YouTube Hints At Support For Free/Open Formats With HTML5 133
Posted
by
timothy
from the when-it-happens-I'll-believe-it dept.
from the when-it-happens-I'll-believe-it dept.
shadowmage13 writes "After the recent post about YouTube, so many votes were put in for HTML5 using Free and Open formats that Google has already cleared them all out (to make space for others) and issued an official response (requires Google login): 'We've heard a lot of feedback around supporting HTML5 and are working hard to meet your request, so stay tuned. We'll be following up when we have more information. We're answering this idea now because there are so many similar HTML5 ideas and we want to give other ideas a chance to be seen.' Now all the top ideas are concerning copyright and DMCA abuse."
Well then... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's a more polite way to say, "be more like Vimeo"?
Can we dump flash now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Youtube is pretty much the only reason I need Flash. If it was possible to watch Youtube videos without plugins it would be great. No more choppiness or Flash using 100% CPU. Playing some videos from internet shouldn't be rocket surgery so this is really about time. Flash seems almost purposefully bad on Linux.
Re:Google's purchase of On2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus releasing On2 tech as a standard without legal encumbrances, for everyone to take & implement freely, and opening its adoption as the HTML5 video?
That would be interesting...
Re:is html5 going to provide faster better video? (Score:5, Insightful)
Faster at all 3 if we use h264 because:
Hardware h264 encoders exist, and I bet google would use them – it would cut their power use massively
Hardware h264 decoders are common on just about all graphics cards
h264 can compress a video much more for a given quality than the current flash video they use
Not faster at all if we use ogg theora because:
Hardware Ogg encoders don't exist
Hardware Ogg decoders don't exist
Ogg barely uses less bandwidth than flash video for a given bandwidth
Re:Google's purchase of On2 (Score:3, Insightful)
technically thats what ogg theora is, as it was on2's submission for mpeg4 standardization that was not selected, and that they later handed over to ogg.
Re:is html5 going to provide faster better video? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hardware h264 encoders exist, and I bet google would use them – it would cut their power use massively
First, do you have a citation for this 'massive' reduction in power?
Second, Google's two main concerns in the case of video and youtube is bandwidth and codec licensing costs, not power. They've already become masters at power efficiency from their experience with their search server farms. Power is not the main issue here, the amount of streaming data they have to pump to the user is.
As for the licensing issues with h264, why do you think they're buying On2? They've seen the statements from MPEG-LA about future hikes to the cost of using h264 and have decided they need a viable alternative, ie. a backup plan.
We won't know for sure what is ultimately going to happen until a) MPEG-LA reveals sometime this year what their new fees will be for h264 licensing, and b) Google's On2 buyout is completed (until its complete neither party is saying anything).
Expect them to be 'following up when we have more information' within days of the finalization of the On2 acquisition, especially if MPEG-LA thinks that they've now got the market locked-in to their solution and decides to get greedy.
Re:Well then... (Score:1, Insightful)
Get a newer computer.
No, seriously, please do. What you're saying is akin to asking that new games don't get improved graphics etc. because your old box won't be able to handle it. It makes perfect sense from your point of view, but what's good for you is bad for everyone else and holds back progress.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.
Re:is html5 going to provide faster better video? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:is html5 going to provide faster better video? (Score:5, Insightful)
H264 is an open standard
A standard that requires shelling out $$ for a license to use it isn't 'open', not by most people's definition of 'open'.
en/decoders might be covered by patents.
There should be no 'might' in that sentence. Patents on h264 is the reason for MPEG-LA's very existence. They hold more patents on it than you can shake a stick at.
That mountain of patents and the control it gives its owners is *precisely* the problem with h264.
Re:Well then... (Score:3, Insightful)
You're ignoring devices like netbooks, smart phones, etc. You can't just expect everyone to buy an i7 and ignore the problem.
Re:Well then... (Score:4, Insightful)
Having a better box to get better stuff is always a good thing. But having to get a better box just for the same old stuff done poorly is always a stupid thing. Let me know when they have the latest dual-socket octo-core i7 processor with 64GB of RAM in a nice portable netbook form factor.
How about "Could you please ban gaming videos?" (Score:5, Insightful)
What's a more polite way to say, "be more like Vimeo"?
How about "I know a lot of people who, to put it mildly, aren't a fan of video games. Can you make subtle changes to your policy so that videos of video games end up all but banned?"
Background: Vimeo bans use of its service for commercial purposes; this rules out any video uploaded by the video game's publisher. Vimeo also rejects videos uploaded by anyone other than the author; this rules out videos of game play uploaded by anyone other than the video game's publisher because they're "derivative works".
Re:is html5 going to provide faster better video? (Score:3, Insightful)
But you are missing the BIG "gotcha" like what happened with Ogg...hardware support. Sure MP3 in "patent encumbered" but you know what? I can buy an MP3 player at Walgreens for under $15 so as a consumer I don't care. We have the same problem here, in that pretty much every single GPU released in the last few years supports H264 out of the box. Both the onboard that came with my PC as well as the 4650 I paid a whole $35 for has hardware support for MPEG 2/4, DivX/Xvid, WMV 7-9, and H263/264 out of the box. Nothing for me as a consumer to mess with, and even on a quad core having the video accelerated makes for a nicer experience for me, so the patents? I really don't care as a consumer.
And THAT right there, that is the gotcha that will most likely screw Theora. You see FLOSSies care about things like patents, the Average Joe? Hell he never comes in contact with them. It is just like how the average Joe don't give a crap about DRM unless it bites him in the ass. But unlike DRM I don't see this ever actually biting the consumer in the ass, so I don't see them giving a crap. The producers, OTOH, will just pay off the licenses if they are big, or if they are small will more likely hope that users will still come to them even if they don't use what everyone else does, which with the rise of netbooks and how many of the newer ones are getting decent GPUs like the new AMD Neo and the Ion, might not work.
After all if your competitor's content places nicely on my netbook thanks to GPU acceleration, but yours don't? Well I probably wouldn't come back to your site. That is the problem I think many FLOSSies here don't get. Frankly the average user don't give a wet fart about "free as in freedom" because if they did they wouldn't be buying all the proprietary software they currently do. As long as it goes when they push the button that is all the user cares about, and the others have acceleration and Theora don't. Sorry to be the bearer of that bad news, but dealing with retail for going on 15 years that is pretty much how the "average Joes" think and behave.
Re:is html5 going to provide faster better video? (Score:4, Insightful)
No amount of bitching and whining on slashdot or the w3c mailing list will change the reality of the remainder of the planet. It's the way it is and at the end of the day it's a video codec, not genocide, so there's really no harm in accepting it and getting on with supporting it ourselves.
Re:is html5 going to provide faster better video? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, and only when Adobe makes it work.
That's the important thing -- HTML5 can be improved by any browser. Flash can only realistically be improved by Adobe right now, at least until Gnash becomes relevant.
Re:is html5 going to provide faster better video? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's certainly better than "closed" in that ffmpeg and x264 have excellent en/decoders because they didn't have to reverse engineer it.
No, they didn't have to reverse engineer it, but they did have to violate the patents on it though. Fortunately, this 'violation' is only enforceable only in certain parts of the world, not all of it, so implementations like ffmpeg and x264 can exist (if MPEG-LA had global reach, they would have shut these projects down a long time ago).
Better, but not quite good, at least in my book.
A good standard is one that anyone can implement, anywhere in the world, without the need for anyone's permission, or the need to hand over blood-money to anyone just for the 'privilege' of implementing a 'standard'.
Implementing a standard shouldn't be a privilege, it should be a right, otherwise its not much of a standard.
The DMCA stuff is important. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure to what extent this is "storm-in-a-teacup" status, but the DMCA has been frequently abused on YouTube as a means of censorship -- not just by corporations, but by individuals. So has "false flagging" -- a video says something you disagree with? Flag it as inappropriate.
Both of these seem to be handled somewhat mechanically by YouTube. For a good example, search for "What Islam Fears: Laughter," but it's much more common than that -- particularly, creationists like to use it to get atheist videos removed, when their votebots fail to reduce the video's score significantly.
Most recently, VenomFangX (remember him?) pulled a neat little trick in which he false-DMCA'd someone, then dropped it when a counter-notice was filed and accused this person of child molestation, using the personal information from the counter-notice to personally identify him.
So far, I see a ton of comments about HTML5, and that's well and good, open standards are important. But freedom of speech is more important. Granted, it is YouTube's right to censor whatever they wish, but this doesn't seem to be YouTube doing the censoring, or indeed a conscious choice on the part of any human at YouTube -- it's individuals abusing YouTube's flagging and DMCA notice system.
Of course, if Google notices this, expect the next wash of comments to be complaints about the new channel pages -- fair enough, given I don't know a single person who prefers it to the old system -- but not nearly as important as these two issues.
Re:is html5 going to provide faster better video? (Score:3, Insightful)
You did not mention openness in your post, so I have no idea where you stand on that. Your post is factual, though.
People need to remember that h264 is not a free format! This is why YouTube videos are limited to ~10 minutes. A free format should be preferred in this case. Also, HTML5 is intended to be an open format. Video and audio codecs that are used with HTML5 should also be open, or the whole system is no longer open. An open format, when available, should always be selected here regardless of quality.
I'd like to point out here that, while people are always comparing Theora to, say, h264, and saying that Theora loses, you have to remember that Theora is still a quality video codec. Sure, it may not be as good, compression-wise, as h264, but it's not so much worse it shouldn't be considered. And it's open.
Google, with YouTube, has a great opportunity here to shape the future. Ogg Theora would never even be considered by anyone else, but if Google starts using it for YouTube, so will everybody else. HTML5 should have specified it from the beginning, but the WHATWG didn't have the power to back it up. Google can do it for them.
Re:is html5 going to provide faster better video? (Score:3, Insightful)
So if something is widely accepted we shouldn't change it? A world that runs like that will, by definition, have exactly zero progress.