Ogg Theora, H.264 and the HTML 5 Browser Squabble - Page 4

How many of these are replacement units for defect/dated models? How many can actually play H.264 videos for real (storage space, sufficient bandwidth, processing power etc.)? What profiles are supported? And how does this compare to over 1 billion desktop users?


I should try this with my next term paper. Instead of adding footnotes and a bibliography I'll just add "Go read it up in the library yourself if you need proof!". But I forgot, this is the Internet where it's obviously the responsibility of the reader to look up numbers instead of the one doing claims providing them. \


I'm sure the DS can download and play H.264 or Theora files with no problem.

Fair point...


Citation please!

How exactly?

This is incredibly weak. First, I'd like to know what "any other format" refers to, because if you want your image to display across browsers there IS no other format. And the fact that PNG is mentioned is ironic. PNG was released in 1996 and was meant to be a patent-free format, like Theora. IF the W3C had had the same influence back then that it does today, and IF they had made PNG support part of the image specification ... well, the work of a web developer would be far easier today. PNG's are superior to GIFs in every way, yet if you look around on the web you still see GIFs everywhere. That's because IE6 still has significant market share, so we can't just use PNG's with abandon. Also, if you remember, for a long time GIF was also patent-encumbered so free software couldn't legally produce them.

Seems like the author doesn't mind going through that whole mess again.

I'll give you that the Theora codec is inferior. But to me that doesn't mean we take it out of the specification. It just means we take some time to make it better. Meanwhile, the YouTubes of the world can do whatever they need to make their service work. They can take advantage of HTML 5 without being 100% standards-compliant. Or does the idea of an "official codec" mean that no other codecs are allowed?

While I'm generally sympathetic to both sides of this argument, I don't think x264 solves any of the real licensing issues. x264 is GPL, not LGPL, so it can only be linked with products that are also GPL. That means no Apache or BSD style licensing. Only supporting GPL licensing would too restrictive for Firefox.

Secondly, x264 falling under the GPL doesn't obviate the need for H.264 licensing if you ship a product containing x264 in the United States. While the existence of x264 is helpful, it doesn't solve anything for Firefox generally.

Did you click the link? No? FAIL.

The numbers are all from the top links. Specifically the Gartner ones...so the mobile market is growing by a significant percentage AND the increases are measured in the millions. A direct refutation of your assertion that the increase is due to the smallness of the market.

In 2008 worldwide smartphone growth was 13%, worldwide PC growth was 13.7%. In the US smartphone growth was up 106%, while US PC sales growth was flat.

2009 worldwide smartphone sales are estimated to grow 17%. While PC sales are estimated to grow 9%.

Personal computer market is extremely mature at this point. There aren't very many people left to sell a new computer to. The far majority of computer sales are replacement.

While smartphone is a relatively new market with a huge potential for growth.

Most people don't have smartphones, so a large number of sales are to people who have never owned one. The absolute reverse situation for computers, the far majority of computer sales are replacements.

At this point it would be difficult to impossible to successfully sell a new mobile device that cannot play h.246. What do the profiles matter?

I did not say there are as many smartphone users as there are computer users, I said smartphone sales are growing faster than computer sales. Yes at some point in the near future there will be more smartphone users than computer users. The mobile device will become the most common way to access the Internet.



Not without hardware acceloration for Theora.

Several commenters have criticised Mozilla without getting to the crux of the matter.

Mozilla Firefox is open source and distributed under the GNU General Public License. The GPL says you have to include patent rights to redistributors when you ship the software, and Mozilla will not be able to get a license for H.264 which allows them to do that. In theory, they could hook into the native APIs on each platform, but in practice that will be a slow, unreliable and ugly solution that negates most of the advantages of the video tag over embed, would be against their "open web" principles, and weaken their position in the market by ensuring that their browser performs worse than others. Firefox has the 2nd largest market-share of any browser (25-35%), so no format will become standardised any-time soon without Firefox support.

As it is, if Microsoft implement Ogg Theora, it's game over and Theora wins, since IE and Firefox have 90%+ of the browser market between them. If Microsoft implement H.264, it's likely (but not certain) that the status quo will remain and we're stuck with Flash. What they're most likely to do is not implement anything and then we're stuck with Flash for most practical purposes for the foreseeable future.

The issue is similar to that with @font-face and EOT, only @font-face has the additional complexity involved of having to deal with the type foundries as well.

N.B. I'm deliberately not replying to the original article.

Uh, Apple and Google seem to be able to offer their browsers with H.264 capabilities on Macs, Windows, and Linux (for Google Chrome) just fine, so I fail to see how this argument is valid at all. So you're saying what Firefox does to copy what Apple and Google are already doing (their browsers are taking advantage of the OS's codecs) is somehow going to make their browser worse? Call me crazy, but I think you're being a little contradictory here.

As I understand it, if Mozilla wants to include the H.264 in Firefox theyll have to pay for that privilege, which is why they want to go with Ogg, which is free. Google and Apple are paying for the licensing.

Mozilla could easily afford the H.264 will all the money Google is paying them, at least for Firefox. They chose back Theora instead because it is free not only in the commercial sense but also from an licensing point of view. H.264 can't ever be part of HTML 5 anyway as W3C policies forbid recommendation of such a patent-laden codec.

The W3 has a planned meeting to address the Audio/Video November 1, 2009, Stanford University.

http://www.w3.org/2009/09/acc-media-html-gathering.html

I've only skimmed over a text (I'll read it more thoroughly tomorrow) but it makes the impression that they will discuss accessibility implications and not codecs. Anyway, Apple and Microsoft will never concede to using a codec other than H.264 and VC-1 respectively and the W3C can't recommend a patent-laden codec without changing their statutes/abandoning core principles. I don't really expect that their will be a solution on a committee level. My guess: All relevant stakeholders will try to create facts by pushing their respective technological choice and hope that sheer market dominance will force adoption even by unwilling parties. Good for Adobe, I guess.

Both. The codecs for VIDEO/AUDIO have to conform to accessibility requirements.

This is very informative. I'm going to share this with everyone.

David
Optimum Productions

I'm very shocked to know that Mozilla gets 50 million dollars a year, not even tiny amount of that money has been used on developing a video delivery plug-in , while html5 is good, the sad fact is there is no full screen support yes i do know there is actually full screen support but its not included on default the reason is simple the web-kit is slow in supporting theora inside the browser, the test i done on Firefox 3.6/11 with a sampled HD video encoded with theora showed to be very choppy and playback was terrible, this was done on a modern laptop with enough speed and memory to run HD videos inside the browser, but I'm disappointed at Mozilla because they are getting fat and doing absolute nothing in promoting theora streaming.

what Mozilla should have done, is taken Videolans browser plug-in code and created a plugin which integrates into Firefox so it supports videos natively, why Mozilla have not done this already ? is a question i really do not like to know because i see Mozilla same as Internet explorer and that aids infested Steve jobs for not supporting theora.

anyways here I'm releasing a video plug-in which works on all modern browsers and supported on windows and Linux operating system, yes even the apple macs are supported, this plug-in will only stream theora encoded videos

http://screenr.com/wqD

check my site for demo of player and sdk, and plug-in installer
www.33t.co.cc

33tlabs
Alexander A and yes I believe in Open-source advocacy

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