
Daring Fireball: Mozilla, Video, and Mobile Computing - barredo
http://daringfireball.net/2010/03/mozilla_video_mobile
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ssp
_Put another way, “open and better” is a recipe for success; “open but worse”
is a recipe for obscurity._

This is equivalent to: _"better" is a recipe for success; "worse" is a recipe
for obscurity. Openness is irrelevant._

~~~
mrshoe
No, it's not. Given the choice between "better" and "worse", you (and Mozilla)
would always choose "better". However, if the options are "closed and better"
and "open but worse", you might choose the latter.

Openness isn't irrelevant; it's Mozilla's reason for choosing "worse".

~~~
philwelch
That's kind of a confused response. Openness _is_ irrelevant to whether users
will adopt something, even if it's relevant to Mozilla. In other words,
Mozilla cares about irrelevant factors.

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necrecious
All the talk of h264 and not one word about AAC? h264 license is actually very
affordable for small companies (free for less than 100,000 users) and large.
(capped fee per year) AAC is less friendly.

~~~
wmf
"Maximum Annual Payment $32,000 per PC Software Product"

<http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/AAC_fees.cfm>

This sounds dirt cheap.

~~~
necrecious
It is just more complicated. What count as a product? Is it per platform, per
version? Is what you are building an enabling software?

Also, notice that there is no free provision for low volume, or internet
broadcast.

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jsz0
Can anyone think of a case in recent memory where the fear mongering over a
proprietary, wisely used, web format lived up to the doom & gloom predictions?
Seems like it usually turns out fine in the end or, over time, a more open
solution wins out on technical merits and better/cheaper accessibility of
encoders. In 2010 I still see animated GIFS on a fairly regular basis, MP3s,
even RealMedia which thankfully VLC plays well. I don't think it's a bad thing
Mozilla is trying to make a point here about open formats but they shouldn't
take it too far or they risk really hurting the web by committing market share
suicide and limiting the diversity of commonly used browsers.

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wmf
"between 2002 and 2004 Forgent was able to obtain about US$105 million by
licensing their [JPEG] patent to some 30 companies."
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Patent_issues>) Sounds pretty gloomy to
me, yet regular people never noticed.

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ZeroGravitas
You hear this "open is only better if it's technically better" argument all
the time but any popular, open tech I can think of either was or is worse than
the alternative.

At what point did Gecko become better than IE? Where would we be without the
people who worked on it then? When the technically superior alternative was
left to rot because it suited the owner's business reasons.

KHTML? Webkit? Wikipedia? Linux? MySQL? LLVM?

I'm honestly struggling to think of one that was better straight out the gate.
Even if I think of one it probably built on one that wasn't.

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e1ven
The Theora/VP3 code cannot be substantially improved without breaking
backwards compatibility. While there are some gains to be made with better
encoders, some of the choices, such as small fixed block-size, permanently
hobble the codec.

There are those far more qualified than I to go into the technical details (I
think there was an article by one of the FFMPEG devs), but the situation is
not analogous to early versions of Webkit, Linux or Mozilla.

This is not a situation where it can substantially improve over time, which is
one of the major advantages of an Open Format.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
What is stopping them from revving the spec and breaking compatability?

Is it all those hardware implementations? Clearly not. And existing content
would still play just newly encoded material wouldn't play on old encoders.
Very similar to H.264 profiles, where Main and High profiles won't play on
iPhones.

I would suggest they haven't done this yet because they are making rapid
progress without having the need do so. The longer they leave it the more they
can improve when they break either by taking advantage of more expired patents
or just more experience.

If the argument is that Theora can't be revved (for some unspecified reason)
and that limits progress then that argument should be made so it can be
challenged. It does not follow directly from anything said in the article.

~~~
wmf
_What is stopping them from revving the spec and breaking compatability?_

Basically that's Dirac, except they started from scratch rather than improve
incrementally from Theora. There was also Sun OMS Video (which has probably
been canceled) that attempted to incrementally improve H.261 in a patent-free
way.

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ZeroGravitas
He claims Mozilla only have a mobile browser on Maemo. Which is both untrue,
as they've got builds for WinMo and Android, and a bit cheeky for an Apple
pundit since it's Apple that is the main blocker for that happening on their
platform.

(Mozilla claim they do better on Javascript benchmarks than the bundled
Android browser, which is surprising).

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troymc
He forgot the Wikipedia factor: Wikipedia probably won't be using H.264
anytime soon, and it's one of the top sites in terms of traffic.

~~~
jacobolus
Currently, Wikipedia is 95% text and 5% images, with negligible amounts of
audio and video served up with a cumbersome almost broken Java thing. Barring
substantial changes, I’d go so far as to say Wikipedia’s audio and video are
irrelevant to users and browser vendors.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
If you're getting the Java thing it means your browser doesn't have native
Theora support. You should upgrade or install an appropriate plugin.

(They've also done a lot of work to improve the Java fallback but it's not
gone live yet).

