Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs 640
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>."
Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:2, Insightful)
See, this is something that open source accomplishes that stupid fucking arrogant businesses will never get. When something is obsolete or no longer needed, it gets ditched or replaced by something better. Don't keep it around because someone thinks that they have the right to continue being in business even though their shit is a decade out of date. Its a hard and cold life for the developer whose project gets ditched (And sometimes I feel bad for them), but in the end, the user wins big and things evolve.
But of course, the rest of the world lives in reality, so the user loses.
Fuck you Microsoft. Die already!
Fuck you Adobe. Die already!
Fuck you Java. Die already!
Fuck you too Realnetworks. Just because.
Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it is a stupid question but why do the vendors have a say what goes into the spec and what doesn't? Isn't it up to them to choose to implement the spec fully or not? FFS just make it Ogg Vorbis/Theora and if Apple doesn't want to support it then Safari can just not support that part of the spec. It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.
Apple's concern (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Or perhaps their concern is precisely because of this fact?
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps because there is no point having a standard if no one is willing to adopt it.
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
I find jus tthe opposite true.
Business users love obsolete software because its cheaper and what is the ROI for upgrading. Not to mention a larger IT staff is needed to support upgrades.
W2k and Office 2k live on and will continue to live for years to come.
Most users do not want to upgrade their computers as long as they work.
Open source evolves too quickly for users to be comfortable with. Until businesses ditch their proprietary obsolete software open source will never see the light of day.
In other words, it's Apple-baw (Score:3, Insightful)
So not counting Microsoft (which has had nothing to say on the matter, and therefore cannot be counted one way or another), the only party blocking this is Apple, and they're blocking it based solely on a trumped-up and prima facie invalid argument, and furthermore, an argument that has never once impeded any of Apple's past actions. In other words, "BAWWWWW they din pik my pet codec BAWWWWW i wants every1 usin only my codec BAWWWWW BAWWWWW BAWWWWW!"
Seriously, folks; QuickTime uses a plug-in architecture for a reason. If Apple were truly concerned about Theora and patents, all they'd need to do is implement it as a plug-in -something they should have absolutely no trouble doing, as it's their own architecture- which could then be trivially removed if the need ever arose. But no; this is a step back towards the bad old days of Not-Invented-Here syndrome at Apple.
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:2, Insightful)
I second this. The cart is way before the horse. If the WC3 doesn't have the balls to issue a standard and let the vendors stick to its implementation, maybe it's time for us to get a new standards committee.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when is Java a company... Oracle (previously Sun) are behind java
and why no mention of Apple? they are the ones refusing to support ogg
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who cares about Apple's browser? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fuck Apple too... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple does not seem to want to update QuickTime. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple's concern (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah and open source usually doesn't ever do anything fully. Almost all open source projects (that I've used) are partially done.
Ironic, I was just thinking that about all the closed source software I have...
There is a saying in development groups: You don't make money by making bug fixes, you only make money selling the next version.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:1, Insightful)
You seem to have forgotten that Mozilla and Google are every bit as guilty as the closed source companies in this case. Perhaps you should reread the summary without your rose coloured glasse.
Re:A solution: system codecs. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right on a technical level, you really are. But wouldn't that make playing video on the web more like it was in the web 1.0 era? People would have to stay on top of codecs and go surf for these sorts of things. I believe flash won out originally because it was a seamless solution for the end users-- one plugin to rule them all.
Honestly, the solution you're suggesting is not unlike the way Silverlight/Moonlight handles media-- except that it does have a default/preferred codec.
Why, you could circumvent the lack of a video tag on IE (or anything else) by using the pluggable codec support in Silverlight 3 to provide a Theora codec. ;) And that won't require any proprietary tools and very little code- just (if the browser is IE, load the following silverlight control, point it to the codec and your theora video)
We might as well just keep using the object tag to embed media files and let the system figure out what's supposed to run it, if we're going to use system codecs. On Windows, WMP will do it, on Linux, mplayer (or gstreamer if the user is a sadomasochist), and on mac it will be Quicktime. I mean, it's progressive, in an absolutely regressive sort of way.
Re:Then html5 wont exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides all the professional tools do not support it so it wont ever be used
Which professional tools are these? Most video editing software I've seen uses either QuickTime or Windows Media for exporting, and both of these have (free) plugins for encoding Theora (and Dirac). You wouldn't want to use Theora as an intermediate format - something like MJPEG or Pixlet with no inter-frame compression is better for that - but exporting from most tools is pretty trivial.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Insightful)
The mention of Apple managed to spleen together two unrelated ideas: "expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free."
There is no relationship between worrying about patent submarines and Ogg being royalty free. This is simple idiot-targeted editorializing. Apple doesn't want to be the deep pocketed commercial implementation of Ogg that ends up having to pay patent trolls. That's why it is going with the ISO/MPEG standard, which pools patents together from everyone. Mozilla doesn't want to use the standard because it is the opposite: penniless and non-commercial. Its entire business plan is based on pushing users to do Google searches as that $50M in search fees is its only source of income.
The only good news is that Apple owns the mobile web with the iPhone, so it can pretty much establish HTML5 itself and provide Flash-killer standards-based video without any help from Firefox.
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.
That is the excuse Microsoft used to set back open web standards years with IE. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes you put something into a standard as a way of pressuring people to adopt something. Make it the standard, and if Apple won't adopt it, make a big stink about how Safari isn't really HTML5 compliant.
I suspect that the problem is that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe have enough influence on the W3C to kill something like this.
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:5, Insightful)
The stated reason is that, if vendors will refuse to implement a portion of the spec, that part shouldn't be in the spec. The spec isn't supposed to force vendors to implement something, it's supposed to be a common set of rules that everyone can follow, and mandating Theora is counter to that goal.
Sure, but there needs to be a way to distinguish between:
No standards body worthy of the slightest respect should ever concern itself with that second category.
I am not fond of putting it this way, but I think what really needs to happen is for the average user to grow a pair and realize why Item B is not in their interests and never will be. So long as the masses of users have no understanding of these things, it is always going to be an uphill battle to maintain an Internet that is as free and open as possible.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? Closed source every does something fully?
The smartest people are those who realize that a program is never "done", its just closed source refuses to fix the problems and tells you things are alright.
If closed source was ever done fully, we'd all be using IE 6 or something, no wouldn't we? Oh, and see how much everyone loves that idea.
Re:Apple's concern (Score:5, Insightful)
Theora is a bit different from Ogg in this respect. Theora is based on VP3, which was both patented and commercially distributed for a number of years. If VP3 had been infringing someone else's patents, then they would likely have sued back when a company was making money from it. The patents that were required to VP3 were released by On2 under a free, irrevocable, license and then (I believe) allowed to lapse.
Dirac is in a weaker position; it is believed to be patent free, but no one has done a patent search to make sure and it is not based on an existing codec.
Re:Apple's concern (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely - the notion of "submarine patents" rising up, should Theora take off, is not a new idea, and not specific to Apple. By mandating Theora in HTML5, you'd be risking the years of negotiations on the spec on the bet that there are no such patents - a bet I'd be surprised if any good Slashdot reader would take.
As others have pointed out, HTML has never mandated a specific image format reference in an IMG tag; a type of plugin referenced in OBJECT or EMBED; or the type of resource referenced in an A tag; it's outside it's scope. Let the standard focus on its scope, and let the market hash out the rest - it's not the end of the world to not have a single, mandated codec - in fact, I'd argue that having such a thing would unnecessarily limit our options - Theora is, to be kind, not the most efficient codec on the market; and the situation will likely only get worse. Don't hamstring HTML5 by hitching it to any particular codec.
Re:Fuck Apple too... (Score:1, Insightful)
Fuck Apple too. They are as bad as it comes. No less than microsoft.
My thoughts exactly.
Their agenda is to push h.264 since they are a member of the licensing group MPEG-LA. It's got nothing (or only slightly) to do with fear of submarine patents in ogg. H.264 still could have submarine patents anyway.
Fuck Nokia too. I'm not buying their phones again.
Re:The real reasons... (Score:3, Insightful)
True, most of them probably don't care much about users. However, the stance of Apple and Microsoft in your post clearly is clearly negative for developers and users because it locks everybody into paying them. Google, Opera, and Mozilla, while they don't necessarily actively HELP users, they're not actively hurting them either.
I'm not normally the 'rah rah open source' type, but the way you present that, one of the choices is clearly better.
All that said, I think it's just fine to remove codecs from the standard. At least the way I understand things, they're keeping the audio and video tags and giving people a choice of codecs. Firefox is too big to ignore now, so most major sites will support them. Similarly, they can't ignore Microsoft or Apple, so everyone gets supported, people actually follow the standard, and we're hopefully all able to enjoy our new audio/video content.
Re:In other words, it's Apple-baw (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps you're not aware that there are already Ogg+Theora etc plugins for QuickTime, and that anyone can install them for free.
Some of the reasons Apple has no interest in using FOSS codecs are:
- Codecs are bleeding edge technology, and FOSS is typically behind the curve (as Theora is)
- Codec algorithms are patented to high heaven and impossibly difficult to vet for patent submarines.
- Nobody sues FOSS until a monied company adopts it. Apple doesn't want to be the target.
- There is already a technically superior, non-patent encumbered, world wide standard with ubiquitous silicon support: ISO/MPEG
- Apple has already spend years investing in AAC/H.264.
- Apple doesn't want to double its development efforts just to perform pointless political posturing to satisfy people who don't pay for anything.
Re:Apple's concern (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. I hear 'royalty free' and I think of GIF, which was also royalty free... Until it wasn't. Which was an absolutely huge mess.
Honestly, if I were Apple and the Theora foundation offered a $100-per-million-device license saying basically 'we swear we are the sole authority on Ogg Theora, and you have a license from us to implement it to the spec' I'd be much happier than without it. Because then I'd have a set contract, spelling out the cost, and that if someone then comes along and says 'wait, we own this part of the spec, and you owe us $Xbillion' I could turn around to the Theora foundation and say 'Your breach of contract just cost me $Xbillion, and I expect you to pay that.' Basically, at that point the risk is Theora's, and not Apple's.
Apple is unwilling to take the risk that there are IP problems with the spec. It would take a lot of costly research and examinations for them to prove there aren't any, and there is no real benefit to them to spend the money and time. Translation: At free, it costs to much.
Re:Fuck Apple too... (Score:4, Insightful)
What history?
The history of Apple proprietary hardware which they only recently (mostly) gave up?
The history of Apple suing clone makers out of existence?
The ongoing history of Apple locking iPhone users into their app store, dictating what apps are and are not acceptable, making exclusive agreements with a wireless carrier and enforcing said carrier's rules on what one can do with their connection even AFTER they have PAID FOR IT?
Hey.. I hate Microsoft but at least they don't care what CPU I run Windows on or what apps I run in Windows so long as I bought it per-seat!
And today we read about Apple playing their part in wrecking an effort to get an open standard for internet video. Looks like a continuation of history to me!
Re:Fuck Apple too... (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft has gained popularity through theft of technology(GUI From Apple, their defense was "We stole it from Xerox, not Apple), Backdoor licensing agreements (IBM PC-DOS/MS-Dos), and anti-trust in general (How many competitors has Microsoft bought out or used "creative innovations" that break the original software [java, Internet explorer/HTML Standardization], in order to remove competitors?). They continue to use shady business practices to force PC manufacturers into selling windows licenses with every pre-built PC, regardless of what the user wants on their machine.
On the other hand, Apple has been releasing proprietary, non-upgradeable hardware, forcing their users to pay a premium for the hardware, then forcing an upgrade to the customer, causing them to buy all new hardware, for most of the company's history since the Mac was invented. Apple's Proprietary business deals have stagnated their platform several times, but their "creative marketing' has always managed to create enough fanboys to turn almost every Mac user into a smug elitist bastard who points the flaws out in everyone else's product except their own. Microsoft has also been making progress in that marketing strategy, but has yet to achieve Apple's market share in holier-than-thou egotistical bastards.
In recent years, they have both been proponents of DRM at some point, both support their own proprietary formats (Microsoft with WMA/WMV/ASF, Apple with Quicktime, and AAC), and are both patent whores.
In other words, both companies have had their evil dealings, and I'd say brainwashing and gouging end users is just as bad as dirty business tactics. When people finally realize that a computer is a computer is a computer, the Operating system wars will end, and the world will be happy with it's interoperable bliss.
Of course I think that day will come when I start blowing sunshine out my ass. Business is too cutthroat to allow that level of convergence.
Re:Then html5 wont exist (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides all the professional tools do not support it so it wont ever be used. It wont ever be used because professional tools do not support. Its a catch-22 just like Microsoft Windows and Office. You can't ever leave the platform.
Like Microsoft said they wouldn't support ODT, throwing their weight behind OOXML instead?
Transcoding to any format shouldn't be a problem these days, ESPECIALLY one with an open spec, so there is no reason for a tool not to support Ogg.
Phillip.
Re:The real reasons... (Score:3, Insightful)
> Google, Opera and Mozilla won't support anything that puts them at risk of needing to pay
> royalties on the huge number of free downloads they give away.
That statement is hard to reconcile with the fact that Google is shipping H.264 support in chrome.
That discrepancy is easy to account for by noting that the MPEG-LA licensing terms for H.264 (see http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf [mpegla.com] ) have a cap on royalty payments. Looking at the rates there, anything over 10 million shipping units is effectively a flat fee of $5 million. For this year, at least. It's not clear to me whether the cap applies across both parts (a) and (b) of the licensing agreement; if it does, then Google might hit the cap just due to the "2 cents (per view?) per youtube video longer than 12 minutes" bit.
Note that Opera has explicitly said that the licensing fee is why they're not implementing H.264 support.
Also note that Mozilla has explicitly said that while it can pay the licensing fee it's not clear whether the result would fall within the letter of the open-source licenses it wishes to use, and would clearly fall outside the spirit (in that the browser could not be redistributed by someone else without paying the same licensing fees).
I can't speak to Apple and Microsoft, though I think their patent concerns are valid at least in their minds. But I think you're reading a lot more into the actions of Google, Opera, Mozilla than is there (and reading some things in that are _definitely_ not there in the case of Google).
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah and open source usually doesn't ever do anything fully. Almost all open source projects (that I've used) are partially done. They do work, yes, but they don't work well, and nor do they look good.
Not true. Sure, there are a lot of small, obscure open source projects that either get abandoned, or lack developers, or whatever, but most of the major open source projects out there work and work well. Firefox, Gnome, OpenOffice.org, Ubuntu,
Those who know know what they are doing can figure it out, but new users have tons of issues.
That's true of every piece of software on the planet, including such vaunted products as Windows, Mac OS X, Microsoft Office, etc. Just take one look at any of the various support forums out there for these packages (official or unofficial) and that becomes very obvious, very quickly.
Open source isn't the final end-all-commercial business thing. It's just an alternative.
That's the only part of your post that isn't verbal diarrhea.
If there aren't a bunch of Microsoft fanboys and astroturfers on this site, how did you get modded informative?
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:1, Insightful)
The stated reason is that, if vendors will refuse to implement a portion of the spec, that part shouldn't be in the spec. The spec isn't supposed to force vendors to implement something, it's supposed to be a common set of rules that everyone can follow, and mandating Theora is counter to that goal.
I'm not saying you are wrong, nor is this directed at you, but as a general reply to your statement:
We will never have a W3C spec again (or at least for the next 30+ years, but odds are never)
Microsoft's stated goals are to always undermine the W3C spec, and embrace/extend the web.
They will say no to the spec as a matter of course, thus no new features can ever be added that they won't say no to.
W3C just signed their own death certificate if that truly is the real reason for excluding something.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you serious? YouTube rejecting Theora for quality issues? Have you been to YouTube recently? YouTube doesn't seem to give the slightest care about video quality.
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.
Re:Apple's concern (Score:1, Insightful)
The question becomes; will the extra per-unit decoding hardware and amortized design cost increase the cost of the iPhone/iPod/etc SOC by more than the per-device royalty for h264... Probably :)
What HTML 5 should have been (Score:4, Insightful)
What we really need in HTML standarization:
Re:Fuck Apple too... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, Apple has been releasing proprietary, non-upgradeable hardware, forcing their users to pay a premium for the hardware, then forcing an upgrade to the customer, causing them to buy all new hardware, for most of the company's history since the Mac was invented. Apple's Proprietary business deals have stagnated their platform several times, but their "creative marketing' has always managed to create enough fanboys to turn almost every Mac user into a smug elitist bastard who points the flaws out in everyone else's product except their own. Microsoft has also been making progress in that marketing strategy, but has yet to achieve Apple's market share in holier-than-thou egotistical bastards.
Meanwhile, we Linux/Ubuntu smug elitist bastards continue to point out flaws in everyone else's production, including our own, constantly taking the defeatist attitude that Linux is "not ready for the desktop" despite the fact that, at this point, it's easier to install than all competitors' products and easier to admin, maintain and upgrade than all competitors' products,
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is a really good point. I mean, I have no idea if it's true or not... maybe they do specify image file formats, I have no f*****g idea. But it certainly makes sense. The standard should define how web developers specify images, and how browsers should handle them, but the actual file formats are left up to the market to work out. Same thing with video... makes sense, right?
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. (Though I guarantee you'll see trolls coming out of the woodwork with all sorts of wacky patent claims if Theora ever becomes really big.)
So, Apple will support one; Mozilla will support the other; Microsoft will support none; and VLC will release a super-duper ninja plugin that runs in any browser and supports both, plus 1001 other obscure formats for good measure. People will look around and see who's suing whom and how successfully, and eventually one or two formats will become so common that a browser developer would have to be stupid not to accept it -- the video equivalent of JPEG and GIF.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
So?
For some reason, any "official" YouTube videos (music videos from labels, trailers, etc.) are typically shitty quality. Someone else will upload a high quality version with good sound and no artifacting, but it'll get taken down.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, they are actually concerned about bandwidth (Theora will take more) and encoding time (Theora will take more (especially given presently available encoders)).
Re:Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting a license for H.264 off MPEG-LA does *not* protect you from liability of other patents that may cover the standard that they don't have (MPEG-LA).
Apple don't have any fear of patent litigation with theroa. They want everyone using a standard they make money on.
Wait till later --when the fees go up and even content needs a charge....
Re:Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggest string will be no secondary distribution allowed. I would not be able to include FF in my linux distro for example.
The next biggest string is that they can change the terms anytime they want...
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, OO certainly does compete with MS office not to mention it's basically compatible now (can convert from and to ODF/OOXML) I use OO for everything and nobody in our office realizes because guess what? Our enterprise even wanted to swap sans that they had already purchased and are using the 07 purchased licenses. That migration cost in a business is calculated and not worth it as that's hardly a true pressing issue. Formatting and other issues don't really exist anymore.
There is an easy argument for OO/2K7 vs 03 though: storage space. 2K3 documents take up an astronomically larger amount of space vs the alternatives. We're talking 2MB files down to 50k ish. This might not sound like much to you, but for an entire company that archives everything that translates to real cash costs.
2K8? 2K9? Not even on the radar for enterprise. Trust me, beyond all you see, MS is hurting on the computer front. They have other business and make lots of money, but they don't have quite the traction people think.
If you want to see where this stuff is going for future, watch what Lotus and Google wave are doing, because those are the kind of features enterprise wants: realtime collaborative editing. Google's version will be purchased by a lot of enterprises most likely, just like how they open source their search engine and lots of sites (such as government sites) use it.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:2, Insightful)
Better to have poorer quality than no video at all.
When was "no video at all" the alternative? The alternative is "Flash video".
Re:Fuck Apple too... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary is actually pretty terrible at explaining the reasoning. So I think I will:
Apple's reasoning: :'(
1. There is no hardware support for ogg theora, this means it can't be decoded on an iPhone.
2. The patent situation with theora is not known, but it likely does trip over some, and to start using it and *then* have the licensing worked out is a sure way to end up paying a crap load for it.
Nokia's reasoning:
1. There is no hardware support for ogg theora, this means it can't be decoded on any of their phones.
Google's reasoning:
1. Ogg Theora does not compress well, and it'll cost us too much in bandwidth
2. We can easily implement both, so we will.
Mozilla's reasoning:
1. h.264 costs too much
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is not that apple won't adopt it, it's that apple *can't* adopt it, and nor can nokia, and nor can sony erricson, and nor can RIM, and nor can any of the other smart phone makers. There is *no* hardware support for decoding Ogg Theora, that makes it totally unsuitable for the task at hand. Even ignoring the submarine patent risk and the fact that it's far worse quality than h.264.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:5, Insightful)
I say implement the tag, give the web developers what they want. Let them host the video in multiple formats and just serve up the appropriate one based on the detected browser or the user's preference (as many sites already do anyways). Ideally history would repeat itself and all the dominant browsers will eventually be able to handle all the major formats used with the tag.
Re:H.264 Theora: a demo (Score:3, Insightful)
What's really funny is, Youtube has pretty poor H.264 quality.
By tweaking x264 settings(B-frames and motion detection in particular), I've encoded videos to the same quality as Youtube at 1mbit.
(Mostly FRAPS vids of me playing games)
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe W3C saw that as a tragic omission and they didn't want to repeat the mistake. Remember in the 1990s when you'd use a PNG and then find out that some people couldn't see it? Shit, to this very day there are still people running browsers that can't show these images (or can't show them quite right, like MSIE6), and those browsers are far newer than PNG. If in 1998 W3C said, "This format has been around for several years and is well-proven, you can trivially use it without licensing it, and a lot of browsers can already show it just fine; therefore: use it or you're not following the standard" then a lot of headaches would have been avoided.
Now we're going to have those same headaches with video. I'm not saying we wouldn't have them anyway if Theora and Vorbis were in the standard; Apple and Microsoft can certain ship product that leave basic standard features out if they wish. But at least they wouldn't be able to claim they're HTML compliant, so there would be at least some social pressure to get their shit together. Lame, but better than nothing.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
As was argued by the original author, you're left in a situation where if Ogg were specified in the standard, you'd have folks who followed the standard at a disadvantage in quality and/or bitrate.
The idea was not to restrict the supported codecs to Theora. The idea was to mandate at least Theora support. The way HTML5 video element is specified, you can provide several streams in various formats, letting browser pick the preferable one automatically. Mandatory Theora support would simply mean that everyone could provide one of the streams in it, and know that any browser can display it out of the box. Presumably, if e.g H.264 is also provided, all browsers that support it would just pick it, so there's no quality loss.
Besides, W3C doesn't say which image file formats are allowable, why should it specify a codec?
Not specifying image formats proved to be a problem - witness how long it took PNG to be supported, in part because of that. In addition to that, HTML5 is by far the most pragmatic of all W3C specs - it's designed by people who actually make browsers, not by academics, and as such it tries to standardize as many useful (or simply already common) things as possible, to encourage interop.
It's interesting to note, however, that HTML5 spec explicitly refuses to mandate support for any image types:
"This specification does not specify which image types are to be supported." [w3.org]
I agree that if they want to mandate a specific codec for video, they should do the same to images as well. We may have a de facto standard for that today, but it needs not be a stable state of affairs.
Re:Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft really isn't "pushing" Windows Media that much anymore. Zune and Xbox already support MPEG-4 and H.264, as will Silverlight 3 and Windows 7.
Well they're not pushing it too hard anymore, but that's really because they already lost on the audio side. Their hopes for locking up online music sales died when the major labels agreed to sell without DRM. Video may not be all that far behind.
Anyway, the point was never to have high licensing costs, but to build relationships with media companies while strengthening their vendor lock-in.
Re:In other words, it's Apple-baw (Score:3, Insightful)
Nokia ships a browser on their phones.
In fact, phones (and mobile devices in general) are a major sore point for Theora - there are no hardware decoders for it. It's probably the only reason why Nokia is against, as there don't seem to be any other reasonable motives (unlike Apple).
Re:Fuck Apple too... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you serious? YouTube rejecting Theora for quality issues? Have you been to YouTube recently? YouTube doesn't seem to give the slightest care about video quality.
That's because you're looking at horrible flash video. If you download the H.264 version, they look much better.
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Cheeply licensed" is still a problem.
MPEG LA and all this RAND crap is killing this conversation by muddying the waters. That something is a standard does not imply that a license is usable by libre software. I suspect that this is not a problem for you, but it is for many of us.
If h.264 were to become the standard for the video tag, it could very well sink Mozilla and an open Webkit (Apple is really pooing where it eats on that one). "Reasonable" is such a subjective term... The cost wouldn't be reasonable to Mozilla, nor would the terms; Mozilla couldn't be expected to keep track of all users of its browsers for the MPEG LA fees, and it couldn't force GPL/MPL-incompatible terms on its users. And, all the misinformation aside, we know that something horrible will happen on 2010/12/31. And all of this is to say nothing about MPEG-4 part 13.
Re:H.264 Theora: a demo (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting, considering that I don't remember ever hearing about ASP or AVC hardware decoders until after those formats became popular. It would seem that the popularity of the codec defines whether a hardware decoder exists, not the other way around.
Re:Why do the vendors have a say? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, because it is the only free and legal option open to all users and manufacturers.
It may be free, but nobody really knows if it's legal yet, due to the issue of submarine patents.
Theora should be specified.
Why? Because you like it? The HTML spec is not a platform of Open Source evangelism.
They can then add H264 or whatever as well if they wish, but for those who cannot use H264, Theora is a fallback available so that they can meet the standard.
But that means that everybody has to host Theora alongside their higher-quality videos. For content providers, that's not a very attractive option. We'd rather use the standard that is widely adopted in the real world, and only have one file to upload.
What good is a standard if you automatically prevent certain manufacturers from meeting it ?
That's an issue with any standard in the world. There's always going to be somebody who cannot meet a standard, for whatever reason. I haven't seen any evidence that "automatically prevents" Mozilla or Opera from supporting H.264. They just choose not to.
Your same argument also applies to Ogg Theora. It "automatically prevents" Apple and Microsoft from implementing it, because the uncertain legal landscape and risk of litigation.
Oh that's right, it's not about creating a standard, it's about protecting someones IP and profits.
Got any evidence of that? Have you even read the group's mailing list on this topic? There's no evidence of this being done to protect anybody's profits. If you actually read it, it's a very level-headed and intelligent conversation about drafting good standards that will be implemented in the real world. Nobody involved appears to have been compromised by commercial interests.
Streaming video is going to get expensive (Score:2, Insightful)
The browsers need to start supporting free codecs now. Streaming h.264 is free for now, but that party is going to end at the end of 2010 [mpegla.com]. If YouTube has to start paying royalties for every h.264 stream they serve up you better bet the whole game is going to change.
Theora/Dirac/Whatever start looking real good when consider that it keeps the web "free". Imagine if you had to pay everytime you served up a jpeg on your website? If you want to serve video from your site in a couple years, you may have to. I say we pick an open format now, to avoid all that headache now.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
Citation needed?
(The only one I've seen is one that claimed the Iphone was the single most popular model, but that's a flawed statistic, as Apple just have one phone, where as most manufacturers have large numbers of models. Not to mention that all these accesses are still a minority compared to desktop browsers, so it's irrelevant. Even if and when that changes, there's no reason to think Apple will be in a monopoly position on it.)
And the idea of playing downloaded videos on your phone? Welcome to 5 years ago. That was all the rage with the hype when 3G phones first appeared. You know, the ones several years before it came to Apple. But I guess most people would rather use their phones for useful things.
Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model (Score:3, Insightful)
If they can't display images at all, then the "failure" to display a PNG isn't noticed by that user. I'm talking about the other portion of the population, who run graphical web browsers: they can see some images and not others. And the images they can't see, are trivial for the software to support.
iInsularity (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:H.264 Theora: a demo (Score:3, Insightful)
Patented means proprietary, please to not try to make words mean things that they do not.
No, patent means patented. There's a qualitative difference between a format for which there are public and publshed interoperable standard, and one where the implementation details are private or only avialable under a specific license. You may not care for either model, but it's certainly a meaningful distinction, and a longstanding one in the digital media world. When people in the vieo industry speak of an "open standard" they mean publically available specifications and patent licenses available under RAND terms. A propritary codec would be used to describe, say, RealVideo 10 or Apple's ProRes, for which there isn't bitstream documentation or RAND licensing availble.
With an open standard, everyone's on equal ground in building interoperable implementations without any reverse engineering, and has equal abilty and pricing for licensing the patents.
The issue of whether those patents have a fee or not is obviously important, but somewhat orthogonal to openness. One could certainly have a free-to-implement technology that isn't documented, and hence wouldn't be considered "open."
And Theora is certainly patented as well; On2 has released their patents under an extremely flexible license, but they're still valid.
I repeat my assertion that Ogg Theora is already good enough for me, and likely is good enough for many besides myself, who do not care much about 3 DB more or less of streaming bandwidth, and who do care about freedom from proprietary restrictions and patent fees for video codecs.
I've never heard streaming bandwidth described in dB. Interesting metric; so 3 dB would be ~2x bandwidth difference at the same quality? Kind of elegent; I normally talk about that in terms of percentage, but since improvements are measured in dB, it could apply either way.
FWIW, codec engineers sweat blood for a 0.1 dB improvement. The cable industry has spent multiple billions of dollars to upgrade to H.264 set top boxes and infrastructure to get that ~3-4 dB improvement of H.264 over MPEG-2, expecting a much bigger payoff due to additioanl channels/services they can sell with those savings.
Anyway, if Theora does what you want it do, use it with my blessing. Good enough is by definition good enough. Like I said earlier, I work on Silverlight, and we've already got the infrastructure in Silverlight for 3rd parties to add new codec and format support in managed code.
My concern is mainly that a lot of people seem to be thinking that Theora is capable of things it isn't and won't be capable of. To whit:
Theora isn't ever going to be competitive with H.264 High Profile in compression efficiency. While it's certainly capable of futher improvement, H.264 implementatiosn are improving rapidly as well, so I doubt it'd ever need less than 2x the bandwidth for a particular quality level compared to best H.264 implementations at the time.
For the business models I've run some quikc numbers on, the extra bandwidth cost of Theora would cost more than any H.264 license fees saved.
Thus mainstream media sites, like YouTube, don't have any business reasons to adopt Thera; it'd be a net negative on their profitability.
If you think I'm mistaken on any of the above, I'd be very interested in disucussing your perspective. If you're asserting that there are markets where the above factors don't matter much, then I agree with you.
But if it's really important for this community to have a competitive codec without patent licensing requirements, then Theora (at least a Theora 1.0 bistream compatible version) may be a distraction.
I don't have a lot of hope for Dirac either; I've not seen any indication of a new approach to the challenges of marrying wavelts with motion estimation; once your intra and inter block sizes are radically different, things get quite challenging. Theora is likely to remain a superior choice than Dirac.