made a plugin that would plug into the platform video pipeline and look for the format there? What difference is there between that and flash?
Like it or not, what format is used for video will completely depend on what google does with youtube. If google chooses h264, that is what the defacto standard will be. And like I said in my original comment, if a browser doesn’t support youtube, it is not going to be relevant for all that long.
If mozilla wants to take a moral stand thats fine, but first remove support for flash (and quicktime). They said they have no problem for having support for something but not using it, and all the reasons they cite for h264 apply to those other things too.
What this whole thing ACTUALLY is, is mozilla trying to throw around weight they don’t actually have.
The difference is that flash is already being used on the web and is necessary to support. The video element isn’t, and Firefox is trying to influence the way it will be used while they still can. If you want to create a plugin which will hook into the system video pipeline, then go ahead. It’s going to be pretty difficult, though, because Flash videos commonly take use more advanced functionality than just playing videos. (like displaying ads or links on top of the video).
If you think Youtube isn’t going to include a Flash fallback for YEARS, you’re clueless. They’re still supporting IE6, for god’s sake, they’re not going to suddenly drop support for all older methods of viewing the site. However, I do agree that what google decides to do on YouTube could be the deciding factor as to whether or not Theora video on the web goes anywhere. If they stick to h264 only the chances look really bad.
You’re looking at this completely backwards. Mozilla does want to get rid of flash, but it’s already here and not going anywhere anytime soon. So, they can keep flash support while slowly working towards getting rid of it, or they can lose all usefulness by breaking half of the internet and lose all their users. The reason h264 support hasn’t been added is because it isn’t yet being used like Flash is, and Mozilla wants to keep that from being true in the future. They’ve basically stated that if it gets to the point where h264 video element is being used all over the place then they’ll bow to user demand and include it.
Yep.
Well, that remains to be seen.
The other response pretty much nails what I was going for. Flash is already a necessary evil where the video tag is not yet necessary or finalized. It would do a disservice too the users to not include Flash support. It would do a disservice too the users to hand the future internet over to a bigger licensing mess than Flash.
In terms of flash, I actually think Adobe should providing it through the normal Firefox plugin catalog. It’d be easier to find and easier to keep updated since the standard framework update process would be in place. There’s no reason that it should be such a separate application. I’d also like to see them keep a little more current across the platforms with the readers. They’ve made a lot of money, they can bare some responsibilities for there success.
Flash and h.264 are both bad ideas, and Mozilla doesn’t support either. They support a plugin interface that Adobe and others take advantage of. But while <video> could use plugins of some sort on the backend, that isn’t what was really intended.
Maybe because Flash is free as in beer, after all? I’ve downloaded it a 1000 times, never paid a Cent. Is it free for devs as well? I don’t know.
You’ve never paid for H.264 either.
Not yet. H264 becomes more valuable the more it is used and the owners of H264 can increase the price whenever they want. Websites that require activex don’t work in most browsers while webcontent that was made with open patent free standards still works in all browsers.
Directly no, indirectly that’s not so sure!!
Flash is not free when you distribute content with it. When you use Flash to stream videos, providers have to pay exactly the same fees as if the videos were streamed via the <video> tag: http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/hdvideo/supported_technologies/h26… (that only applies to territories where software patents exist)
Adobe Flash Media Server isn’t free. It’s commercial software: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/
And as end users: Flash is not Free Software. While there are reverse-engineered FOSS implementations (swfdec and Gnash), they are way from being fully compatible. On the other hand, AVC documentation is available for free, including reference source code. There are FOSS implementations of AVC (most notably ffmpeg) that are fully compatible with the standard.
So much for propagating the “open web”….
Because there is a difference between proprietary and expensive to distribute, and proprietary and free to distribute. Flash costs Mozilla nothing to distribute, and in the case of Linux and FreeBSD, the distros do the distributing.
That’s not his argument when he’s talking about opening the web and avoiding costs for content providers. Streaming h.264/AVC videos via Flash costs content providers the same amount of MPEG LA licensing fees as via <video> tag — even more when the content provider buys a Flash Server from Adobe…
The Mozilla people like to present themselves as idealists who fight for freedom, while in fact they are as much idealists as money tells them to be.
What in heavens name are you on about?
Theora/Vorbis is zero cost for everybody.
Flash and h264 are not.
You insane love of h264 is merely an additional, perfectly avoidable cost for almost everyone else on the planet.
So exactly why are you so overwhelmingly keen on millions of people, many of whom around the world cannot afford it, having to pay licensing fees (especially after this year) which are perfectly avoidable and unnecessary?
I repeatedly mentioned Dirac as better alternative to Theora.
Of course, you conceal that I mention another patent-free codec that compared to Theora has the advantages of 1.) being an actual standard (a subset to be exact) and 2.) being targeted at HD resolutions right from the start.
Just because you mention something doesn’t make it so. This seems to be especially true when it is you who mentions something.
Theora out-performs Dirac currently.
“Being targeted at HD resolutions” is a meaningless phrase. HD is merely video at a higher resolution, it is still video.
Compression is compression, it works at all filesizes, and generally works better the larger the filesize.
Edited 2010-01-25 10:07 UTC
Only at low resolutions, but at low resolutions the resulting file size differs only marginally.
The higher the resolution, the more does Dirac benefit and the larger the absolute file size difference is.
Wow, you really have no clue about that matter. “Compression is compression”… ridiculous …
There are very different kinds of compressions and they shine at different scenarios. Stamp-size and HD are very different scenarios.
Despite your sarcasm, Theora has always been better than Dirac at “low to medium” resolution video. With the recent improvements in Theora, the point at which Dirac still achieves a better filesize/quality trade-off than Theora has shifted upwards from where it used to be, to such an extent that Theora now beats Dirac at HD resolutions.
I take it that you can agree that HD resolution videos are not “stamp-size”?
Someone who posts blurry videos as “proof” how competitive Theora is, may actually believe that.
Don’t take my word for it then, ask someone who actually produces web browsers:
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/01/html5-video-and-h-264-what…
Edited 2010-01-26 02:01 UTC
Being a browser programmer makes him competent in conducting professional video codec comparisons?
Given your “compression is compression” attitude, you obviously don’t understand that…
Has nothing to do with MPEG-4.
Edited 2010-01-26 13:30 UTC
I glad you agree. It cretainly makes him a great deal more credentialled than you appear to be.
and if Firefox would use the Host operating system’s media stack to play the video then no one has to care about h.264 being in FF… MS, Apple, and nearly every Linux flavor out there supports h.264 (legally or otherwise). The two “stupid people” platforms have it built in and licensed already from Frauenhaufer. Linux users can figure out how to get x264 installed.
Mozilla are just holding the line for no reason or are trying to extort a licensing agreement from Frauenhaufer that is specific to them so they can use the codec for free since they are a non-profit entity.
And that would mean that Firefox would be different on different platforms. Some webpages would only work on Windows. If you make sure that you always provide an opensource videocodec you can always be sure that every device or browser can run it. Of course you can also provide a ‘higher’ quality codec version that will only run on blessed platforms.
huh?
How is sending the media out to be played by the host OS make it different from one web page to the next when they are playing H.264?
Because you make webpage support dependent on the host OS like what activex did.
It’s the “legally or otherwise” part that is a problem. One can’t simply push software out and say “ok users, go forth and break the law”. There are places where that would still be legal basis for a product but your cutting yourself out of some pretty big markets by legally crippling your distribution.
There is also a higher respect of copyright and similar licensing issues in the FOSS community regardless of the rumor that anyone involved with FOSS is only there because it’s free of cost. We don’t need to fuel the rumor further by promoting the illegal use of software.
In the end, what is still needed is a legal way to play or replace the closed formats that limit content to specific platforms.
name one linux user who does not have x264 installed and I will call you a liar.
It is not only about the users, it is also very much about the providers of applications, the designers and suppliers of new platforms and devices, and the providers of web content.
It is important that anyone be able to develop new stuff for the web for no royalty chrage, just as much as it is important for anyone to be able to view and participate on the web, using whatever client device they choose or can cobble together, also for no charge.
As soon as we put up proprietary paywalls on either viewing the web or on providing content on the web, then at that very moment the web is no longer universally participatory.
So linux users are the only ones who count?
More to the point, I don’t think anyone thinks that individual end users are going to be sued, it’s the websites.
If you create a blog post that has an h264 video in it, you have to pay. If you don’t, you could be sued for providing the video to others. I’m not sure if they’d really go after small personal websites like that or not, but you can bet they’d definitely go after any small business that tried to do it.
How about OSNews? Are they based in the Netherlands? I’m not sure if they’d be forced to license the thing or not, but I really wouldn’t want to bet against lawyers with that much money. Anyplace that does a lot of business with the US, which includes all of Europe, could potentially be pressured into agreements.
we’re building machines displaying web pages on linux here.
we cannot distribute x264 without paying a few millions $$. we obviously do not have this cash. Hello, vendor lock-out overlords.
IT DOES NOT MATTER IF THE FUNCTIONALITY EXISTS AS PLUGIN, AS WE CANNOT DISTRIBUTE THE PLUGIN EITHER!
For what it’s worth, we cannot even decode Apple trailers using “regular” mplayer plugin for this reason.
it does not matter that users have x264 installed illegally without getting troubles. what matters, is that it kills competition in the egg and ensure a de-facto monopolistic situation.
that’s why mozilla is against h264 and they’re damn right.
Edited 2010-01-26 13:27 UTC
I am a Linux user, and I do not have x264 installed.
Josh Cogliati
Mozilla doesn’t distribute Flash plugins. Mozilla provides a link to Adobe’s site when a user encounters a page with Flash on it.
At one point they also provided the choice (on Linux) to install either gnash or swfdec as well, although I’m not sure if they do that any longer.
Yeah, and all those torrent sites didn’t participate in distribution – they just provided the links..
Yep. Do you think that it should be illegal to provide information? I think that it should be legal to download as long as you don’t ask money for it.
Software and content owners should make it easier to legally download than to illegally download it. They should also use reasonable pricing. Most people don’t want to put in the effort of learning torrents, searching multiple networks and frequently failing to get a movie, game or program. They would much rather pay a reasonable amount to get it much easier without trouble.
Thanks for supporting the argument that Mozilla could just as well point its users to a website where users could download h.264/AVC codecs.
Right now they could possibly do that, but the period for which the h.264/AVC codecs can be used for free ends at the end of this year, so there is little point.
Besides which, Mozilla’s main point is not about the cost of the codec so much as it is about the ability for anyone to implement web standards.
Mozilla’s point is therefore still perfectly valid even if end users of browsers are still allowed to download h.264/AVC codecs for free next year.
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/01/html5-video-and-h-264-what…
The web grew up on Royalty Free, and Royalty Free is the only way it can continue, and continue to grow.
Edited 2010-01-26 03:44 UTC
So why does Mozilla operate the Plugin Finder that finds Flash?
He says
Flash is not a content/video delivery format. Anyway, probably proprietary plugins should be no problem if they deliver content in non-patent-encumbered formats. You can deliver patent-encumbered content with Flash, but that’s another issue.
Mozilla does not distribute Flash
if they dont try to make it easy for people to get the plugins you need, then people will use some other browser.
Of course there are many others who are willing to pay for an improved experience. In fact there are those whose goal is not to spend as little as possible but to enjoy life to the fullest.
Interesting that you equate experiencing “life to it’s fullest” as measured by how much money one is willing to spend.
I agree that ogg theora should have been the standard. But now because there is no standard video format I think mozilla should support codec plugins. That way mozilla will only provide support for ogg codecs but any other programmer could hook up x264 or ffmpeg so we can watch viemeo/youtube in HTML5 without flash. This hypothetical codec plugin programmer would live in some country where there are no patent issues.
Oh, and how does x264 and ffmpeg handle the patent issues anyway?
Luckily Mozilla is actually adopting GStreamer. Installing plugins for that one is possible and easy.
Strangely enough, Mozilla says publicly that using external media frameworks is bad and that Mozilla won’t do it, while at the same time Mozilla engineer Mike Kristoffersen is working on exactly that: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540
Both projects are not located in the USA. Same for OpenBSD, btw.
Mozilla should not support codec plugins. Mozilla should stop being stupid and implement support via the main media framework for the system being built for. They don’t want to do this as they claim there is no common codec, read Theora, and don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept that they could ship that codec and install as necessary. This is the only sensible way to proceed and is how other browsers are dealing with things. (The media framework, not the install a common codec)
In fact, by installing Theora and Vorbis codecs with encoding support on the system, Mozilla would help spreading the Ogg formats more than just by building a player into the browser.
Suddenly countless people would be able to save their videos in Ogg Theora+Vorbis who are currently saving WMVs just because they don’t even know that there are alternatives and where to obtain alternative video codecs.
Here you go:
http://www.xiph.org/dshow/
Enjoy.
Dude, you really need to learn to read.
I’ve written that Mozilla should bundle encoding-capable Theora codecs with Firefox to encourage Theora-based media creation to people who do not know that non-WMV formats even exist.
You posting an address at OSNews does not make the bundling happen.
Wrong, Neither Theora nor Ogg are included on Windows.
Also, the windows port of both codecs looked like abandoned right now:
http://www.xiph.org/dshow/
Edited 2010-01-25 01:30 UTC
You mean a company full of programmers can’t write a Theora codec for Windows Media Foundation?
All Mozilla needs to do is implement support for media frameworks into Firefox. Make it a plugin, hell we already have plugins that do this type of thing but on a more limited scale, e.g. the mplayer-plugin. That way, when a video isn’t supported in Firefox itself (which I think will be most of the time) it can just spin it off to GStreamer, Quicktime, or whatever media framework plugin you’ve chosen to install. Mozilla is not going to push Theora by attempting to force only Theora videos to play in their browser. Not going to happen though they seem to wish that it would, all they’re going to do is turn users away from Firefox if they can’t watch what they wish to watch. Further, since Flash does work in Firefox, they’re just going to end up pushing Flash even more as the only cross-platform solution that is hassle-free. I do have to love the irony, but I don’t much care for the outcome.
Edited 2010-01-24 19:25 UTC
– h264 currently require a very expensive license to distribute an encoder/decoder in the USA (other countries?)
– h264 will also require paying to stream content in 2011 (so you pay: for encoding, for decoding, and for the content. triple rip-off ftw)
– h264 patent expires in 2017 (by then, h264 will be obsolete)
– google bought on2 (VP8) probably to pro-actively destroy h265’s (the thing after h264) competitor
– theora produce more or less similar stuff as h264 but isnt backed-up by companies since they have no interest into it
– theora lacks hardware acceleration
– using h264 ensure some vendor lock in: you can’t setup a youtube competitor without zillion of dollars, firefox can’t survive, etc. ultimately, the consumer (US) lose
i think the last thing is the most important
Gosh, that’s what you get when everybody calls the format by its ITU-T name…
Currently it looks like there will not be a h.265 — at least not anytime soon.
However, AVC (same codec as h.264, but just with the catchier/handier name used by ISO/MPEG) will likely have a “successor” soon: HVC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_Video_Coding
That “successor” will just be a set of extensions to AVC to make it more suitable for Ultra HD resolutions — nothing that has anything to do with the web for the foreseeable future.
AVC won’t go anywhere for some years to come.
Google bought an asset to suppress it in favor of a codec that they have zero financial stake in regarding sales?
– google bought on2 (VP8) probably to pro-actively destroy h265’s (the thing after h264) competitor
If true, I wonder why would that be.
From: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2009/12/from-cinepak-to-h265-…
Right now, a standards committee is busy hammering out the details of the H.265 video standard, which is again supposed to cut bitrates in half when compared to the previous top-of-the-line solution and a similar image quality. But another 50 percent objective improvement is hard to come by after so many generations of amazing mathematical acrobatics. This time, the group will settle for a 20 percent improvement in mathematically objective measurements. The rest of the improvements will be subjective.
H.265 will be lossier than H.264, in other words, but lossy in ways that won’t be too obvious to humans and our imperfect image-processing brains. Pause an H.265 video and break out the spyglass, and you’ll find many technical imperfections compared to older codecs, but it’s all about perceived quality when the moving picture is, well, moving.
Edited 2010-01-25 07:42 UTC
Actually you can say a lot of things about WM9 but the licensing is way better than H264 for the end user (not for the people having to integrate it). A few years ago I had to put a video on the web and tried to opt for H264 I then read all the licensing issues (which are explained here) and shunned away. Even free streaming currently is allowed only for 10 minutes after that you have to pay. WM9 had none of those restrictions, you could use it as you wanted.
So guess what I then opted for.
I just wonder what sites like youtube etc… will do post 2010, I assume that was the reason why Google bought On2, they simply can convert all videos (and probably are doing that by now) to VP8 and then will provide the plugin for all browsers involved.
Others will have bigger issues.
I agree that there are a lot of bad things in H.264 licensing. Still, I think it will be the standard of the near future. Don’t forget about flash! It supports H.264 as well and is even hardware accelerated now. And flash is there on almost every machine and soon on most smart phones as well. And it plays HW accelerated H.264 on all browsers, including FF. So, in the end I think Mozilla’s move will ultimately help flash survive, because YouTube and the likes just can’t ignore the large FF user base and will just stick to flash as the standard way of watching video on the net.
Edited 2010-01-25 09:27 UTC
It’s worse. There are US MPEG-LA patents that don’t expire until 2028, not 2017.
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-July/02073…
Mozilla is a FOSS project, they cant license this codec and remain true to its principles cant cant afford to support it if this codec wins out and becomes the default online multimedia codec
what is mozilla to do?
1. They should ship with FREE codecs and advocate their use
2. Come up with a plug in system that will allow firefox to use system codecs to play codecs it doesnt support natively
People love to complain about flash but flash helped in giving a multimedia solution that worked consistently
Do we know what the likes of real network thinks about this tag? who is to say they wont push their own codec? what about microsoft and their wmv codec?
wont we go back to the days where were were told online “download this codec if you want to watch this video”? ..have we forgot?
Better Dirac than Theora.
Already in development, even though Mozilla spokespeople deny its existence: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540
MPEG-4 — the codec family that includes AVC aka h.264 — exists since over ten years.
Before AVC was released, there was already another very popular codec from the same family: ASP. Or in popular terms: DivX and Xvid (different brand names for the same thing).
MPEG-4 ASP still works so well, that the not-so-legal-but-mainstream movie sharing still uses that codec pretty much exclusively for non-HD content.
No, because nobody cares about Real. :-p
That would have the same effect on the web as my mom pushing a codec.
Dead. Microsoft adopted MPEG-4 (AVC and AAC) on all recent platforms by default: Xbox 360, Zune, Windows 7, Windows Mobile 6.5.
Only MS themselves use it on their website (but even that use is fading in favor of Silverlight) and Xbox 360 developers who AFAIK are mandated to use WMV for cut scenes.
At least back then videos played fine without utilizing 90% of my CPU.
ASP works so well I can hardly tell teh difference between an HD video in ASP and AVC on my 37 inch TV.
The only big difference is the files size and the fact that ASP is 1/3 the size of AVC, I can’t justify downloading video in AVC just to get better consistency in the blacks.
As for WMV… It will be nice when MSs software supports the creation of mp4 with avc. I hope they move the MKV though.
Edited 2010-01-25 02:20 UTC
And Real Networks has done an excellent job of ensuring our indifference, thanks to their strong commitment to f**king ugly, klunky software.
Well said.
Maybe they didn’t forget. Maybe they’re too young.
Most of the focus has been on the browsers in the format wars, but the true deciders in this war will be the content sites. Ultimately firefox will support whatever formats they have to support to remain relevant, just like they support flash today even though its a closed format. Unless the all the browsers get together and decide on a single codec, which they won’t because Microsoft certainly won’t play ball and Apple is a strong supporter of h.264, the default codec will be chosen for them by content sites. And the content sites will not let their choice be driven by ideology there are too many competitors for them to do that.
Firefox doesn’t support Flash, Adobe makes the Flash plugin and they make a version for Mozilla’s browsers including Firefox. Firefox doesn’t care, it’s a plugin like any other. In point of fact, this is how it should be. No browser should ever come with a built-in codec, that’s counter-efficient and just creates a mess as we can already see. It’s a mess already, and HTML 5 hasn’t even taken off yet. If it isn’t straightened out soon, the future doesn’t look good for it.
And I had such hopes for it, but I don’t want the codec hell again like we had 10 years ago. I can’t believe I’m saying this, I hate saying it, but if the choices are going back to 1999’s codec mess or using Flash… well, I’d take Flash. The sad thing is, this wouldn’t have been hard to solve. The standard should’ve just settled on a codec (Dirac would’ve been my personal pick). Failing that, just pass the bloody thing to the os’s media framework and have done with it. This isn’t a logical stretch, it’s fairly obvious. Instead we have browsers including codecs and refusing to play videos that aren’t encoded in their included codec of choice. Great. This is certainly getting off to one hell of a start.
1999’s codec mess? WTF? Back then for video streaming it was either QuickTime or RealPlayer. That’s exactly two.
Now for the <video> tag it’s either Theora or AVC. Again: Exactly two.
How is that a mess?
Unfortunate: Yes. A giant mess: No.
Edited 2010-01-25 01:32 UTC
not to mention… easily avoided by using Chrome, Safari or eventually IE (or IE with the chrome plugin)
Wow. Back to proprietary Web again.
Will you FOSSies stop moving the damn posts?
The Web has always been open and Free. How is that moving the goalposts? If anything, those of us who are saying that H.264 is a bad idea are trying to keep the damn goalposts back where they used to be.
Some of us have been around long enough to remember the last time a heavily used but patent encumbered format became a problem (GIF) and we don’t want to go through that mess again, yet some people appear to want to run at it head first, screaming.
the web has been standards based. Using a standard is not proprietary.
And I am not some young fellow, I remember GIF and its patent problem.
Edited 2010-01-26 03:33 UTC
how is MS not playing ball with their strong support for h264?
I just don’t get it! Why can’t we have open standards that all platforms can use freely without having to pay for some codec or IP. I guess that would be common sense so we can’t have that can we.
Doing work on codecs can be considered to be an investment. How to get a return from that is a good question.
Exactly so.
The work has been done, Theora/Vorbis performs very nearly as well as h264, so close that the difference is imperceptible.
It is free and available to anyone to use and implement. It works perfectly well with HTML5. No plugins at all are required.
So why not just use it as the public access standard for video on the web and be done with it? Mozilla’s points are all well raised. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would come to this conclusion as a no-brainier.
The only conceivable for arguing otherwise is for commercial self-interests. The only people arguing against Theora/Vorbis as the standard codecs for AV over the web are also those who are seeking to rip other people off.
Great to hear that you’re volunteering your computer resources to anyone who would like to re-encode their videos using Theora, that you’re volunteering to pay for both the local AND server diskspace to host the resulting files, and that you will provide support to any end-users who cannot view the Theora files.
How generous of you!
The following companies, most not based in the US, have patents involved in H.264. They are also part of MPEG LA.
Columbia University, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea (ETRI), France Telecom, Fujitsu, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Polycom, Robert Bosch GmbH, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Thomson, Toshiba, and Victor Company of Japan (JVC).
So, all those countries where those companies are based will have issues distributing H.264. This is not just a US problem. They should really push Theora IMO.
Here the looser are Opera & Firefox who cannot buy h.264 for economic & principle reason. But the deciders are Google & Apple, because Google has largest video service called YouTube and other has iPhone.
Google & Apple are saying that no one has comfirmed that Theora has not violated any patent, so it is risk. I buy their arguments, Atleast the H.624 is being there in the market for many years prominently and someone would have sued if it has violated any patent.
For me the best solution would be all the rich companies like Microsoft, Google , Apple, IBM, Oracle, etc. should come forward buy the H.624 license and make if royalty free. H.624 research department should also get money for their investment/research.
Google hasn’t said anything about patents for Theora, they wouldn’t include it in their browser if they did. Their concerns have been about performance and since the iphone only supports h.264 with hardware acceleration, that limits their options considerably. I mean if they went with Theora they would have to still keep Flash for IE users, give iphone users h.264, and everyone else Theora. I’m sure they are not envious of this outcome. So would greatly prefer to just stick to flash and h.264, which is pretty much the status quo, upgrading to html5 is just a coding issue then, no backend changes needed. Apple is the one refusing to include Theora for patent reasons.
Can we blame them? If they develop something themselves that infringes someone else’s patents and decide to use it they take that risk themselves (I can feel a Nokia reply coming on here), but why should they include something like Theora that is developed by someone else, IS NOT A RECOGNISED STANDARD and has no determination regarding possible patent infringements?
I don’t get the patent argument at all. Couldn’t H.264 have unknown patents too? I think their argument about hardware acceleration is perfectly valid, but the patent thing is just silly.
Well h.264 has the mpeg-la patent pool behind it, A bunch of multimedia companies who pool all their patents related to h.264 together to decrease chance of anyone being able to bust it. Here is a list of all the companies in the mpeg-la
Apple Inc, DAEWOO Electronics Corporation, Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, France Télécom,Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung, Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi, Koninklijke Philips Electronics, LG Electronics, Microsoft Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, NTT DOCOMO, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation ,Panasonic Corporation, Robert Bosch GmbH, Samsung Electronics Co, Scientific-Atlanta Vancouver Company, Sedna Patent Services, LLC ,Sharp Corporation, Siemens AG, Sony Corporation, The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, Toshiba Corporation, Victor Company of Japan.
Anyone one challenging a h.264 would be challenging all of these guys, all of whom have their own substantial patent arsenals to counter-sue with. Theora has no such patent pool behind it.
Okay, thanks. That makes a lot more sense now. However, it’s just more proof that the patent system is a piece of junk…
Well, there is a patent specifically for the VP3 codec upon which Theora is based. Xiph.org have an irrevocable license for developing VP3 into a codec and then distributing the resulting work under any license which Xiph.org please.
http://www.theora.org/faq/#24
It is interesting to see the list of companies that have a vested interest in pushing the h264 codec for use on the web, and in particular the companies that I have bolded. I wouldn’t mind having a look for any software companies that refuse to support the free Theora/Vorbis codecs on their systems, and seeing if there is any corrrelation here!
I note that Nokia and Google, two large companies that are involved with web-connected technologies, are not on this list, along with Mozilla. Interestingly, there are an estimated 6.8 billion people who are also not on the list.
In any actual vote, the cost reductions for the larger 6.8 billion-strong group far, far outweigh the profit self-interests of the first group, I would have thought.
Edited 2010-01-25 07:44 UTC
Safari delegates all <video> requests to QuickTime. If Xiph or anybody else just upgrades the QT Components http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/ to handle streams, Safari would play Theora streams without problems.