Mozilla Adds H.264 Support To Android Firefox 77
sl4shd0rk writes "Chris Double of the Mozilla developer team has (H.264, AAC and MP3) working with the Android version of Firefox on a Nexus S handset. Although a preliminary patch, it looks like it is on track to be included in Firefox 17, which will enter the Aurora channel at the end of the month. It will be some time before being made available to users, so hang in there. A very welcome addition. Thanks Chris!"
Re:Sanity prevails (Score:5, Informative)
"Mozilla decided that, where available, Firefox should take advantage of the media decoding capabilities supplied by the underlying hardware and operating system. This approach means that Mozilla won’t have to license patent-encumbered codecs or include built-in decoders in the browser—it can just use the decoding capabilities that are already present in relevant environments."
Given that the vast majority of smartphones seem to be based on SoCs with hardware h.264 decoding as an option, usually turned on, I suspect that it is largely a dead issue on the mobile side. Nobody can really afford to not support it at all, full stop, that capability stubbed out in the little crypto blob that controls the hardware decoder; and once you've enabled it, there is minimal additional complexity(and no legal entanglement) for Mozilla or anybody else who wishes to ask the decoder to do some decoding.
On the desktop, where hardware decoding cannot be as reliably depended upon, or in relatively closed embedded systems where cost is a major factor, there might still be room.
(Alternately, it could be that Google doesn't really give a damn about formats, they just care about licensing fees, and only need WebM to be plausible enough to keep the MPEG-LA running a little bit scared, not enough to run them into the ground, which is likely too expensive to be cost effective.)
Re:WebM (Score:5, Informative)
This [slashdot.org] happened. [slashdot.org]
Mozilla bloggery [mozilla.org] indicates that, at least on mobile platforms, WebM is just a non-starter. H.264 is already out there in hardware (all bastard patents tidily licensed, all i's dotted, all t's crossed); WebM wasn't getting any traction; and Google didn't look all that serious. (Protip, Google: if you threaten to pull H.264 support in Chrome in order to strengthen WebM's hand, you need to follow through within at least a couple of years. Otherwise, you just look like a poser chump.)
Mozilla was supporting Google's play, and Google stopped playing.
I think it boils down to "the mobile world has moved on".
Re:WebM (Score:5, Informative)
And then there's folks like me, who need to render out video from their games, and would like to enable end users to click a button and have the replay of game footage uploaded to youtube (or placed in a folder) -- because I need to make the video w/o screen recorders myself anyway. I have a plugin system for handling the video encoding so I can create multiple encoders, but the only encoder I can actually AFFORD to ship is WebM (or Theora, but I only have so much time)... I'm using Google's code at current in my WebM plugin implementation, but I've seen many cases where I could create GPU shaders to do WebM encoding or decoding more efficiently than they do... My software is a Game, so I can rely on the minimum GPU specs being higher than WebM can afford at present. I don't see any reason that WebM couldn't detect the shader support and use hardware decoding over CPU decoding if available.
As mobiles get more powerful shader support, and heterogeneous computing becomes more pervasive, I don't see any reason to choose H.264 over WebM -- The patent and licensing BS of H.264 are enough to swing my vote to WebM. "Hardware Decoding" out of the box doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot if either decoder is running on the GPU... It's really all about adoption. Google didn't get GPU MFGs on board for their implementation for whatever reason, so we have H.264 "in hardware"
o_O (I suspect this means it's in that binary blob that gets uploaded to the GPU, so "in firmware" would be a better name for it).
I wonder what sort of license Mozilla has? I mean, Will I still be able to compile my own Firefox and get H.264 support via their licensing deal? Actually this isn't "Mozilla" it's just some dude who works for Mozilla. It would be like a Ford factor line worker adding hydros to her personal Mustang, then someone headilnes: Ford is experimenting with crazy-ass Hydrolic lift kits on new Mustangs!
Re:Sanity prevails (Score:4, Informative)
XP does/did. Every Nvidia card and integrated chipset with onboard video made since 2004 has had h.264 hardware decoding included, with the exception of the 6100 made around the same time.