Comments on: “Get with the program”

By: Anon

Anon — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:17:23 +0000

It is worth noting that the version of Chromium distributed by the Ubuntu PPA does not ship with H264 support. It is unlikely that the big community distributions (Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora) would ship Chromium with its H264 support enabled out of the box (not that this is a significant market share). As for codec bundling with browsers: this is quite a popular choice for cross platform browsers. Firefox (via libogg), Opera (via GStreamer on OSX and Windows) and Chromium (via ffmpeg) all bundle codecs. It could even be argued that Safari on Windows does something similar by using QuickTime...

By: scott

scott — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 14:50:44 +0000

The most glossed-over fact in this debate is that there is no hardware support for Theora. Apple supports H.264 because they will not let precious (mobile) CPU cycles be wasted decoding a video format just because it’s “free” when it could be done on the GPU at a fraction of time/power. Many more users care about battery life than software freedom.

Theora supporters, put your money where your mouth and implement a theora decoder in hardware. Then get the big semiconductor companies to buy your design, then bemoan Apple and Google for not supporting Theora.

Until then, get off your high horse and realize there’s more to the story than “free” vs. “closed”.

By: Mikkel Høgh

Mikkel Høgh — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 13:20:09 +0000

Like James, I think it’s Mozilla that needs to get with the program here. If they can’t afford to pay the H.264 license, they should at the very least make the codecs pluggable, so those that need not/do not care about software patents could get it easily, instead of having to switch browsers to watch video.

Let’s face it. Ogg Theora is a nice codec, but H.264 is better in almost every way and almost universally supported. And it has very good open source implementations, too. I don’t think Mozilla should be holding back the web from getting rid of Flash on the basis of some ideological argument that this other codec is free-er.

By: James

James — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:57:15 +0000

So what you’re actually saying is the United States needs to get with the program.

Why should the rest of the world care because you’ve painted yourselves into a patent corner.

If you really care so much, just ship the DLLs for H.264 from European servers as a once-off at startup of Firefox, or first time you try to play H.264 content.

Problem solved.

I don’t hold out any hope for Mozilla Foundation to get head out of ass any time soon though.

By: Mogden

Mogden — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:25:44 +0000

On the other hand, Apple is afraid to use Ogg due to patent concerns as well. They can’t research whether it infringes, or they might discover that they are infringing in some other way. They have deep pockets compared to Mozilla so they would be targeted in a way that Firefox would not. Sucks.

By: Anon E Moose

Anon E Moose — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 02:17:35 +0000

Building codecs into the browser is insane. What happens when someone comes out with a better free codec? Under the Apple/Google approach, you would install the new codec on your system, and then you could view websites that use it. Under the Mozilla approach, you’d have to wait for Mozilla to decide to build the new codec into the browser.

By: ojetroni

ojetroni — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:54:30 +0000

Just accepting “H.264 is patented, we can’t use it, besides the patent being unfair and the implementation being fully fair and open source” is very disgusting. H.264 has a really good technical quality, and very good open source implementations, so this patent thing is very sad.

I think the way to go is to fight software patents, not asking everyone to use an algorithm unencumbered by patents, even because it may be encumbered without someone knowing it, because of the patent system nature.

The way to go while software patents persist in the US is perhaps to use a source-based distro. Source code is free speech and can be distributed unrestricted.

By: Hogart

Hogart — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:24:19 +0000

Monty’s right, ultimately Google and Apple can afford the licensing. And apparently, it costs less to them than the endeavor of shifting their content to Ogg/Theora. Despite our personal feelings about this situation, it’s obvious that entities like Google have an incentive to upsell h264 and ignore our idealism. Patents and freedom have nothing to do with this, really. And unfortunately, Mozilla and Opera (among others) will have no choice but to buckle under unless a miracle occurs, or simply suck it up and risk losing market share.

By: mayly

mayly — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:19:21 +0000

Adopt a Theora Video

As you may have noticed Youtube and Vimeo have started experimental HTML5 video support. Right now they are using the H.264 video format since this is what they already have.

By my personal interest to make an open and free video format de-facto used and support Mozilla’s and Opera’s aim to make these available for everyone, I propose to start an adopt a Theora video campaign.

It is that simple: Just embed a Theora video of your choice on your homepage or soup – e.g. from TinyVid – and add some information about how to play it like installing the XiphQt extension (for Safari/QuickTime) or a Theora-supporting browser. Also there is the Cortado-Applet available, which is a usable fallback.

It would be pretty nice if someone, who likes this idea, could create a template for this. ;)

By: Monty

Monty — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:49:50 +0000

Licensing fees are not trivial things. Blizzard has mentioned in the past that shipping just mp3 decode in FF would cost Mozilla around $500,000 per day just for the license. h.264 is considerably more expensive on all of the MPEG-LA’s licensing charts.

Sure talk about freedom all you want, but that’s an awful lot of ‘cold hard cash’ incentive.