

Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video - bcrescimanno
http://briancrescimanno.com/2010/03/17/dear-mozilla-please-dont-kill-html5-video/

======
docgnome
I like how Mozilla gets all the blame for refusing to support a non-free
solution, instead of Google, Apple, and Microsoft for choosing a proprietary
solution.

~~~
bcrescimanno
I'd personally contend that MS, Apple, and Google didn't "choose proprietary,"
they chose 1) the current market leading format 2) ...that has the most video
content available online already 3) ...that can be hardware accelarated 4)
...that offers the best quality to size ratio.

~~~
docgnome
You're right of course. Free vs Non-Free had nothing to do with it. I just
really hate how everyone is hating on Mozilla for making a choice that is
consistent with their principles.

~~~
blasdel
They have a custom auto-installer for Flash baked into Firefox, and they've
even distributed the binaries to it from addons.mozilla.org.

Nobody that hasn't already been wanking over it is going to start using
Theora. Authors will just fall back to Flash playing h.264 in mp4 containers
via HTTP like they've been doing for years, which Mozilla is eager to support.

There's nothing consistent about their principles.

~~~
dtf
They don't have to cough up $5 million to support Flash. That's a priniciple I
can understand.

~~~
blasdel
I wouldn't be surprised if they'd spent millions promoting Theora to the
exclusion of all else (they reinvent the wheel by linking directly with
liboggplay, instead of using libavcodec or the platform DS/QT/GS like everyone
else)

The salaries of all the cheerleaders and wheel-reinventors have to add up to
something substantial. They've got piles of Google cash — they stopped begging
for donations after their $60m search-referral windfall in 2006 got
publicized, but they've gotten secretive about their financials after that.

~~~
kinetik
Google will help you find more recent financial details. The 2008 financials
are right here: [http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/11/19/state-of-
mozilla-a...](http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/11/19/state-of-mozilla-
and-2008/)

~~~
blasdel
Thanks, that's a lot clearer than it used to be.

I had found the 1099s a while back, but they stopped showing the whole picture
after the Mozilla Corporation was created to take the revenue.

------
jmillikin
You should be directing this towards Microsoft and Apple; all of my videos
work fine in Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and Opera but currently do not in IE
(54.5% market share) or Safari (5.3% share). If IE9 supports Theora, then
that's one less browser which will require Java- or Silverlight-based
fallbacks.

H.264 is great, and I look forward to being able to use it in 15 years or
so[1]. But the only reasonable codecs I can use _today_ are Theora and Dirac.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-
the...](http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-
html-5-video-codec-debate.ars)

------
evgen
Don't worry, Mozilla is taking a principled stand that will become the impetus
for their final jump into irrelevance. If IE9 does what their recent noises
regarding HTML5 have been suggesting then Mozilla will join Opera in the "cute
but useless" category and Chrome & IE9 will divvy up the Firefox marketshare
within three years.

~~~
CoreDumpling
Sorry, my sarcasm meter needs some calibration. While HTML5 video driving
forward web standards is certainly nice, I can't even bring myself to believe
that we will rid ourselves of the rotting carcass that is IE6 within the next
three years, let alone Flash as a video delivery platform. I don't think
Mozilla feels threatened yet, but we'll see if they change their minds once
they see this affecting their bottom line.

Strangely enough, my gripes with Firefox have driven me to Opera, despite the
"cute but useless" label you have slapped on it in such a cavalier fashion.

~~~
jmillikin
Opera is sort of "cute but useless" -- on some sites I maintain for non-
technical users, Opera has a smaller market share than IE5. IE6 will probably
be around until we're all dead of age.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I'm guessing your not in Eastern Europe?

I'm guessing you are in the US since their denizens are famous for assuming
the world stops outside their borders.

Opera + Chrome + Mozilla (i.e. Theora supporting) market share varies by
region but is probably over 50% in every european country bar the UK and that
will probably topple with the browser ballot.

~~~
jmillikin
_Opera + Chrome + Mozilla (i.e. Theora supporting) market share varies by
region but is probably over 50% in every european country bar the UK_

Why do Opera users always say something like this? "Opera (and the important
browsers) has some huge market share!" 0.2 + 18 + 43 > 50, but the 0.2 really
doesn't matter.

~~~
driax
Wikipedia says that: "[Opera has] 20–25% market share in Russia, 25-30%
Ukraine, and 5–9% in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic"

A bit more than 0.2

~~~
carussell
Why rely on "Wikipedia says"? Why not attribute it to the source Wikipedia
uses?

------
ja2ke
Firefox has been slowly winning Joe consumers in the past few years by simply
doing it better. Faster, less complicated, no spyware, displays everything.
Regular users don't give a crap about the ideology behind any of those
decisions, they just cared that FF sucks less than IE in almost every
measurable way.

From a consumer standpoint, not playing the video format everyone else plays
goes against why so many started using FF in the first place.

I don't care if Theora is great, it's not what people are using right now.
Maybe Mozilla can fight this battle on the next go-round, but right now
they're the odd man out in a split which has all major browsers and many many
content creators on the other side.

If Mozilla was Microsoft they could maybe try this, but they're not, and I
think many people are frustrated by this video thing because to people who
"just want good software," that was the message behind adopting FF from day
one. Not militant idealism or everything should be free hippie coder talk or
anything else - the impression they _gave_ at least, was of practical and
clean decisions to uncomplicated the lives of average users. Sometimes that
means going with the flow, even if only for the time being.

The moment they reintroduce "why doesn't this just work" into the equation,
they fail at the expectation they spent so much trying to create when Firefox
first caught on. This fight is weird because it feels like "Mozilla the
ideological open source organization" is battling against "Mozilla the
practical and uncomplicated software for your previously complicated and
annoying life" marketing campaign.

------
wazoox
This is utterly stupid. Mozilla can't support H264 and distribute freely its
browser and conform to the (moronic) US law. This guy can whine as long as he
want, there is no way around. Mozilla is a real US company with real money,
not a couple of hackers in a garage; unfortunately they must comply to the
unfortunate state of patent laws.

~~~
ubernostrum
I'm going to go round to the homes of everyone who assumes that shipping a
hard-wired copy of a codec in a browser is the only way to support video, and
smack them all upside the head with a printout of the source to gstreamer.

It won't cause them any sort of enlightenment, but it will make me feel a bit
better.

~~~
avar
The issue isn't that it's technically impractical to support H.264 but rather
that it's legally impractical.

Sure you could just offload the problem to the operating system via something
like GStreamer but that just moves the target, it doesn't eliminate it. It
just means anyone who distributes your OS gets into trouble rather than your
browser distributor.

This is about eliminating the possibility of submarine patents for an
essential feature like video, not just moving the target around.

~~~
planettrash
I don't think that is a problem. Part of the price of the OS goes into the
codec.

Open Solaris tries to get around this, by getting you to pay for the codec
after install.

Of course not paying is the ideal outcome, for most consumers.

------
fnid2
In the end, this was a good move from Google, Apple, and Microsoft if they
want to kill off FireFox. Why do any of those three want FF to survive?
They're rich, they got money. They want to dominate the browser market. FF is
all of their enemies, so in this instance, they are friends.

I don't see anyway that FF could compete against them all if people can't
watch videos in the browser.

Additionally, they are all owners of massive content sites that will be able
to distribute the content as well, so it's a win win for them. They beat out
FF as a browser and they beat out rival content distributors.

~~~
rimantas
Why would anyone want to kill something that looks suicidal anyway?

------
fungi
this really isn't fair

mozilla is in no position to be directly supporting h264, to suggest otherwise
is just naive. its not a free codec and they simply can't afford to bet their
future on the liability of massive royalties when the licensing regime changes
(and it will).

their reasons for not indirectly supporting h264 via the OS is in my view
valid but weak, would assume that this will be overcome with an extension of
some sort in the future.

in any case encoding video twice really isn't a big deal.

~~~
ubernostrum
To suggest that the only way to handle H.264 is to directly write and ship a
codec for it is such an uninformed position that I'm surprised you're sitting
at a positive score.

Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media
framework with support available for H.264. Mozilla's policy is to refuse to
delegate to the OS for media handling, largely so that they'll have a
political bargaining chip to try to push Theora on everyone else.

In other words, this is not a pragmatic or economic decision by Mozilla; it is
purely an ideological decision, because they could -- if they chose -- support
H.264 video easily and at zero financial cost to themselves and their users.
What we should be talking about, then, is whether this is a good ideological
stand to take.

(and, personally, I think it's the wrong stand at the wrong time; Mozilla
should be holding off from making _any_ decisions until the Bilski case is
decided, because it may well turn out that there's no such thing as a software
patent in the US)

~~~
buster
So, then can you enlighten us a bite more? Personally i have read pretty much
every kind of "myth" about mpeg licensing. One blog post i remember was
"according to their terms you (theoretically) would have to pay when a friend
sends a video with copyrighted material to you" which more or less sounds like
"wherever there is mpeg video they have the right to demand fees" (because
even your holiday movie may contain a copyrighted soundtrack).

According to
[http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalti...](http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-
what-you-need-to-know.html) there are "royalties for pay-per-view or
subscription video". And this is just what is happening in the internet all
over the place. Firefox can't even know if you look a "free" broadcast or just
paid for an online stream, so they just have to pay to support this codec?

And in the end, it's not at last the uncertainty about the codec. MPEG-LA
could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with
HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't. Because there
probably is quite a good amount of money to be earned from fees.

Screw that H.264 stuff, support theora or dirac and problems are solved.

~~~
ubernostrum
Well, you'll notice I was talking about the point of view of a browser vendor,
because H.264 licensing is irrelevant to that use case: the right thing to do
is delegate to the operating system's media framework, and let codec support
and licensing be the OS vendor's problem.

But since you mention it:

 _MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go
ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't._

Personally I'm against having HTML5 specify _any_ codec of any sort. HTML 4
and XHTML 1.0 are each over ten years old now, and HTML5 won't be broadly
usable as a replacement for at least another year or two; given the rate of
development in video codecs, mandating one in a spec with that sort of
expected lifespan would simply be stupid.

But it's worth pointing out that MPEG-LA is currently exempting H.264-encoded
online video from royalties (so long as it's provided free of charge to users
-- hence YouTube and other video sites don't have to pay every time a video is
played), and will continue to do so until at least 2015 (by which point the
whole question of software patents may be moot), so rushing to draw lines in
the sand now is -- as I already said -- rather premature.

~~~
buster
Last time i checked there a lot of video services out there with
subscription/premium service. Vimeo has premium subscription.

Ok, so you don't want to specify the codec. Technically a good reason. But
think about it, what will happen then? MS will support wmv by default, Apple
will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora. This is a freaking
nightmare for every enduser! Now on a desktop you can probably tell the user
to install the correct decoder (my family/mother/older people certainly would
never be able to do that!). But on a phone? So Windows Mobile 7 will ship with
"hardcoded" wmv support? iPhone with quicktime?

As i told you, this is not technical, it's political. Now i don't know you,
but when you have ever worked in a bigger revenue driven software company
every f*cking decision is first made by money. It doesnt matter if something
is technically the best solution as long as another solution provides a
"benefit" in terms of money, marketshare, whatever the manager thinks will
drive the competition away. MS in particular has proven to be driven by such
decisions in the past, why would they change now?

~~~
ubernostrum
_Last time i checked there a lot of video services out there with
subscription/premium service._

Vimeo doesn't charge to _watch_ videos, so far as I know, and that's what
triggers the licensing exemption.

 _But think about it, what will happen then? MS will support wmv by default,
Apple will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora._

If HTML5 were to mandate Theora support, that part of the spec would simply be
ignored by browser vendors who don't want to support Theora. Thus the mandate
or lack of mandate in the spec produces no practical difference whatsoever in
the end result: Apple's browsers would do H.264, Mozilla's browsers would do
Theora, etc., etc.

 _But on a phone?_

Again, it seems unlikely that anyone other than Mozilla will bother with
Theora on mobile devices. Apple and Nokia have already taken pretty clear
stances against supporting Theora, for example, so what good would it do to
put a mandate in the spec? It'll just be ignored.

 _As i told you, this is not technical, it's political._

You seem to have a misunderstanding of how web standards actually work;
without buy-in from the companies which will implement them, the standards
might as well not exist at all. That's why HTML5 currently doesn't mandate a
video codec; originally it required Theora support, but several major players
basically said "if you leave that in there we're just going to ignore it".

Since this is a recurring problem with what you seem to be saying, what's your
solution? Any approach to video codecs must take into account the fact that
browser vendors can't be forced to ship an implementation of any particular
codec, and will make their own decisions independently of what you might like
them to do. As far as I can see right now, delegating to the operating
system's media framework is the only way to get the sort of broad support
that's needed, since those frameworks have to ship with a wide range of codecs
already.

(and, honestly, the manual codec install really only turns out to be an issue
with Theora; Windows and OS X both ship pretty much everything else out of the
box)

------
Robin_Message
> I hope you can at least agree that going from two proprietary formats to one
> is a marked improvement.

I think I'd argue one proprietary format is worse than two in terms of lock-
in, monopoly power and misaligned incentives.

~~~
bcrescimanno
Not when, in the case of two formats, the formats aren't competing and one, in
fact, includes the other.

------
DannoHung
Things I don't understand:

* Fork?

* H.264 HTML Video support via a plugin?

Why aren't these valid solutions?

~~~
allyt
Because you need to pay licensing fees measured in "millions of USD per year"
if you're going to distribute software which decodes H.264.

~~~
ubernostrum
Or you just delegate to the OS, which either already ships a licensed copy of
the codec (Windows and OS X) or has users who ignore patents and install
unlicensed codecs (Linux). By doing this you incur a whopping license fee
of... zero dollars, because licensing becomes someone else's problem.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
It's not someone else's problem if your stated mission is to be "dedicated to
promoting and preserving an open, shared and innovative web."

It's like a shareholder owned corporation deciding that making money is
someone else's problem.

~~~
ubernostrum
It is an ideological issue; look at my other comments and you'll see me saying
that.

My problem with comments like the one I was replying to is that they refuse to
see this; there is an easy solution to the _financial_ issue of codec
licensing, but it keeps getting thrown out as a red herring, when the focus
should be on whether Mozilla's ideological stance is a good thing.

~~~
allyt
_they refuse to see this_

Nah, just hadn't read up/thought about the issue enough, thanks for
explaining. I'm actually a bit of a supporter of software patents, as they
give business reason to invest boatloads of money in things like H.264 to
begin with.

------
tmsh
I imagine I'm missing something. But why couldn't Mozilla use an extension
that supports H264? Similar to Ubuntu's nonfree packages?

I imagine the HTML5 video tags are pretty deep in Gecko, but surely they could
'pave the way' with a clear interface for such an extension. And then use one
that is developed by others. Isn't that one of the advantages of having a
standardized <video> tag?

Reading this: [http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-
codec...](http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/)

It sounds like Mozilla is worried about (a) encouraging a non-free web and (b)
passing on licensing fees to other people who use their product downstream.
But surely there is less risk in being 'side-stream' so to speak with licensed
technologies, esp. under a standardized markup. Anyway, curious legal issue.

~~~
pingou
But who will make this extension ? Who will pay 5 millions $ each year to use
H264 on Firefox ? If H264 become standard, every browser will have to pay the
license fee. What if a new team of developers decide that all browsers sucks
and they want to create their own, just like the Mozilla team did ? They will
have to pay 5 millions if they want to distribute a browser that people could
really use (almost nobody would use a browser that doesn't play their favorite
videos).

~~~
tpz
"Who will pay 5 millions $ each year to use H264 on Firefox ?"

I've already paid for my H.264 licenses. Now I just want to use them. The PC
to my left has a video card with licensed H.264 that I paid for and free
software that harnesses it, the Mac in front of me has both a video card with
licensed H.264 and a licensed software decoder and I paid for both, the
Windows 7 VM running in the Mac even has a licensed H.264 decoder that I paid
for, the phone to my right has licensed H.264 that I paid for, heck the linux-
based set-top box in the living room has hardware in it with licensed H.264
decoding and as I'm sure you can guess I'll point out that I paid for that
license too. :)

"If H264 become standard, every browser will have to pay the license fee."

Why? I just want Firefox to let me use the licenses I have already paid for.

All they have to do is defer to the appropriate operating system -level
decoding support as many have suggested. That they are refusing to do so
suggests to me that this has nothing to do with licensing fees and has
everything to do with something else we've not quite uncovered yet.

At the end of the day, though, unless the Mozilla folks change their course I
can easily see techies supporting family and/or business by saying "just
install Chrome" the same way they used to (and to an extent still do, I
suppose) say "just install Firefox" when their supported userbase complained
about IE. The real risk now is that even if in the end Mozilla's issue is
purely one of ideology it won't stop them from having become irrelevant in the
process.

~~~
cookiecaper
The browser has to take responsibility for its formats. Offloading to the OS
is all fine and good if you have a native H.264 decoder installed, but only
Windows 7 and OS X only ship with that. Most users out there are still using
XP. Most users are not going to understand if Firefox comes up and says "Hey
buddy you need to install some codec from OS vendor to watch this, teehee",
and they'll just switch to something else, so it's kind of useless in that
regard.

------
Qz
I'm so glad the patent system is spurring creativity and innovation.

~~~
mkyc
It seems to have gotten us h264. The variant that isn't patented is clearly
inferior - look at the screenshots.

~~~
andrewf
Theora is patented. On2 granted people the right to use their patented
technology without fear of legal reprisal. <http://theora.org/faq/#24>

------
nivals
Keep Mozilla patent free. The HTML5 video jockeys want Flash dead more than
they want the future of the internet to be open, they are being blinded by
short term problems.

Support Mozilla for making the tough, but correct choice.

------
freetard
Mozilla is waiting for google to open source On2's codec.

~~~
jimmyjim
It isn't in Google's long-term interest to do any such thing for its future
expansion. Especially with the news of Android on TV's, it would seem that
it'll have to cave in to DRM-encumbered technologies in order to play ball
with big media.

~~~
freetard
Having an open codec doesn't prevent at all using DRM.

------
planettrash
I am lost in this debate.

If the decoder is a paid for plugin. Then it makes sense for it not to be
shipped.

Why can't Google buy out the h.264 tech and give it to us all?

Why do we need the video tag anyway?

Doesn't it make more sense to use existing codecs that already sit on the
system? Why bundle the codecs in the browser, wouldn't it be better to work on
a common architecture that can interface with codecs?

------
jsz0
I think the Mozilla folks are just trying to make a point here but ultimately
it's hard to see how they back it up against IE/WebKit. They'll have to give
in eventually or they'll be left behind.

------
jrockway
Dear Apple, Microsoft, and Google: Please don't kill HTML5 Video. ("Why should
I change? He's the one who sucks!")

------
anr
How old is h264? When will the patents expire?

