

Ask YouTube for Ogg support - tjr
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/youtube-ogg

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elblanco
I've never quite understood why the resistance to the various Ogg formats?

I certainly falls into that "good enough" category for encoding audio and
video, the same as Divx and mp3. And it appears to stream at rates a few
percentage points lower than the prevalent licensed formats.

My little Sansa clip player plays it quite happily and I like that I can stuff
more songs onto its little 4GB memory if I reencode everything in Ogg, with
really no perceptible different in sound. The few Ogg encoded videos I've seen
seem perfectly fine and take up less space and use less bandwidth off of my
disk to watch...

I was mystified when Google and Chrome went h264. Seems like lots of expensive
licenses for something that's cross platform and well supported with no real
expense associated with it.

seriously, why the hate?

~~~
jonknee
Hardware decoding makes h264 usable on low-power devices like phones which
Google sees as the future of the internet. It's technically superior and also
supported out of the box by 97% of new computers.

It's not a real surprise that Google built in support for h264--they have
petabytes of h264 video and sell phones that play h264 with built-in hardware
decoding. Oh and it looks better.

~~~
jrockway
_Hardware decoding makes h264 usable on low-power devices like phones which
Google sees as the future of the internet._

This is true. But, if I had to choose between paying $20 extra for a better
processor (that can play Theora) or $20 extra for a patent license (to legally
play h.264), I would pick the former. At least I can use the better processor
when I'm not watching video; the patent license only works for the 10 minutes
a year I feel like looking at Youtube on my phone.

 _It's technically superior and also supported out of the box by 97% of new
computers._

Nice statistic. What percentage of Internet users have "new computers",
though? (I work at a company with 300,000 employees. We still use Windows XP;
two versions behind the latest stable version of Windows!)

You are right that h.264 is technically superior to Theora. The Space Shuttle
is technically superior to my bicycle, but due to cost concerns, I have to
ride my bike to work rather than fly there on the space shuttle. Sometimes the
best solution is not the one you can afford.

(I can't afford an h.264 license. Or rather, I _won't_ afford it. I don't care
_that_ much about seeing a cat flushing a toilet on my phone.)

~~~
jonknee
> Nice statistic. What percentage of Internet users have "new computers",
> though? (I work at a company with 300,000 employees. We still use Windows
> XP; two versions behind the latest stable version of Windows!)

The same h.264 files can be played with Flash, which is ubiquitous on "old"
computers like you have at work. Everyone can watch now and when they upgrade
they can watch without needing Flash. Ogg doubles storage requirements for the
foreseeable future without any gain.

~~~
elblanco
I'm just curious, in a number crunching kind of way, what's the per-browser
cost for Google for Chrome vs. just buying more hard drives?

I'm sure somebody has done the math on this.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Part of the problem is that there's a cap on the fees. Google/Youtube and
other large conglomerates are already paying that cap ($5 million per year is
a figure I've seen thrown around) so they get a pricing advantage compared
with smaller startups.

This makes sense for those collecting the fees because the big players could
move the market by themselves if they switch so there's no use squeezing them
for money, when you can use them to lure in large numbers of smaller players.

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travisbell
Agreed. I think this should be re-titled, "Ask Firefox for H264 support".

With YouTube and Vimeo adopting h264 and not Ogg, I'd say I have a feeling I
know how this is going to end.

~~~
sailormoon
Agreed 100%. Mozilla has plenty of money from its Google ad revenue. They
should just do the reasonable thing and license h264. It can't be THAT
expensive.

The alternative is the continued domination of Flash. Is that what they really
want? Because that's what they're choosing to get.

I admire their principles but in the end it's the outcome that matters.

~~~
windsurfer
How do they license it for their derivatives?

~~~
sailormoon
I don't know, but c'mon, they're a $100m/yr foundation. They can find a way.
Maybe a plugin or something.

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mmastrac
Before dismissing Ogg, I suggest taking a look at a somewhat recent head-to-
head comparison:

<http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html>

It appears that Theora could easily replace H.263 as a low-end codec and would
be competitive with H.264 as a high-end codec.

~~~
jrockway
No DRM support. Media companies are not interested in "freedom", they are
interested in the opposite.

(Google is the same; they are just another media company. If you think Google
is about "openness", ask yourself why Google can crawl your site, but you
can't crawl Google's site.)

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guelo
Does anyone have any idea when the h264 related patents expire? If you recall
the big gif shitfest, the end result was that png was able to establish itself
but when the patent threat expired gif and png have been able to coexist fine.
I expet the same to happen here, theora uses this opportunity to establish
itself and then h264 and theora are able to coexist. Btw, fuck software
patents!

~~~
blasdel
Except that in that case GIF was a mediocre established format, and PNG was a
terrific new one. The GIF decoder was never encumbered, just the encoder.

In this case Theora is both mediocre and unestablished, which is not a winning
combination.

~~~
jrockway
Theora is not exactly mediocre, it just isn't the best. But the "best" is
expensive to license, and Theora is a reasonable substitute that is completely
Free.

People complain about the extra CPU power it takes to decode Theora, but if I
have to choose between paying extra for a more-powerful CPU or a patent
license, I would choose the former. At least I can make use of the more-
powerful CPU when I'm not watching videos of cats flushing the toilet.

~~~
axod
Surely more CPU power often equates to shorter battery life. Which really is
very important to most people, considering just how badly batteries still
suck.

So personally if it's a difference of battery life, I'd choose the one that
uses less power and gives me more time.

~~~
jrockway
If you are watching video constantly, then this is a concern. If your phone is
mostly sitting in your pocket waiting for the GSM signal to wake it up, then
it's irrelevant.

(And, I have a portable device that plays arbitrary video formats just fine on
a rather-big 5" screen for a whole transatlantic flight; 7-8 hours. So the
current technology is more than adequate, H.264 or not.)

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drivingmenuts
Why can't all of these browsers be format-neutral and have support done
through a plug-in? Leave it up to the end-user to decide what they want to
have running on their system?

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xal
Where can we ask Firefox for h264 support instead? The web will not support
two different video formats at the same time, the whole idea is madness.
Storage is expensive.

~~~
please
You would have to ask MPEG-LA for royalty free licensing for encoding,
decoding and any internet use of h264 and aac.

~~~
blasdel
Practically, you'd just need licensing for decoding if Mozilla wanted to
distribute the binary themselves.

Even they weren't shitheaded enough to remove their GIF decoder when the
encoder was revealed to be patent-encumbered.

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moron4hire
What value does this provide to me as a user? I'm not interested in formats
for formats' sake, neither am I - as a consumer - interested in "openness";
I'm interested in "workingness".

~~~
felixc
Right now, nothing. That's not why this is important.

Think about the consequences of this for just one moment. How much support and
developer time is Firefox going to lose if it can't play videos if/when
YouTube switches over fully and doesn't use Flash? How much support and
developer time is Linux going to lose if there are no browsers for it that can
play internet videos, if H.264 becomes the de-facto standard (note that only
Chrome works, not Chromium)? If you don't care about that at all, and are
happy using IE (or Chrome, these days) on Windows for ever, then by all means
move along, there is nothing for you to see here. The rest of us care.

~~~
blasdel
That's not true at all: the patent coverage has no practical effect.

Chromium supports _all_ the codecs your local ffmpeg install supports, if you
put symlinks to the libraries in /usr/lib/chromium-browser/. Everyone installs
it this way, and it actually supports way more codecs than the official Chrome
(Google didn't buy licenses for MPEG2, Xvid, etc.).

~~~
felixc
Thanks for that titbit -- I have to disagree that "everyone installs it this
way", because I certainly hadn't! (I installed on Ubuntu from the chromium-
daily launchpad ppa). That fix makes me feel a bit better, but it's still a
nasty blow against the idea of open and free formats.

Edit: I must be doing something wrong, because I can't get it to work. This
might be a distro/version/phase of moon-specific fix?

~~~
blasdel
Yeah, install the erroneously-named [1] chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree

[1] Ubuntu's default ffmpeg package has all the decoders turned on without
being 'nonfree'.

