

VP8, WebM, and HTML5 video - Heff
http://zencoder.com/encoder-blog/2010/05/19/vp8-webm-and-html5-video/

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zaatar
The link says:

    
    
      "Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Adobe currently support VP8, and Safari and IE may at some point."
    

Microsoft has already confirmed that IE9 will support VP8. See:
[http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive...](http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2010/05/19/another-
follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx)

~~~
blasdel
Safari supports everything that Quicktime does. You can add the support
yourself, just like you could with Theora: <http://xiph.org/quicktime/>

<http://perian.org> is a Quicktime Component that wraps around libavcodec
(ffmpeg) that has a pretty wide install base on OS X and checks for automatic
updates by default every time it's loaded in an application. Google has a set
of patches for ffmpeg on their site that will surely get picked up and
automatically distributed before too long.

If Apple ever ships support, it'll be with Quicktime, not the braindead
approach of linking it directly into the browser. IE9 has this approach too,
just with a codec whitelist. Google Chrome bundles a pared-down libavcodec
that you can swap out with your own. Opera does the same but with GStreamer.

In reality, the new version of Flash with VP8 support will get %95 penetration
in a couple months after it's released, and fallback to Flash will continue to
be how the <video> game is played. I wonder if Google's stopped charging Adobe
for VP6 as a quid-pro-quo? It seems like that (and VP7 for Skype) were On2's
sole sources of revenue.

~~~
glhaynes
Just curious: do you know why IE9 uses a codec whitelist? Why not just support
any codec installed on the PC? Does Safari's QuickTime usage have such a
whitelist?

~~~
blasdel
Because the codecs are unsandboxed native code running in the browser process
with full access to your user data. That you downloaded from the internet. To
enjoy pornography and pirated media (and pirated pornography!). It'd be a
perfect exploit delivery vehicle, and on a newly-prominent attack surface (see
the recent @font-face exploits)

It's a much bigger problem on Windows because shitty DirectShow codec packs
have a huge install base -- I wouldn't be surprised at a hundred million!
It'll be a little better now since XP users won't get it, and the codec pack
situation has cleaned up a lot in the last few years.

The IE team is doing the right thing for the situation they have. Anybody that
cares is going to be using a different browser, their support for <video> just
means that we won't have to use a Flash fallback for Vista/W7 users that allow
updates.

Google is unlikely to prompt IE users to install the WebM codec on Youtube,
since it'll work better with h.264 anyway.

Apple doesn't use a whitelist now, but they might in the future. Their attack
surface is more constrained, since it's only the code they ship directly (the
library, their default codecs, and the pro stuff they ship with Final Cut),
Perian/libavcodec, and Xiph/liboggplay that are actually installed anywhere.
No cambrian explosion of repackaged hacked codecs to deal with.

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stcredzero
I wonder if a side effect of WebM will be to push Ogg Vorbis into wider
adoption? Platforms that want to play WebM will also decode Ogg, so why not
support the audio-only format?

~~~
jmillikin
I hope it does, but believe it won't.

Much like Theora, the primary reason to oppose Vorbis is political. It's not
covered by patents and doesn't support DRM, so to content providers it's a
significantly worse codec than MP3 or AAC.

If Apple or Microsoft were going to support Vorbis, they'd have done so years
ago.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Not to detract from your general point, but Ogg and Vorbis support DRM to the
same degree that any other container and codec do, it's generally an
orthogonal concern.

It's main problem is network effects, in cases where network effects don't
apply, e.g. game audio and web streaming audio, it has longe been used by big
names such as Microsoft and Spotify.

There is now no reason for it not to be the standard for web audio, since you
can even fall back to Vorbis in Flash 8 via a non-native decoder. It's also
likely to get a boost in the pirate video market, even when paired with H.264
as a result of WebM introduction. It really could become mainstream for a
variety of uses.

The biggest drawback in the last few years has been the lack of support in
iPods. It will be interesting to see if Apple chooses to prevent you playing
Vorbis audio on your iPod Touch even if it caves and allows it for web audio.

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laut
Do any of the browsers current support streaming with the HTML5 video tag?

So that you don't have to download the entire video before playback can start.
And so that you can skip ahead and start playing something towards the end of
the video without downloading the whole video.

~~~
wmf
_So that you don't have to download the entire video before playback can
start._

That's called progressive downloading, and it would be totally stupid not to
do it.

 _And so that you can skip ahead and start playing something towards the end
of the video without downloading the whole video._

That's called seeking, which is harder. Firefox can do seeking if your Web
server supports byte ranges. It looks like Chrome does the same thing but I'm
not entirely sure.

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CoryMathews
Dear Steve Jobs, Why do you not support an "open web"? O yeah I know why..

