Examining the HTML 5 Video Codec Debate 459
Ars Technica has a great breakdown of the codec debate for the HTML 5 video element. Support for the new video element seems to be split into two main camps, Ogg Theora and H.264, and the inability to find a solution has HTML 5 spec editor Ian Hickson throwing in the towel. "Hickson outlined the positions of each major browser vendor and explained how the present impasse will influence the HTML 5 standard. Apple and Google favor H.264 while Mozilla and Opera favor Ogg Theora. Google intends to ship its browser with support for both codecs, which means that Apple is the only vendor that will not be supporting Ogg. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately, on the situation regarding codecs for and in HTML5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' Hickson wrote. 'I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined.'"
Apple and Xiph (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like Apple has something against implementing any Xiph codec... FLAC and Vorbis support in iTunes is nonexistent, and even with the QuickTime plugin, iTunes still doesn't have proper tagging support. And now refusing to add Theora support in Safari?
Perhaps someone on the Xiph board did something to one of Apple's Media guys when they were kids or something?
Re:It's a toughy (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Microsoft has lost the media wars, and they pretty well know it. (admittedly, just a guess) Expect their products to support H264 and AAC. The bigger fly in their ointment is probably improved web standards in general. They've been gearing up to fight Adobe (Silverlight vs. Flash) for the proprietary "rich web" market, and if HTML/CSS gets rich enough that we don't need a proprietary plugin, that might not end up being a market worth winning.
Re:It's a toughy (Score:4, Interesting)
Flash, to my recollection, was pretty much limited to ads and mediocre games before YouTube came along. If YouTube dumped flash, would it still be deemed necessary by the average user? Certainly iPhone users seem to be getting along without it...
Re:There was a simple solution... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's definitely a better option, but there is a catch - it means that content providers who want to reach the widest possible audience will need to encode video in H.264. And that means that they will need H.264 encoders, which are by definition non-free (since license fees must be payed for those).
Now consider something like Wikipedia. Since videos are uploaded by the users, it would effectively require all of them to have licensed H.264 codecs to contribute - which is an unacceptable burden for a Free encyclopedia. Though I guess automatic transcoding of uploaded Theora videos to H.264 would be an option, but it would likely be very detrimental to quality.
Re:irrelevant (Score:3, Interesting)
Just watch. Once IE's market share hits 50%, suddenly Microsoft will start playing ball. The search revenue from all the IE users who don't bother to change the default search is too nice to simply give up.
Re:Why does it care? (Score:3, Interesting)
Img-tag doesn't specify which image formats you must or must not use so I really don't understand why video-tag should be any different. Video-tag could just instruct the browser that "put the video in here and fetch stream from here or if user has no ability to play the video display whatever is inside the alt-attribute".
So when browser sees video-tag it renders it by using which ever video plugin or built-in mechanism is in use, be it Flash, Silverlight, Windows Media Player or whatever. Then it is up to browser vendors to offer mechanism to download, install and/or configure video player and/or codec to the browser. No need to force the whole world behind a single format.
Just my uneducated opinion. I don't know much about video codecs.
Re:why not both or more? (Score:3, Interesting)
More importantly are these factors:
- Ogg requires ZERO licensing costs, which is very important to the Open Source community who want to create free products that do not produce revenue for the creator.
- Ogg is not currently hardware accelerated by any mainstream hardware (encode or decode) and therefore is not ideal for current generation netbooks or other low powered devices.
- Ogg does not produce quite the same quality as the patent encumbered options at low bitrates
These are the core arguments for and against ogg, the only royalty free option. If ogg produced very similar quality at the same bit rates and there was hardware on the market that encoded and decoded it then it would be the spec without contention.
If it were up to me, I would say write it in the spec as the standard and prey that demand encourages manufacturers to add hardware acceleration to their products. At the same time, start an OGG quality improvement campaign and try and get some massive attention paid to the development of Ogg Vorbis over then next few months while HTML 5 spec browsers are being developed and tested.
I believe that making it the standard would ensure that it gets the attention it needs to achive quality/feature parity with some of h264 and other competitiors.
Re:It's a toughy (Score:3, Interesting)
> I don't think Flash will go away overnight.
I don't think it will go away at all
Not when agencies can charge $100s for a 100K flash app that does something our html contractor could have done in 5 minutes and 2 lines of javascript he found online. (trivial apps like rotating images)
(Many) Agencies and individuals like to be "experts" on things that take special tools and knowledge so they can charge more.
LOTS of contractors can do html/css/basic javscript. Not as many can do flash and those who can don't want flash to go away.
If an agency delivers HTML, there is usually someone in the office who can edit it (change wording, colors, etc). But if you want flash changed, you are more than likely going to need to give the agency more work.
Re:Like Capitalism (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't matter. Microsoft not supporting it (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft's blessing was a must when they had 95% market share. Right now they have no more than 70% and it is steadily declining - by the time HTML5 is available, they might not matter any more. Moreover the majority of their market share is just uninformed. All it takes now is one really big "killer site" like Youtube not supporting IE, and their share will plummet into the low 20s.
Re:Apple and Xiph (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Like Capitalism (Score:2, Interesting)
Interestingly, sites implementing H.264 will not really find a big market. (At least, initially). According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers [wikipedia.org] and it's sources, 1 out of 10 users actually run a browser that will support the video-tag with h.264 in the near future. The Theora combo on the other hand will soon be supported by for 1 in 4 viewers.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. My guess is a combo. It should not be difficult to figure using Javascript what type of device you're running on, and deliver full-resolution Theora content for desktops (where Firefox is king of the HTML5-gang), and lower-resolution H.264 for handhelds. (I assume content-site will still would probably want different bitrates and resolutions for handhelds.)
Another interesting aspect is what the numerous smaller streaming-sites will go with. They may not want to pay a H.264 license. Maybe we're going to start seeing the "Site works best with browser X"-stamps again, and there is really only one browser that is platform-neutral and will work equally well for the 10% Mac-users, as for the 88% Windows-users, and the 2% others. Interesting times, it was almost 10 years since we really saw a full-out browser war.
Re:irrelevant (Score:3, Interesting)
If these browsers get to the point where they're all offering a clearly superior experience on the web, and Microsoft is still dragging their feet, they will eventually become irrelevant themselves.
Exactly. Which is precisely why Microsoft isn't doing anything, and probably won't. Apple's NIH syndrome and Google's bandwidth interests will prevent them from accepting Theora, Mozilla's legal and Opera's monetary problems with H.264 prevent them from accepting it in turn, and neither faction holds enough leverage over the web to 'win' here without Microsoft's support.
End result? no single codec is picked as the standard, web developers ignore the video tag and continue relying on Flash, the status quo is maintained, Microsoft's position isn't in danger, all without them having to do a single thing. Exactly the best possible scenario for them.
Anyone looking for Microsoft to settle this matter should, IMHO, start looking elsewhere.
Re:Why does it care? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, you don't know much about video codecs - or the browser wars.
The huge headache everyone wants to avoid is content providers having to code around, and store duplicate copies of video, to cater to all the browsers.
This is before you get into all the bullshit about codecs that are really rootkits and the like. You do not want your browser saying, "I cannot cope with the computationally intensive task to render this video without 'magic software' from goatse.cx".
Re:It's a toughy (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:why does the codec have to be in the spec? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or simply invalidate the patents behind it. Call it Eminent Domain or something. I mean, I know it would suck to lose your patents, but I'm sure whoever created it has recouped their expenses and even profited by now, since it's so damned important.