
Mozilla: Stick to Your Ideals, Shun H264 - skorks
http://www.osnews.com/story/23031/Mozilla_Stick_to_Your_Ideals_Shun_H264
======
godDLL
I've grown increasingly annoyed with Thom over the last two years. The man is
an ego-maniac.

 _The problem is that there's no standard codec for HTML5. The main
contestants are H264 and Theora, and so far, it seems like on the browser side
of things, Theora is winning out; with a Theora video you can cover Firefox,
Chrome, and Opera users - whereas with H264 you miss out on Firefox and Opera
users. Since Firefox is by far the largest HTML5 browser, encoding your video
in H264 alone is shooting yourself in the foot._

Theora isn't in any position remotely favourable. And definitely not "winning
out".

 _It helps that H264-specific chips are available on just about any mobile
device, whereas Theora (or other possible patent-free contestants, like Dirac)
does not have this luxury._

Dedicated mobile hardware is a necessity, not a luxury, not until li-ion
batteries are superseded by a new breed of whatever with 10 times the charge.

~~~
FooBarWidget
I've always found the mobile hardware argument a bit strange. I've never
watched any full-length movies on my smartphone, the screen is simply too
small to be comfortable. I might watch short Youtube videos once in a while
but does it _really_ drain the battery significantly if 3 minutes of video is
not hardware accelerated? I find that hard to believe, especially considering
that Wifi and 3G already drain tons of battery.

I'd rather watch full-length movies on my laptop, which has a programmable GPU
meaning that it's possible for someone to make a hardware accelerated Theora
decoder.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
They can write software to give you "hardware" accelerated Theora decoders on
your phone too, as long as the phone maker lets them. Apple doesn't.

Nokia (who are actively campaigning against Theora) do, so voila:

[http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-
ti-c64x-dsp...](http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp-
and-omap3/)

------
ZeroGravitas
This is harsh and misleading:

 _"Opera's refusal to license H264 hasn't got anything to do with ideals,
obviously (Opera being proprietary and all), but the Norwegian browser makers
believes the license is simply too expensive."_

a) it's possible to be idealistic about royalty-free standards without also
being idealistic about open source (personally I think both are somewhat
pragmatic choices too but whatever), and more importantly:

b) Opera was actually the ones who proposed the idea of the video tag and the
use of Theora 3 years ago:

<http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2007/03/05/1>

------
jsz0
Mozilla: Stick to your ideals but don't fall on your sword. The openness
argument is worth making right now before HTML5 video takes off. It probably
won't radically slow the adoption of HTML5 video, or change H264 being the
preferred codec, but they might have a chance to make Theora and equal player.
They just need to flip WebKit and Microsoft would probably follow. Not totally
impossible. Worth the fight in my opinion. What Mozilla needs to be careful of
is taking it too far and weakening their market share reducing diversity of
browsers if HTML5 video really delivers a better experience than Flash video
(and it probably will) This would only serve to strengthen Apple, Google and
Microsoft's role in controlling the browser. Mozilla needs to know when
they're beat and live to fight another day. I give it another 12-18 months or
whenever IE9 hits Windows Update.

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DeusExMachina
It seems to me that the author purposely avoided to discuss the reasons
against Mozilla not adopting H264:

\- Firefox may be the most used browser on computers, but on mobile devices
H264 is clearly winning. And that's where companies want to go right now.

\- A lot (the majority?) of online videos are already encoded using H264.

\- Flash is also proprietary. So, if you shun H264 for your ideals, you should
do so also with flash.

~~~
Qz
Flash is provided to Mozilla as a third party plugin, so Mozilla doesn't
actually have to deal with the licensing fees. If they use H264 for the video
element, Mozilla has to license it for their own software.

~~~
stralep
Why not allow third parties to perform playing <video> tag?

~~~
wmf
Mozilla won't allow any kind of plugins for <video> because they want to force
you to use Theora. You're getting freedom, and you're going to like it.
(Because who doesn't want freedom?) The cost of the H.264 license is not the
issue.

~~~
Qz
Now you're just making assumptions. As far as I know, there isn't a single
browser that uses plugins for displaying elements defined as part of the HTML
specification. With <video> as part of the HTML5 spec, any browser supporting
HTML5 is supposed to render <video> tags without relying on 3rd party support.
This is the entire reason for <video> existing in the first place.

~~~
wmf
I don't think this is an assumption:
[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_fr...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html)
[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directsh...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html)

I always thought it was a mistake that <img> wasn't extensible (e.g. Mozilla
would display PNG with <img> but for IE you'd need <embed> or <object>) and I
think that mistake is being perpetuated with <video>.

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FooBarWidget
I'm pretty tired of all the Mozilla bashing and all the H.264 praising. I'd
say: give the people their damn H.264, let them face the consequences 10 years
later and then tell them "I told you so".

~~~
houseabsolute
Presumably similar consequences to the ones we suffered for using GIF and JPEG
images, and MP3s? Those were tough, I must admit.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
JPEG was specifically created to a be royalty-free standard. JPEG 2000 is the
more advanced format with patent royalties that no-one uses on the web for
that very reason.

~~~
varjag
No it wasn't. There was arithmetic encoding option, which was owned and
patented by IBM and was not royalty-free. As result everyone implementing
codecs had to stick with less efficient, but free Huffman encoding.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Interesting, so that amends my statement to:

Baseline profile JPEG was specifically created to be a royalty-free standard.
JPEG-arithmetic is the more advanced optional extension to the format with
patent royalties that no-one uses on the web for that very reason.

(Though to be fair to IBM, though the situation appears vaguer than I'd like,
it seems they were happy to licence their patents royalty-free, but other
companies that also held patents weren't:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#US_patents_on...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#US_patents_on_arithmetic_coding,))

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mikeryan
There's a flip side to this issue that adds a layer of complexity.

Right now video content owners are encoding video (at a fairly significant
cost) to (generally) H264 for streaming media. This includes a wide variety of
platforms - not just the web, mobile, internet connected TVs and the new over
the top boxes like Roku all support H264 so it has already become a defacto
standard for encoding.

Having to re-encode an existing media library to something else like Theora
would be a significant cost to content providers with large library archives
of content.

~~~
FooBarWidget
Why does anybody need to recode anything? Youtube didn't had to recode all its
H263 video to H264 when they switched. You can have both at the same time and
only encode newer things in new codecs.

I don't understand why most of the tech community thinks that it's a black-
and-white situation. I don't believe that any video site will have the guts to
force everything to be H.264 HTML5 video - did you forget that 70% of the
visitors, those using IE, cannot watch HTML5 video regardless of the codec?
No, if they support HTML5 they'll ensure that they have a Flash fallback and
things will work fine on Firefox and Opera even if H.264 is the codec.

~~~
dsturnbull
Yeah that's the point. HTML5 + h264 by default, Flash + h264 for legacy
browsers (like Firefox).

------
ikari
H.264 predominance in web video will probably not affect Windows, Mac or Linux
users but it will certainly affect BSD and alternative OS users.

I can't see flash content now because my OS of preference doesn't have the
plugin. I've been doing fine with out YouTube videos and flash sites. I think
I will also be fine with a bigger library of content I can see under Theora
and more standard compliant sites even if I can't see H.264 content. But I
think Firefox should use the available multimedia frameworks in the different
OSes and leave video decoding to the users system.

------
fleitz
Even if Mozilla sticks to their guns it doesn't prevent someone from writing a
plugin that uses the H264 codecs shipping in Windows & Mac, or x264 on Linux.
Sure, it won't be "officially" supported, just like flash doesn't ship with
Firefox, but everyone has it.

H264 is baked into silicon, there it's already been decided. Holding out for
Theora is like holding out for ogg. Yeah, Wikipedia might use it, but no one
else will.

~~~
duskwuff
Actually, the video implementation in Firefox makes it extremely difficult to
add support for other codecs. Word has it this is _specifically_ so you can't
easily add H264 support. So yeah.

~~~
krakensden
"Word has it"? This is an open source project, you can find the reasoning on
the bug tracker and the mailing list. I would like to call 'bullshit'.

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kogir
Why can't firefox just use the already licensed codec for H264 present on the
majority of OSs if it's present? Then they'll have support for Therora and
H264 on OS X and Windows, and Theora support on Linux.

Costs them nothing and is a win for most of their users.

Am I missing something obvious? I hope they're using DirectShow and Quicktime
already anyway for the hardware acceleration.

~~~
gorog
And why can't other browsers integrate an Ogg codec? It would cost them
nothing. The img tag supports several formats, so why should browser
developers decide which video codec web companies should use? Especially if
their choice is one that costs millions per year. Mozilla is right to promote
the free option for us all. They should add Matroska/Dirac/Vorbis in the
future, just like they support both JPEG and PNG.

~~~
cracki
why is codec support even a browser issue? the system is supposed to manage my
codecs, and the browser is supposed to use system APIs to play any and all
videos i have a codec for.

i'm guessing this is because linux doesn't have a single video codec API, but
everything has to explicitly link against codec libraries...

~~~
vetinari
Desktop distributions do have single video codec API (gstreamer).

But browsers are unlikely to use OS-provided libraries for anything downloaded
over net, if they can avoid it. If there is a exploit found in third-party
code, the browsers cannot work around it and they get the blame (remember the
Firefox-on-Windows shell exploit?).

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InclinedPlane
I predict this to be just about as successful as the attempts to get everyone
to switch over to ogg vorbis as a sound file format.

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yesbabyyes
This quote by Sidney Morgenbesser seems apt. About pragmatism:

"It's all very well in theory but it doesn't work in practice."

------
hackermom
What a stupid, contradictive, misleading and deceitful reply from Mozilla
(surprised? they are after all interested in stuffing their pockets). And,
yeah, I _will_ stick to my ideals: good video; H.264. Please stay out of
HTML5, Theora.

add.: I really misread both source and addressee on this one. Seems I cannot
manage both breakfast and news digest at the same time. I'll still stick with
H.264, though... and breakfast.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
This is quite stupid, contradictive, misleading and deceitful but it's not
written by Mozilla, it's by a blogger on an obscure news and community site.
Therefore the people being asked to stick to their ideals is Mozilla, not you.

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pragmatic
Umm, FireFox is already losing market share. After I switched to chrome (and
everyone I know have, including my 60 year father, sister, co-workers, etc,
anyone who I can show it too, the speed is a killer feature).

How irrelevant would they like to become?

