Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs 640
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by
timothy
from the that's-a-disappointment dept.
from the that's-a-disappointment dept.
snydeq writes "Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>."
Re:Apple's concern (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Informative)
Not only that, but Java IS fully open source.
Simple (Score:4, Informative)
They don't know who to pay.
Re:Who cares about Apple's browser? (Score:2, Informative)
First...
Have you even *used* Safari, Webkit, or any Webkit derived browsers?
Why would they care what Apple/Webkit supports? Um, besides the fact that 65% of mobile browsing is currently with a Webkit based browser, golly, I can't think of any.
Someone please mod this idiot Troll.
Second...
But, I agree with others ... that they shouldn't care what *any* browsers currently support. Make it part of the spec and the users will decide. FireFox users will use ogg, Webkit based browsers will use h.264... I really don't see the issue here.
Seems to be more of a 'if you won't play my game, we just won't play ... I'm taking my ball and going home' behavior that really isn't helping the situation to me...
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:3, Informative)
But Mozilla already have supported it with Firefox 3.5??
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Fire fox should support ogg (Score:3, Informative)
This is essentially what is happening. FF3.5 shipped with support for Theora.
Video For Everybody- a javascript free tag (Score:5, Informative)
You can still make use of the tag in a cross platform way. Video For Everybody [camendesign.com] Is a simple set of code that uses the video tag with only two input files - an ogg and an mp4 - and lets the tag work for, well, everyone. IE6? Check. Safari? Check. iPhone? Yep.
It falls back to whatever method works for playback - including using Flash to play the h.264 if it needs to.
It's pretty funny to see so many people bitching about Apple not supporting ogg when Microsoft ignores the tag altogether. Everyone, start supporting the video tag today as widespread use is the only way to get big companies to fully adopt it - perhaps that will motivate Apple to someday support ogg.
Nothing but hot and smelly air (Score:2, Informative)
what they did, is just one brain fart out of this quote from:
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020620.html [whatwg.org]
"I considered requiring Ogg Theora support in the spec, since we do have
three implementations that are willing to implement it, but it wouldn't
help get us true interoperabiliy, since the people who are willing to
implement it are willing to do so regardless of the spec, and the people
who aren't are not going to be swayed by what the spec says."
There's no word about "cutting theora" just considerations that some companies won't comply with the spec.
But I guess this is somehow normal with new specs...
Re:Apple does not seem to want to update QuickTime (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:5, Informative)
> The W3C needs to ignore everyone and push forward with Ogg support in the spec
As much as I'd like Ogg Theora support all around, doing what you propose just leads to a useless spec (useless because implementors don't actually follow it, so you can't rely on using it).
> work with Nvidia and ATI and Intel, etc. to get h/w support for Ogg.
The issue is hardware support in the form of ASICs for decoding theora; none of the companies you mentioned are relevant to that. The hardware issue is on cell phones and the like, not desktops, in case you missed that.
The problem might be worked around somewhat by using DSPs and software decoding optimized for those DSPs, but that's not quite clear.
> my iRiver H10 mp3 player had Ogg support
Ogg Vorbis, not Ogg Theora. There's a huge difference in terms of computational complexity.
You seem to be somewhat confused about what Ogg is. It's just a container format. For a real life analogy, think shipping containers. They come in a small number of shapes and sizes, but each one can contain anything from lots of barbie dolls to lots of sewing needles to a single chunk of industrial machinery. Just because you have someone (say a toy store) who knows how to open a container and then sell the barbie dolls they find therein doesn't mean that person will be able to to open that same container and then make effective use of the industrial machinery or sewing needles inside. The situation with container formats and codecs is quite similar.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Informative)
You do know that almost everyone without an iPhone can still access the web in much the sme ways as people with an iPhone.....right?? They use a web browser, of which there are many. One of the most popular being Opera Mini.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:2, Informative)
You must not use many open source projects or have a different definition for "partially done". Hell, almost any Windows project is partially done at best.
I'll give you an example of where open source isn't just "done" but better. Final Draft is script/screenplay writing software that costs in the hundreds of dollars and everyone seems to use it; that is until Celtx came along which is not only partially done but surpasses the functionality and usability of Final Draft. Now Final Draft are going to have to start fighting to keep their outdated business model because they couldn't keep up.
Then there's Firefox, Pidgin(a great Trillian replacement), NX....
Re:In other words, it's Apple-baw (Score:4, Informative)
Except it isn't just Apple blocking it. Nokia also sided against Ogg Theora, but then I guess that wouldn't be sensationalist enough for the /. crowd.
Neither is h.264 Apple's codec. apart from patents apples only other contribution was to give the MPEG group the MOV container for use as the MP4 container file format.
Re:Video was bait anyway (Score:2, Informative)
In a way, that's what's happening. Vendors are flat-out declaring they will not cooperate on open-source unpatented web code. What's getting dropped here is not just HTML5 but the W3C's reason for existence, and thus the document neutrality of the Web. This is a bad day.
Re:Fuck Apple too... (Score:1, Informative)
It's got nothing (or only slightly) to do with fear of submarine patents in ogg. H.264 still could have submarine patents anyway.
While I don't know for sure, I believe that the H.264 licensing authority indemnifies licensees against third-party patent lawsuits over use of the codec. There's no such organization for Theora.
I don't want to guess how much of Apple's decision actually is based on patent worries, but the submarine patent situation between H.264 and Theora is pretty darn different for implementers (if I'm right).
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Informative)
Opera mini isn't a web browser; it's a java-based image viewer displaying pre-rendered content from opera's caching proxies. It's designed for phones that can't handle a real web browser. Are you sure you want video with that?
If you look at actual mobile web usage [hitslink.com], iPhone/iPod touch is at 64%. Nobody else comes close, though Android (also webkit) will likely see an increased presence in the future.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Informative)
H.264 Theora: a demo (Score:5, Informative)
Ignoring the tremendous improvements in the Thusnelda branch, if YouTube suddenly switched from severe H.26whatever overcompression to stock Theora with optimal settings (and everyone had libtheora and HTML 5 browsers), no one would notice the difference.
Untrue. Xiph has made heroic progress with Theora, but it's still a decade-old codec design and bitstream, and it's hard to imagine it catching up with xvid, let alone a good H.264 implementation.
YouTube certainly has quality issues, but things can be bad in more than one way at a time. There's nothing that less efficient codec would help them with. Note their top bitrate is 1280x720p30 at 2 Mbps.
Some samples compared Xiph's latest demo clips, with the same source encoded with VC-1 and x264 are here:
http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare [live.com]
x264 can do 640x352 with higher per pixel-quality than Theora can do at 400x224 at the same bitrate.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Informative)
There are really only two significant video formats today for web streaming: Mpeg4/H.264 with MP3 or AAC audio is technically superior; Ogg/Theora with Vorbis audio is freer.
Ogg use on the internet is a rounding error at best; RealMedia still gets more use (very popular in internet cafes in China for some reason).
The three primary media formats/codecs are MPEG-4 + H.264 (QuickTime, plus Flash and soon Silverlight 3 via progressive download), RTMPe + H.264 (Flash uses MPEG-4 files but a propritary protocol), and Windows Media + VC-1. Move Networks + VP7 (ala ABC.com) also pulls in million of eyeball/hours a month, certainly more than Ogg at this point.
I'd say Ogg is #5 at best today. #6 if you count torrents and hence MPEG-4 part 2.
As for Microsoft support, that's becoming pretty codec neutral. Silverlight 3 (currently in beta) supports both H.264 and has a Raw AV pipeline allowing arbitrary codecs in managed code to be added to any Silverlight player. So adding Theora/Vorbis or any other codec, format, and protocol can be done inside the Silverlight sandbox by any third party.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:2, Informative)
Have you been to YouTube recently? YouTube doesn't seem to give the slightest care about video quality.
First, have you been to YouTube lately? Have you noticed how they've added high(er) quality versions of many videos? Why would they do that if they didn't care about quality? Hell, some videos have an "HD" option.
Secondly, pretend your parent said "quality per bandwidth". Because bandwidth use is something that Google definitely does care about.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with standards is that if you leave too much open to "interpretation" you get a mess of incompatibilities. I'm a firm believer that standards organizations need to make the truly important parts of the spec completely mandatory, i.e., if you don't support <video> and all the listed codecs, you can't claim HTML5 compatibility.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:1, Informative)
We're talking about the quality : bitrate ratio here and h264 is clearly better.
Incidentally, try clicking that HQ button and then fullscreening a video on youtube some time, you might be surprised.
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:2, Informative)
A) refusing to implement because there are sound engineering reasons not to do so
Tick -- no smart phone vendor can implement ogg theora -- there's no hardware support for it. Even ignoring the submarine patent risk, and the fact that it's worse quality than h.264.
There really isn't any of B going on here. h.264 may be somewhat proprietry, but it's already cheeply licensed, and it's *everywhere*. Movies bought off the internet are more often than not h.264, bluray disks are more often than not h.264, even high def pirated torrents are more often than not... you guessed it... h.264. When was the last time you saw an ogg theora video that didn't involve a bunny rabbit?
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, Google is also refusing to switch YouTube to Ogg because of its lower quality per bitrate than h.264.
No, it is not. There has been no official statement from the YouTube team saying that. There's been one off-the-cuff statement to that effect by Chris DiBona, who is the open-source program manager at Google and does not work with YouTube (AFAICT). Subsequent requests for clarification failed to elicit any official statement. Peter Kasting of the Chrome team stated [whatwg.org]:
This is a quote from an actual Google employee, who incidentally happens to work on their browser and quite possibly knows their exact reasons for supporting both Theora and H.264.
Could people please stop spreading the misinformation that Google/YouTube believes that they can't use Theora because of its bitrate? It's completely unsubstantiated. Period.
Re:What HTML 5 should have been (Score:5, Informative)
Valid XML, all the time. Require that the tags balance, as in XHTML. This will make the document tree well-defined, which, at the moment, it is not. So all software that works on the DOM will behave consistently.
You're wrong. The document tree is well-defined in HTML 5. You don't need XML, you just need to follow the HTML spec. Of course, we can't force people to follow the spec, and the Web is currently full of non-conforming pages that include half-assed attempts at using bits and pieces of XHTML mixed with HTML. XHTML doesn't make anything better.
Errors put the browser in "dumb rendering" mode. Rather than a "best effort" approach, browsers should, upon detecting a serious error in the input, drop to "dumb mode" - default font, default colors, etc., after displaying an error message. Much of the incompatibility between browsers comes from inconsistent handling of bad HTML. So there should be a penalty, but not a fatal one, for bad code.
You're wrong. If your browser does this, users will use some other browser (regardless of whether it conforms to the HTML5 spec or not, because users don't care about that). You're right that broken code is a problem, but HTML5 addresses this by more clearly defining how broken code should be handled, so that all browsers can try to render even bad code in a consistent and compatible way.
No more upper code pages. The only valid character sets should be Unicode, or ASCII with HTML escapes. Chars above 127 in ASCII mode are to be rendered as a black dot or square. No more "Latin-1", or the pre-Unicode encodings of Han or Korean. So all pages will render in all browsers, provided only that they have some full Unicode font.
You're wrong. If you make a browser that doesn't support these other character sets, users will choose something else (see above). Of course everybody should be using UTF-8 these days, but we can't force them to.
Downloadable fonts. Netscape used to have downloadable fonts. The font makers bitched. Bring that feature back, despite the whining. No more having to express fonts as images.
It's back [alistapart.com], but in CSS, not HTML.
WebForms. Get the WebForms proposal back on track. Any needed processing for input should be do-able without Javascript.
HTML5 includes Web Forms 2.
2D layout The "div"/"clear" model of layout was a flop. Horrors of Javascript are needed just to make columns balance. Absolute positioning is overused as a workaround for the limits of "div"/"clear". (Text on top of text happens all too often.) Tables were actually a better layout tool, because they're a 2D system. HTML needs a 2D layout model that can't accidentally result in overlaps. There are plenty of those around; most window managers have one. There's been a quiet move back to tables for layout, but people are embarrassed to admit it.
CSS layout has some problems. Balanced columns is certainly one of them (although tables certainly doesn't fix that). They're working on it, but this can be addressed by improving CSS, outside of HTML.
Better parallelism. Pages must do their initial render without "document.write()". Forcing sequentiality during initial page load should be considered an error. This will make pages load faster. Some ad code will have to be rewritten.
I'm not sure what you're talking about exactly, but this sounds like a JavaScript implementation issue and not an HTML issue at all.
Re:W3C doesn't say which image formats are allowed (Score:4, Informative)
From the HTML5 spec [w3.org]:
"This specification does not specify which image types are to be supported."
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Informative)
Precisely. That's why you say "if you don't do X, Y, and Z, you can't say you're compliant with the spec." Sun does this all the time to Java EE appserver vendors and what do you know? They all implement the specs fully (with the inevitable bugs of course).
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:2, Informative)
There are people running browsers that can't display images at *all*. What's your point?
Re:H.264 Theora: a demo (Score:3, Informative)
Does Ogg even have hardware acceleration at this point?
Nope. I don't know if anyone's even scoped a hardware implementation of VP3. There have been some VP6/7 DSP implementations, but no ASIC ones (ASIC have better power consumption).
Now, Theora is a pretty simple codec, so doing it in hardware would be a lot simpler than H.264 and probably simpler than VC-1. But it can take quite a few engineering years to refine a decoder for performant playback.
Of couree, performance isn't just the video decoder. It's the video and the audio decoder, and the whole pipeline to make sure you get smooth in-sync playback. Media pipelines are really hard, particularly if you're trying to implement them as part of a browser rendering model that never had to worry about timestamps, decoder buffers, etcetera.
Re:H.264 Theora: a demo (Score:3, Informative)
What are your mobile devices, and what's your media player? All the current ones that are meant for media playback include H.264 ASICs. And those are getting crazy good; the Zune HD's going to support 720p HD playback using the NVidia Tegra.
Lacking an ASIC, any Theora on devices would need to be done in sofware, and even a simple codec can be extremely taxing on a 400-600 MHz ARM. Even if it's playable it's going to eat battery like no tomorrow. I can imagine a really good implementation being able to maybe do 320x240 30p 500 Kbps Theora in software on a 600 MHz ARM, but that'd require a whole lot of tuning.
The VP3 bitstream predates device media, so I doubt it has any particular design tuning for them. It's very much a codec designed for x86, with a PPC port.
Re:H.264 Theora: a demo (Score:2, Informative)
Using mplayer, h264 will eat almost exactly twice the CPU time that theora uses with similarly encoded files.
Also, about the battery life -- I can get about 5-6 hours of playback time decoding purely on the CPU with an Atom N280. That's certainly not "eating up battery like no tomorrow."
Re:In other words, it's Apple-baw (Score:2, Informative)
There is already a technically superior, non-patent encumbered, world wide standard with ubiquitous silicon support: ISO/MPEG
Where did you get the idea that MPEG is not patent encumbered [google.com]? It's been patented since MPEG 1.
Not to mention the impending MPEG4 patent licensing bomb that's coming up next year [mpegla.com]. Remember all those sites streaming MPEG4 for free (I'm looking at you YouTube). It's going to be very expensive to stream MPEG4 after 2010.
Now is the time to start converting all that content to free format.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Informative)
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-daily-20080701-20090703 [statcounter.com]
shows Opera in the Number 1 position - which isn't even listed on your link, which makes it suspicious. Moreover, no browser is in a dominant position.
(Since when would most used matter, anyway? By that reasoning, we should all be using and doing what IE does...)
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:3, Informative)
You're right as for there being no hardware support for decoding Ogg Theora. I don't know enough about that to make a comment (I wonder if it is possible to make such a thing but whether or not it just hasn't been implemented). As for the rest though, the quality argument is simply not true [xiph.org]... it looks as if in some circumstances, in fact, theora comes out on top. But even if that isn't true, we can see that it's close enough that it isn't a significant difference.
As for the submarine patent stuff, that's FUD... every codec technically has that threat. But Theora is the only one not known to have any current patent issues. h.264 has several known patent issues, but of course Apple is not worried because they are in control of that. But what about everyone else? In fact, unlike Theora, where steps have been taken to avoid patent issues, the dangers of patents are already known when it comes to h.264 [wikipedia.org].
Please don't spread this obvious bullshit. One codec may have patent issues but nobody can find them. One codec has obvious and known patent problems and may have even more that nobody has found. If you're going to make an attack on the former for patent issues, you'd better not be supporting the latter.
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:2, Informative)
and the fact that it's far worse quality than h.264.
FUD. How about this for clarification http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html [xiph.org]