Questioning Mozilla's Plans For HTML5 Video 242
AberBeta writes with this excerpt from OSNews:
"We're on the verge of a serious evolution on the web. Right now, the common way to include video on the web is by use of Flash, a closed-source technology. The answer to this is the HTML5 video tag, which allows you to embed video into HTML pages without the use of Flash or any other non-HTML technology; combined with open video codecs, this could provide the perfect opportunity to further open up and standardize the web. Sadly, not even Mozilla itself really seems to understand what it is supposed to do with the video tag, and actually advocates the use of JavaScript to implement it. Kroc Camen, OSNews editor, is very involved in making/keeping the web open, and has written an open letter to Mozilla in which he urges them not to use JavaScript for HTML video."
HTML is dead... Didn't you notice? (Score:2, Interesting)
Our browsers are javascript virtual machines. The web is now being delivered through javascript and not in any meaningful way through HTML.
Re:Waiting (Score:3, Interesting)
Javascript is a cool language. I've written more than a couple of browser extensions and intranet apps with it in my time and I'm one of those people that disables javascript for browsing the public internet. I consider running random 3rd party code to be an outright security hole, some people are willing to sacrifice security for the bells and whistles but only a complete moron disagrees with the premise.
You can probably guess that I personally am going to disable the HTML5 A/V elements and continue downloading video manually. That aside, browser based audio/video should provide basic playback functionality for the user without javascript enabled. The functionality should also be easily disabled or switched into "prompt to download" mode and finally, I don't want to use GStreamer for anything... ever...
Re:Video tag (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of video producers like to rely on the fact that Flash makes it difficult to download videos to your hard drive. I wonder how they'd react if a major online video provider were to provide its content through a less restrictive method such as the video tag.
I think that's rather simple. The video tag would only be popular with free and amateur content. Flash (or Silverlight) solutions will continue to dominate the more popular commercial comment that needs to be protected. If videos were trapped behind theora playlists with commercials in-between, advocates would make solutions to circumvent the commercials and demonetize the model of the very companies who took the risk to support it.
Basically, any major media company that buys into HTML 5 video tag will be strangled by the advocates who pushed it on them in the first place, monetarily. When the production studios offering the content find out that a free video application that plays their content without commercials (hypothetically) exists, they will pull out and said video site will collapse. Colloquially, it's a trap. Commercial content needs protection because those watching it on the web do not own it.
Furthermore, there will be a minor codec war. Firefox will probably only support theora, Safari will only use h.264 (Apple will flatly refuse to use theora), same for google chrome, perhaps. Then, Microsoft will support the tag in IE, but provide support for WMV in the video tag (and possibly h.264 if we're lucky, since it's now licensed in Windows 7). So, the video tag will slowly become just as crazy as the plugin-based video players of Web 1.0... except they will be written in slow javascript instead of the fast native code of the past. Primarily, because no one has agreed on how to do it so it isn't a standard.
Re:Waiting (Score:3, Interesting)
Javascript is MISUSED a lot, but hell, so is C.
Re:I thought DRM was the issue (Score:4, Interesting)
My understanding is that the reason that people use flash and silverlight for video is so that people cannot save, reuse, and redistribute the content.
I've run across very few streamed videos that can't be downloaded. In the olden days I'd use something like WireShark or Network Monitor to get the URL of the content. Nowadays it's much easier with various Firefox extensions.
As far as I know, the reason most sites use Flash or whatnot is because they want the video to be streamable and start more or less instantly. In modern Western society, if you can't start watching the video immediately, how likely are you going to be to remember to watch it after it's downloaded 15-30 minutes (or more) later? The whole (business) idea is to keep peoples' attention, like with television. If they "switch channels", you've lost your advertising opportunity.
Re:Video tag (Score:0, Interesting)
The key is Google/Youtube (Score:2, Interesting)
If we can get Google to go along with Theora, we'd be all set.
Youtube is the only reason I have Flash. I avoid "Porntube" type sites because of the security vulnerabilities found in Flash.
Re:Eyes wide shut (Score:3, Interesting)
If I download an .flv and play it in mplayer the problems disappear.
Well what I do is start the stream and then pause it. Go to the dir where firefox saves its current streamed content (/tmp) and play the stream in mplayer there. Works perfectly even as the file is streaming . . . no jumps, no jitters, no CPU overload.
Re:Eyes wide shut (Score:1, Interesting)
Does Flash ever bother using the hardware (mostly, overlays) for showing video? As far as I can tell, it doesn't...
... And the same applies for the Mozilla <video> implementation. Watching their demo videos were always hilariously slow - slower, in fact, than Flash video.
Minefield m-c / win32
Re:Plugins are Still the Answer (Score:2, Interesting)
That is what we have codecs for..
But then who provides implementations of codecs for every combination of CPU, operating system, and browser?
Re:Everyone using Firefox 3.5, see this (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not so much that spinning videos are "good", but more as a demo as to how you can manipulate video.
Just think several years into the future, you can have a pseudo 3D environment (think VRML, but better) in a browser that can have angled videos playing.
It is about being able to bend, twist and twirl videos in any way you want.
And being able to detect those positions for things like simple object detection led to an awesome demonstration that i can't find... (it was the guy waving iPhones around and it was placing dynamic content and scaling them)
Re:Plugins are Still the Answer (Score:2, Interesting)
So plugins are always cross-platform now?!
They have to be provided for each platform, or they won't come into wide use.
Misinterpretation (Score:4, Interesting)
and actually advocates the use of JavaScript to implement it.
The writer of that linked piece makes it pretty obvious his goal is for the video to work for everyone - and the javascript code is therefore used to basically find a method the current user's browser can support without it being obvious to the user (e.g. not forcing the end user to download the video and view it in a separate player, which the OSNews letter seems to want to push on the user).
In other words, he's thinking about the user's experience first.
The author of the submitted story, on the other hand - as with the one from a few days ago that lamented Chrome's lack of purity regarding HTML5 video support - is more interested in Ogg zealotry. That's fine, if it floats your boat - but let's not dance around and obfuscate this. Make it very clear you want the Ogg format used - and ONLY the Ogg format used. Then the rest of the world (outside of Slashdot) can choose to continue ignoring you, just like it's been doing for the past few years.
Re:Windows N versions; Linux other than x86 (Score:1, Interesting)
And how are you sure that Linux has all the codecs available even on CPU architectures other than x86, such as those used in PowerPC-based set-top boxes or ARM-based handhelds?
According to gentoo-portage both ffmpeg and gstreamer work on tons of platforms, including arm and power pc. On portables you'd usually expect the software to undergo a certain amount of customisation to suit the hardware. Video decoding is frequently moved to a dedicated low-power chip on these architectures.
But if the operator of a web site resides in the United States, and he recommends the use of software whose use in the United States would infringe a patent, MPEG-LA could make a case against him for contributory patent infringement.
Firstly, I should clarify that although h264 is my fist choice, I do not think it should be used exclusively. The point of using the platform's built in codec support would be to allow the borwser to play everything that gets thrown at it (moreso on Linux than say Windows).
Secondly, I doubt that supplying a video and assuming that the user will invest in software to play it legally would be illegal. There are a lot of music sites that sell mp3s (also a patented format), none of them check that the user has a patent license.
Re:Really... (Score:4, Interesting)
What you're saying is HTML is going to add the ability to do what people have been doing for 5 yrs with Flash.
No, what we're saying is that video is going to become a first-class Web citizen that can interact with the rest of Web content in ways that Web developers want. Flash's video is locked inside the plug-in prison and cannot be well integrated with non-flash (real Web) content. Bringing video (and audio) to HTML means that real Web content like other HTML, JavaScript, SVG, CSS, etc. can interact with video and improve on what people have been doing for 5 years with Flash.
Re:Waiting (Score:3, Interesting)
This has nothing to do with HTML 5 or the video tag. The javascript is used to create a fallback path for users who don't have a particular codec installed. It is not compulsory. Most linux machines install ogg theora with a media player package anyway, it's the rest of the world that need to download it.
<video> support in all browsers is cross-platform (except Chrome, which AFAIK doesn't support audio/video yet except on Windows, but that's an omission they're working on fixing). The browser doesn't have to rely on system libraries for decoding Theora any more than for decoding JPEG. Firefox 3.5 or recent Chrome supports Theora on Windows just as well as Linux. Better in Chrome's case for now, as noted.
Re:H.264 H.263 (Score:3, Interesting)
Theora is over a decade old; it definately can beat H.264 in software decoding.
But if you didn't see this:
http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare [live.com]
As for "if it was good enough in the past..." rule, most web video gets reecoded every 18-24 months to take advantage of more efficient codecs to improve qulaity or reduce bitrates. For real businesses counting.
I recommend people don't focus on YouTube too much as an example of the web video industry. It's very much an anomly in both business model and particualr being subsidized by Google at such a sceale and getting access to Google's very cheap bandwidth. Also, Most YouTube clips aren't watched even a dozen time, so the cost of encoding time can be bigger than the cost of delivering the bits, so they don't tune their encodes for maximum efficiency, but for rapid transcoding.
YouTube does plenty of things that wouldn't make sense for anyone else. They're not really an example of much beyond YouTube.
Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice? (Score:2, Interesting)
HTML is the content, CSS is the way to display the HTML content and Javascript is the way to interact with it all.
My buzzwordy description for this is Data-Presentation-Mechanics. It's much like the programmer model of Model-View-Controller only applied at a different abstraction level. I believe HTML is near a dead-end now anyways. A proper browser supporting XML (and the related XLink, XForms, etc.) could accomplish anything HTML currently can do, with the added benefit that your (XML) data can speak for itself! Continue to use CSS for styling though, as XSL-FO is too complex for me to support right now. Use XSLT to do data tree transformations if necessary. Add an ECMAScript engine for interactivity. <shameless-plug>i'm writing an XML browser in Java [surfninja.org] to do all this, using existing open-source frameworks where possible</shameless-plug>
Data -> XML
Presentation -> CSS
Mechanics -> XLink, XForms, JavaScript