Firefox 3.5 Beta Boosts Open Video Standard 281
bmullan writes "Dailymotion, one of the world's largest video sites, announced support for Open Video. They've put out a press release, a blog post on the new Open Video site, and an HTML 5 demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5. (You can get the Firefox 3.5 beta here.) Dailymotion is automatically transcoding all of the content that their users create, and expect to have around 300,000 videos in the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats."
Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, bye bye karma... but..
How is this a Linux story/Firefox story? It's a new HTML standard. All browsers will support it, eventually.
Yeah, screw you too (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera has supported for a while now. Stupid site says I'm not allowed to open it cause I'm not using Firefox.
Hmm, does this seem familiar to anyone?
Styling the UI? (Score:5, Insightful)
How does the open video format handle styling the UI? One of the reasons sites love flash for video so much is that it gives them complete control over how the video is presented, e.g. available controls, positions, colors and themes to match the rest of the page, etc. Then you have the more intrusive things, like Youtube's overlay ads, text captions, and suggested videos after playback finishes.
If open video means a widget that site owners have no control over, like Quicktime video embedding, then commercial site operators aren't going to be too keen on it.
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I would assume that most users would prefer not to have to download Flash plugins..
Most users are probably more inclined to download the flash plugin that happens automatically for them versus downloading a whole new browser to get HTML5 video tags to work.
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why promote an "inferior" product? (Score:5, Insightful)
Theora is great for embedded devices like cell phones since it is "cheap" when it comes to cpu cycles. For top quality video, Dirac should be used. I wonder when Firefox, Opera or Konqueror will have native support for Dirac.
Sometimes worse is better (Score:5, Insightful)
In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.
But as of 2009, Thusnelda is coming soon. The Thusnelda encoder has already fixed [slashdot.org] some of the problems that Theora inherited from On2's VP3, thanks in part to the flexibility that Xiph added to the Theora bitstream format. Sure, it's still inferior to x264 (50% bigger rate for same distortion as of about a month ago), but it's improving.
Why not wait until the standard is "up to par" with the likes of Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe's Flash?
Because sometimes worse is better [wikipedia.org]. For example, worse can be better because it's Free and thus more available for deployment on devices other than PCs.
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not really the fault of Firefox or HTML5, it's the fault of the site, but really I do think HTML5 is indeed a step backwards.
It reduces separation of the content and presentation layers and it increases parsing ambiguity by relaxing standards. Of course, ambiguity is bound to lead to a performance hit too, albeit perhaps rather small so may not really matter. This is really not great news as far as the web is concerned as it's exactly what we've been fighting against for the last decade with reasonable success - the web is certainly more portable and accessible now than it used to be.
From what I've read previously of the HTML5 spec and comments surrounding it the idea is to make HTML development more accessible, but I'm not sure this is the right way to go about things. If we're going to increase the amount of people who can publish on the internet then a better option seems to be to improve the applications for doing this - whether they're web applications (i.e. Wordpress to Twitter to Facebook to MySpace) or whether we simply make better quality WYSIWYG desktop applications. If we do this on a spec that's better built for the real web developers - those who really need clear separation of concerns to ensure their sites are truly enterprise ready then we'll undoubtedly end up with a much better web.
With tags like and so forth added it's meant to increase clarity, but really it doesn't, because ultimately it will never fulfil everyone's needs, someone will want or so on, this means they're back to something like
meaning half your markup is in the div format and half not, or you could just ignore the feature but then effectively you may as well just carry on using XHTML anyway.
Let web developers develop and let users use applications to publish - it's worked so well as many Web 2.0 successes have shown.
Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall.
Standards should be lightweight, extensible and well defined, I would argued HTML5 is flawed in all of these areas, whereas with XHTML that is much less the case. HTML5 simply makes worse the very reasons we started to move away from HTML to XHTML in the first place.
Re:finally (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Safari supports the HTML5 video tag, but doesn't include Theora support because Apple considers it a patent lawsuit magnet.
Ummm... Apple doesn't include it because it REALLY doesn't want a free video/audio codec becoming widely used.
Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs (Score:2, Insightful)
Neither flash nor h264 will be opened unless competing alternatives gets strong enough. Implement html5 tags as options in your site and hope for the best.
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:4, Insightful)
So...you're limiting Opera to official/final releases but Firefox Beta is fine?
How cute...
Major Typo in the Article Title (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe I misread, but it seems to me that they're claiming this is somehow standards-based. This is a working draft that's basically implemented in a single browser... and it's not even complete. It's just amazing how everyone has already started trashing Microsoft for not implementing this "standard" when it's a complete paper tiger. This is an unfinished standard with no means of standard implementation.
This is not "standards" behavior. This is calling random firefox features "standards" while Opera and Webkit developers dig through the source code to create awkwardly almost-consistent implementations of the draft. This particular instance, where DailyMotion is concerned, is even branding HTML 5 as a Firefox feature. This is not what I have in mind when I think of an open web.
This is really not impressive. The w3c is doing a terrible job of commoditizing dynamic content with this HTML 5 spec. It's jam packed with horrific cruft like the theora decoder, another rapidly changing and incomplete format that will now have to be picked up, developed, and optimized by any web organization that doesn't want to get lynched by the freetard brigade for not being "standards-compliant". It's amazing how they've found a careful balance to somehow simultaneously cock-block progress on video development while still being unusably bleeding edge with non-existent-to-partial implementations of technology.
If you really want to know how many of these BS standards are actually "Complete", use IE 8 and weep.
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, it's simply exchanging browser monopoly for browser duopoly - previously we've had "best viewed in IE", now it's "...in IE & Firefox". No real progress at all.
Posting from a place where Opera is quite popular (8.5% here, 31.6% in neighbouring country (yeah, more than Gecko - 24.5%); most countries in the region have less than 50% IE usage); trust me, browser-agnostic web is a much better idea.
3 dB (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why promote an "inferior" product? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I am happy to see that Mozilla and Firefox are setting the standards, let me remind readers that previous evaluations have found the Theora encoders inferior compared to contemporary video codecs. In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.
The important thing is that we move toward open standards, away from proprietary solutions, because open standards allow us to do more cool stuff with them.
Remember RealPlayer? Remember all the bitching about what a piece of crap it was? People had to have it, even though it sucked, because a lot of content was only available in RealAudio format. Today, RealPlayer is all but gone, and you can play the same type of content using whatever software you like. Why? Because when Apple added Podcast support to iTunes, Podcasts suddenly became hugely popular, and virtually all of the content providers that used to offer only RealAudio now offer Podcasts instead. This means that users are free to choose whatever software they want, and competition will drive the software to improve.
In the same way, if web sites move away from Flash video players to using HTML5's video tag, it will mean users will no longer be dependent on Adobe's plugin to access the content. Unfortunately we still have patent issues to deal with; Ogg is unencumbered, but better quality codecs will be supported by most browsers, and if we can get content providers to get used to the idea of making their video content freely available (instead of wrapping it up in Flash), there can be competition among codecs too.
It's not a perfect world, but it's one step closer.
Re:Why promote an "inferior" product? (Score:3, Insightful)
"standard" (Score:3, Insightful)
While this new "standard" format is open, it's also something with almost zero support, especially across legacy browsers. /with/ new javascript capabilities.
This means Flash is here to stay, even
Eye of the Beholder (Score:4, Insightful)
[smarmy]An objective evaluation of H.264, VP6 and WMV9 show that they are still not as free as Theora. While we hope that these codec's patent holders will continue to work on this defect and catch up, as of 2009 it is still premature to say that any of them will ever be "up to par" with Theora, which totally stomps those other codecs in all freeness tests. Why promote an "inferior" product?[/smarmy]
Now for a little less smarminess: we're talking about interchange formats, used on the fucking internet where you don't know what OSes and archs either side is using. I know Theora is portable to everything and usable by everyone. I don't know about those other codecs. If you want to use WMV9 for your internal security camera, that's totally fine, but on the internet how could something like that be useful? What's the use in serving video in a format that people can't play? Theora doesn't have that problem.
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, no version of HTML is really suited for "web applications" but that's how we roll anyway.
I'd love it if documents and web applications were really treated as "entirely different entities" (i.e. the only thing they'd have in common is the set of transport layers).
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:3, Insightful)
"Dude, HTML 5 is still in the process of being finalized, and it makes a LOT of things much easier to develop."
So, is your point is that we shouldn't complain about HTML 5 because the standard isn't finished, but we can talk about how great it is because the standard .. how does that go again?
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that the demo is intended to show what an emerging standard can do better than current ones, it's understandable that they want it to look the best it can, which means they're going to want people to watch it using the optimized platform and not something that's barely going to run their demo.
So, they intend to showcase an open standard by publishing something that only works on a single "optimized" platform??
While I understand the pragmatism, it still seems odd.
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:2, Insightful)
So, they intend to showcase an open standard by publishing something that only works on a single "optimized" platform??
While I understand the pragmatism, it still seems odd.
That the standard is open does not mean that every browser implements the standard properly yet. If you intend to showcase an emerging standard, you want to actually showcase the emerging standard. As this is such a showcase, it's perfectly reasonable to restrict presentation to those browsers capable of displaying the page as intended.
As I quoted earlier FTFA:
We would be happy to work more closely with developers from Webkit and Opera.
Based on that, I expect that we'll see similar demos running on those and other HTML5-capable browsers in the near future.
Re:Look up the controls attribute (Score:1, Insightful)
Cry me a river
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:3, Insightful)
Out of interest, do you feel we should have a longer term goal over and above HTML5 that does work to provide a markup language that really is actually good rather than good enough then?
I guess I just follow the school of thought that if you're going to do something properly you should do it right the first time if time permits and I do not personally see any urgency in getting a new spec out there when we have XHTML1 which is extensible enough.
I do not feel HTML5 actually brings anything to the table. HTML to me should define document structure, CSS should define presentation, and Javascript should provide scripting and dynamic content to a site, simply because this is what the 3 things are good at. I do not like the idea of using Javascript for presentation for example, even though it's been used to solve the equal height columnar divs problem in the past and that sort of thing - ultimately it can be solved in CSS and it seems better to do so. This is effectively my main reasoning for disliking HTML5, it seems to be branching away from what HTML is actually good for into areas where we already simply have better solutions cleanly separated as separate tools and standards.