Vimeo Also Introduces HTML5 Video Player 369
bonch writes "Following in YouTube's footsteps, Vimeo has now introduced its own beta HTML5 video player, and like YouTube, it uses H.264 and requires Safari, Chrome, or ChromeFrame. The new player doesn't suffer the rebuffering problems of the Flash version when clicking around in the video's timeline, and it also loads faster. HTML5 could finally be gaining some real momentum."
Excellent. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now if only FireFox will get support.
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I think you mean
Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Insightful)
This will of course benefit ChromeOS and will force Microsoft into implementing html5 and H264 negating its strategy of killing adobe and becoming king of the online video.
But there is a bad smell about this. Google could achieve this as well by adding Theora to the supported codecs. Google is putting Firefox in a position where it is either encumbered with patents therefore losing the status of "pure" open source project, or looking bad in the feature front. I don't like this.
Re:Excellent. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with Directshow (Moz/Opera devs) (Score:3, Insightful)
A Mozilla developer has pointed out several drawbacks of using Directshow for HTML5 video [mozillazine.org]. Among them was that some Directshow codecs are of questionable quality, it can be source of security bugs and would mean a different backend for every supported platform.
The Opera folks have said Directshow is not well geared to streaming videos [opera.com] so Opera has gone with a minimal gstreamer port for HTML5 video [opera.com].
Re:The problem with Directshow (Moz/Opera devs) (Score:4, Informative)
The main problem with this approach is that many DirectShow filters are written in such a way that they can only read from a local file, since the DirectShow framework makes this a lot easier than the "right way" of streaming input from a upstream filter
Now, admittedly, the last time I wrote any DirectShow code DirectX 8 was all new and shiny, but this sounds like complete nonsense. Writing a DirectShow filter is trivial. You just subclass the standard filter class and receive data on one of the pins. I wrote one that took data off any part of a DirectShow stream and chucked it across the network and a matching one that received it. I had absolutely no problems swapping in other CODECs. They all just took data from one pin and pushed it out on another.
Writing a DirectShow filter that can only read from a local file is a pain, because you need to implement support for all of the potential container file types. Writing one that fits with the rest of the architecture is trivial.
Security is a potential issue, but I'm not sure that GStreamer is any more secure. Both contain large amounts of code that can potentially house exploitable bugs. If you care about security then you should run the CODEC in a separate process with a pipe going in to it to provide the data and a shared memory segment for getting the rendered images out.
Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly it seems Mozilla just do not want to support anything but Theora, and they're making up weak excuses for why they shouldn't use platform libraries to play video.
I sure hope they grow out of it soon.
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Re:Excellent. (Score:4, Insightful)
How does using HTML5 + H.264 negate their attempt to draw people away from Flash for video? It just doesn't aide their Silverlight efforts.
The 2 are linked (Score:5, Insightful)
Because HTML5 + VIDEO tag draws people away *from Flash* and *into an open standard* that can be found everywhere.
What Microsoft would have liked would be, drawing people away from Flash and *into one of their own proprietary* technology, marketed as much better.
The core strategy of Microsoft is not just killing random IT companies for the fun of it (although it's not always obvious), but killing other companies in order to get bigger themselves in the process.
Silverlight is their optimal solution to lock more customer in Microsoft solutions.
HTML5 is their nightmare.
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H264 is not an open standard. The video tag is just another lock-in, masquerading as an easy to use core feature.
It's all moot anyway. Without agreement on a codec, the video tag is dead in the water anyway. Lack of a common standard means that the video tag essentially equates to what we already have; the ability to "embed" video which may or may not play in the users browser. Google and Apple
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Google just purchased on2, who own the IP rights to a number of rather good codecs, including a few that they claim to be as good as, if not better than H.264.
Theora, on the other hand, isn't a particularly good codec.
IMO, the best thing for google to do would be to release on2's codecs under a permissive license, and make them the exclusive means by which HD content is delivered via YouTube. This should ensure a rather speedy adoption among all of the major browsers.
Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Informative)
I think you mean
Now, if only the stupid h264 codec would be freed !
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Of course there isn't, but that doesn't mean the issue is impossible to solve. In fact if you look at the way Firefox works right now, it has abstractions of various operating services - messaging, drag & drop, windows, graphics, file locations, plugins etc. Each of these abstractions is done precisely so the bulk of the code is platform netural.
There would be no difference if you were to write an abstract video / au
Re:Excellent. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a big thing for me. I don't give a damn about their ideology or their patent concerns, if youtube choose h264 then h264 has won this mini format war, and firefox better swallow their pride and licence it.
If they don't, i'll end up on chrome for windows, and I already use Safari on mac because their mac UI team are atrocious.
Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Insightful)
If firefox do not support H.264, they're going to become irrelevant as far as video goes.
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Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Insightful)
The authoring tools for .ogg are not there either.
So really, open source people can whine all they want, it will make no difference - Firefox can buy a license, or they can become irrelevant. Or maybe start their own video hosting to compete, but my bet is that will be more expensive than a h.264 license.
Or hell, they can just use whatever codecs are available on the host platform.... and get back to what they should be worried about - writing a web browser, rather than getting involved in a codec war they have no chance winning
Google acquired On2, makers of video codecs (Score:5, Interesting)
Google recently acquired On2, makers of the Ogg Theora (aka VP-3) codec which was released into the public domain and then taken over by xiph.org.
On2 have codecs VP-7 and VP-8 which have equivalent (if not better) quality than h.264.
It would not be surprising if Google made those codecs available, since they aren't patent-encumbered, and Google is heavily invested in HTML5 --and likes open standards.
This would be the ideal outcome. h.264 is a really bad option.
Re:Google already transcodes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, ditching h.264 is simply not going to happen. there are way too many hardware devices out there that do h.264 and no ogg. All I'm hearing is bitching from the firefox camp about how they're not going to support it for reason X rather than looking for a solution to the problem.
Simply not supporting h.264 is an option, sure. I just don't think its going to end well for firefox.
AS to host code not being exposed to the web... run it with least privilege in a sandbox. My bet is that any copy of theora embedded into the browser is exactly the same reference code as used else where in any case (and if its, not, then its not as well tested...), so that point is pretty moot.
Re:Excellent. (Score:4, Interesting)
Google (or any similar company) has no business reason to use Theora.
If they do nothing, they still support Firefox, though flash. So why spend even a small amount of time/money to re-encode video?
Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, why not make a US and non-US version of Firefox with the non-US version having H.264 support. US people will still manage to get the working version and Firefox will still have the required support.
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Tough luck for them. I't won't be long for a fork to appear that includes the H.264 codec - possibly released by Canonical or other interested party . The US seems to be rapidly heading towards some kind of lawsuit singularity which it needs to pull back from or simply disappear.
several European countries appear to recognize patents on H.264 and AAC as well.
Citation? I can't find anything concrete to support this statement.
Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Funny)
You know, I was originally leaning towards Theora as the better codec. But your brazen anonymous cursing has turned me right around on this issue. Well done, sir.
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And while politicians are fixing* the issue, what do we use in the meantime?
* HAHAHAHAHA!
Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Informative)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540 [mozilla.org]
They are working on a Gstreamer backend for the video tag, and that will provide support for h264. From skimming the comments, it seems that there is a working but slow patch for 3.5, which is yet to be updated for 3.6.
Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Insightful)
and firefox better swallow their pride and licence it.
Why should they license it when an embeddable player is available on every OS with noticeable marketshare?
They just need to enable the HTML5 video tag to use that. Oddly enough I couldn't find this bug at BMO with a quick search.
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> Why should they license it when an embeddable player is available on every OS with
> noticeable marketshare?
Because those players tend to be security hellholes. Passing unsanitized data to them is a good way to get exploited...
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> where code that is written in any other codeshop is considered inferior
Not at all. I've written my share of code with security bugs in it and have no illusions about code I write.
But the key thing here is attack surface. Taking a shot at securing the decoder for the one codec that Firefox ships (by fixing the bugs fuzzers found in it, for example) took several man-months of work. This is work that has in fact not been done on most of the platform-default decoders, especially because new ones can be
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> I'm just wondering what makes the Firefox team certain they can write these codec
> implementations and players better than the teams who specialise in that field.
Nothing. That's why they're not writing the codec impl they're using; they're using an off-the-shelf theora decoder (though they've contributed a bunch back to it in the process of integrating it).
But the result is that the codec they're shipping they have the source for and have at least some people who can competently patch that source i
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Firefox can't realistically license H.264. We're talking a license for unlimited copies with the right to do pretty much anything you want with the copies, including turning them into video editing software. It would be the last license sold, because everyone else can just piggy back on it.
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No. The licenses for Chrome and Safari do not allow unlimited distribution. The H.264 licenses are capped per year, so Mozilla Corp. could easily afford to pay for an H.264 license for this year and then everyone who distributed FireFox would have a legal license as part of that. However, if they stopped paying, people who had received FireFox would then be unable to legally redistribute it. As Mozilla is distributed under three licenses which all permit redistribution, that would mean that anyone, like
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FireFox can't license it because the GPL explicitly forbids it. The legality of GPL'd software using propreitary codecs is ambiguous, a situation which Mozilla wishes to avoid.
I wish Youtube would support Theora, but OTOH I realize that most people just want to give the codec a boost. If Youtube want to use a patent-encumbered viideo format, that's their right to do so. The move away from flash certainly makes the platform more open and less dependent on proprietary technology. But they must also realize th
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That's cool. They can not care what their users think, and not support big popular websites, and they can have all the ideology they want and no users.
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Putting your hand up to pay for the licensing of H.264?
At least with flash adobe was nice enough to make a linux version at no cost.
Adobe... (Score:4, Interesting)
I shed not a tear for you.
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Don't. IE will not support HTML5 for many years, if history is anything to go by, making Flash at least a fallback requirement for any remotely popular video site for the forseable future.
Re:Adobe... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem with Flash, stupid menu widgets, irritating ads, and non-html website frontpages, won't disappear until sites can recreate equally annoying equivalents via some other method.
Re:Adobe... (Score:4, Insightful)
Javascript.
Don't whine that it's slow - Chrome, Opera, Safari and Recently firefox now have very fast javascript engines.
Don't whine its not powerful enough - ActionScript (Flash Scripting) is Javascript. And Flash isn't very quick at interpreting it either...
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ActionScript 3 is one dialect of ECMAScript as is Javascript and JScript. Nothing really to do with Java.
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Sure.
http://www.effectgames.com/effect/games/crystalgalaxy/ [effectgames.com]
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He asked for an example of a game in HTML5. I provided an example of a game in HTML5. A simple transaction.
Ironically it's you who's left over bleating to yourself, working yourself up into a frothing rage over things that nobody ever said. You might want to check your caffeine dosages.
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But I don't notice a huge difference between them, other than the videos still play when flash(64bit) crashes, as it tends to do at the end of the day.
Here that wooshing sound, Firefox? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the sound of you getting passed by.
I'm a total GNU fanboy most days, and generally agree with the moral move they are trying to make with OOG formats, but in this case it is a losing strategy. H264 video has gotten a momentum that is hard to break, similar to how MP3 got a momentum in the past. It has nothing to do with technical features, morals, licensing, or other commonly-argued things. Instead, it's about a critical-mass of popularity. H264 video the new pop thing, even in cases where people don't even know terms like "H264".
By not finding a way to make video work properly, Firefox is saying they want to be left behind. No, I highly doubt people like google or others will re-encode video into Theora. They will make the business decision that not only is it a lot of work, it's not necessary as firefox is supported with Flash.
If the Firefox people want to make a good moral stand with this issue, they should pull something similar to the crypto situation and make an "international" version. That version could serve as an embarrassment to the restrictive patent system, and a useful political talking point. At a minimum, though, they should simply remove all codec processing form the project, leaving that particular can of worms to an external project (gstreamer? embed mplayer/vlc/other? some new project created specifically for this purpose?).
I love firefox. I really do. So please don't choose to be non-player in the video arena!
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Otherwise, Firefox will become the browser for those who just really like Flash.
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It is likely not legal for them to pay for a license directly. Such a license would likely require them to not release the patented code openly, like they are required to do for the GPL.
Such a license would also not pass to others, so Ubuntu/etc would not be able to distribute the licensed firefox.
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> Such a license would likely require them to not release the patented code openly
That's actually not a problem as long as you avoid GPLv3 (and I'm fairly certain that it's not a problem with MPL in particular). But IANAL, etc.
> Such a license would also not pass to others, so Ubuntu/etc would not be able to
> distribute the licensed firefox.
This, on the other hand, is a much bigger concern.
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Google licenses h.264 for use in Chrome. Obviously that doesn't extend to Chromium, but it doesn't really need to. It's clear that if you want h.264 support, you'll need to run the Google binary since they've paid the royalties. There's no reason Mozilla couldn't license h.264 for their officials builds. Ubunt
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it's the likes of YouTube and other online content providers that really have the last word, and they have chosen h.264
YouTube is not the only video site in town [dailymotion.com]. DailyMotion went with Theora and others may follow that example.
The web is supposed to be open, if we kowtow to patent encumbered formats just because Google says so, then I'm afraid the last 10 years we have spent trying to get up from under Microsoft and the browser wars would have been a complete waste.
We're basically going to head back to "This site is best viewed by X or Y", only with different values for X and Y.
The reason a "plug-in" solution is redundant s
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Yeah, that's interesting and awful. And to make the licensed portion into some sort of a binary-only library that plugs into Firefox would defeat the big advantage of HTML5, which is that it doesn't need extra plugins.
So isn't there a way in which Firefox could call the relevant codec installed on the computer through the HTML5 "video" tag and use that codec to play back the video? I mean, every Windows machine already has its own h246 decoder. Since we already own that decoder license thanks to Microsoft,
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Another question I have is about whether Chromium also can't play h264.
Google only licensed h.264 for Chrome. I believe you can get Chromium to play h.264 by making it use a version of ffmpeg with that codec built-in, but that's certainly not something Google distributes.
Re:Here that wooshing sound, Firefox? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why I suggest they either:
1) Make it a non-USA release, similar to PGP/PGPi in the past. This would be if they wanted to take a stand, and make lots of activist-style press releases on the subject. It would also probably be more effective than trying to talk everybody into using Theora.
2) Externalize the issue, by using an external program instead. That way they aren't decoding any video, and are totally safe from patent issues.
Option #2 is recommended, as a pragmatic decision.
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Not with being incorporated in the US. They'd have to at least double overhead to set up a separate company/organization to distribute this version, since explicitly doing it under the US entity would be considered exporting a product, and letting the community do it would cut of the revenue from Google and confuse less tech savvy users.
I elaborated on this above.
Basically I consider that the pragmat
Re:Here that wooshing sound, Firefox? (Score:4, Informative)
patenting how to make stuff is ok (Score:3, Insightful)
patenting how to manipulate bits is not ok
the free exchange of ideas is the only thing underpinning any sense of philosophical integrity in modern liberal democracy. besides, you basically lie when you say its expensive to develop this stuff. a university professional could do this, and by publishing it, for free (in an ideal world) he cements his academic credentials, which is the only reward anyone deserves for the advancement of ideas
capitalizing on those ideas is a secondary game that does not overlap,
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Mozilla should just link to the distribution's provided ffmpeg and just let you decide what codecs you compile in. That would mean that at least in FOSS operating systems the problem is sorted.
That would also mean less code to manintain, and to give an advantage to FOSS operating systems.
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It has every thing to do with licensing. It is unreasonable to expect a nonprofit group to fork out millions of dollars to give you a free product. If you want to start paying for FireFox maybe they can do some thing for you.
Audio and video are the only arrows left in the quiver of the proprietary companies. I think once companies start to realize that it is safe to do HTML5 you will see companies that say screw it we don't feel like paying these fat fees any more when we can use some thing free instead. U
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It's unreasonable to expect pop culture to shift because it's choice is inconvenient.
Trying to change perceptions like that didn't work with Vorbis-vs-MP3, and it won't work here either.
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It worked with PNG, even if it took a while. And it worked with Vorbis to a limited extent (there is another option when you need it, there is reasonable hardware support and the lives of game and other developers have been made easier), but that battle wasn't about the web before HTML5 and Firefox 3.5.
Yes, it's a slow process, but with h.264 there is are 15 years or so where it can make a difference, this was not the case with PNG as the patent covering GIF creation expired or MP3, which had a bigger head
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Sure, in 15 year or whatever, it'll be trivial. Most software will be able to implement all of this with minimal hastle.
But in the mean time, the war against other things like Flash, Silverlight, IE, and open-web-standards in general will be lost.
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PNG was easy. Want alpha channels? Use PNG. Want better compression? Use PNG. Want more than 256 colours? Use PNG. Oh, and by the way, it's royalty free so you won't get hit by those fees that everyone's starting to have to pay for producing or reading GIFs.
Theora is hard. Want good quality? Use H.264. Want multiple implementations optimised for different profiles? Use H.264. Want hardware accelerated playback on mobile devices? Use H.264. Oh, and there's a small license fee that you'll hav
Re:Here that wooshing sound, Firefox? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree 100%. Mathematical algorithm patents are not recognized in most countries outside the US, so make an international Firefox version that only visitors who claim to be outside the US can download.
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That doesn't stop the licensing authorities collecting fees and suing left right and center. Almost the entire industrialized world upholds codec patents and indeed many of the patent holders are European companies.
Cost for Firefox H.264: $5,000,000+ per year (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with H.264 is both its patent status and the licensing cost. The patent means that it can't legally be used in software licensed under the GPL/LGPL 3.0 in countries like the US. So, Mozilla would have to add a closed-source component to Firefox for it to be able to work.
But the other problem is the licensing fee. Firefox ships so many software units that it will hit the enterprise cap for H.264 licensing every year. In 2006, that cap was $3,500,000. In 2007 it went up to $4,250,000. In 2009 it went up to $5,000,000. In 2011, it is going to go up again. So Mozilla will have to pay out $5,000,000 (and climbing) per year, just to support this one video codec in a product that they give away for free. Their revenue in their last fiscal year was $78.6 million.
Is it really worth it to spend 6% of your total yearly revenue on the licensing fee for one video codec?
Apple doesn't care, since they already hit the yearly cap anyway (see: iPod/iTunes) so it's free for them to include it in Safari. I'm not sure if Google does (can't think which apps it would be), but they have the money to do it either way. Opera and Mozilla don't currently have this expense... and they can't afford it. Nor can any other upstart browser since once they hit 200k 'units' per year, they have to start paying $0.20 per download.
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Mozilla would have to add a closed-source component to Firefox for it to be able to work.
Or they could hook into each OS's native codec libraries -- IIRC windows 7 supports h264 out of the box, and most linux distros have a gstreamer-x264 or whatever package easily available ("easy" as in "will prompt to be installed the first time it's required", in ubuntu's case at least)
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While I'd love it if the patent/licencing issues could be easily fixed like that, I seriously doubt it will ever be the case. In the world of video, more than most other fields, patents have become a total minefield. Even in things like "patent free" Theora, companies are still reluctant to implement them for fear of submarine patents.
So I suspect we will have this problem in one form or another no matter what.
So Firefox should sidestep the issue by externalizing it. This is not idea, but it's practical and
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Practical? What are you going to do, put a yellow bar on top when people visit a site with h.264 video that says: "Sorry, due to patent restrictions we can't play this video, we would tell you how to work around this issue, but it might expose us to lawsuits, happy hunting"? You can't have a polished user experience without transparent handling here, and you can't have transparent handling without exposing yourself (and Firefox isn't small enough to fly un
Re:Here that wooshing sound, Firefox? (Score:4, Insightful)
that WOULD be an improvement over what they are doing now, which is to simply not play anything!
The proper response, though, is not to put up some sort of error message, but to use an external solution such as mplayer, ffplay, vlc, gstreamer, or whatever, and make it "someone else's problem".
Chrome up and coming is an even bigger issue because of this. If it works well with youtube, and firefox doesn't, then firefox will lose dramatic market share to Chrome.
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The "someone else" will be the user, if they don't have the framework of choice set up, that's the problem. Youtube (or any other major site with a significant portion of IE hits) is not about to drop flash support any time soon. On Windows this is handled transparently for Firefox, so no breakage occurs. On Linux
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> I consider over a year of warning with no implementation in production 'unprepared'.
You're assuming that the goal was to support H.264. That's not in fact a goal at the moment, because it's seen as detrimental to the future of video of the web (though of course beneficial to several big companies today).
Re:Here that wooshing sound, Firefox? (Score:4, Informative)
> They are aware of the issue but they don't have a production ready solution.
"They" (we) are in fact aware of the issue, and feel that H.264 as the "standard" web video format is in fact detrimental to the long-term health of the web and to Mozilla's mission (which is not to make a web browser; the web browser is a means to an end).
> they will eventually have to support all of the codecs in the HTML5 standard
The standard doesn't specify any codecs.
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True. Bad choice of words. I should have said 'supported by' instead:
"On October 17, 2007, the World Wide Web Consortium encouraged interested people to take part in a "Video on the Web Workshop", held on December 12, 2007 for two days.[10] A number of global companies were involved, submitting position papers.[11] Among them, Nokia's paper[12] states that "a W3C-led standardization of a 'free' codec, or the active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg by W3C, is, in our opinion, not helpful
Branding over functionality... (Score:5, Informative)
It seems that both Youtube and Vimeo have both chosen to use their own custom controls, and disable the default controls native to the user's browser.
That wouldn't be such a big deal, except for the fact that full screen mode can currently only be entered using those default controls (making full screen mode available via a scripting api is considered a security risk, and thus discouraged by the HTML5 spec). So they're sacrificing that functionality at the alter of branding.
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I'm going to have to put the blame on the browsers for not implementing a "double click the video to go fullscreen" behavior or some sort of key binding. Sites shouldn't have to refrain from branding just to allow the user to go fullscreen, the browser should always provide a method for the user to do it.
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One nice thing about HTML5 over flash: it's much easier to fix such things in greasmonkey or similar tools.
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Daily Motion (Score:2)
Maybe it's time Youtube is boycotted and everyone switches over to Daily Motion, which has been supporting Theora for several months already:
http://blog.dailymotion.com/2009/05/27/watch-videowithout-flash/ [dailymotion.com]
Boycott probably not going to happen though :(
Re:Daily Motion (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, WTF? This is a big fumble by Google. Here I was, tempted to give Chrome another shot just to see this work - as it's one of the very rare things that my beloved Firefox can't do. And when I go through the bother I find what? An experience worse than Flash?
If Google knew this, shouldn't they have waited with the feature? Will there be another announcement that says: "HTML5 Youtube - now far less crappy than before? Download Chrome to see it!" And seriously, who will?
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H.264 (Score:5, Informative)
Everytime this topic comes up I am amazed at how many people think that it's somehow Mozilla's fault that Firefox doesn't support H.264.
Repeat after me: H.264 is NOT FREE, not by a long way. If Firefox included H.264 support then Firefox would also NOT BE FREE. It would be illegal for most of us to distribute a copy.
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How do you respond to those who say that the Mozilla Foundation should pay for the h.264 license?
After all, Google and Apple are obviously paying for the license to distribute Safari and Chrome with h.264 for free, should be easy enough for Mozilla Foundation to do that too, right? Who really cares that Google and Apple are subsidizing the license fee from their main business models while Mozilla is a non-profit organization formed to provide support and leadership to open source projects that is financed o
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It would be legal for Mozilla to distribute Firefox if it did that. It would not be legal for anyone else to do so.
For example, if you put a copy of Firefox on your USB keychain and went over to your friend's house and installed it there (from that keychain) without paying the H.264 licensing fees required, you could be sued for damages. Not much in the way of damages, clearly, but you would in fact be liable for them.
Of course if you happened to be, say, Ubuntu, you would have to pay a pretty hefty fee (
Doesn't work in Safari for iPhone (Score:2)
I just tried browsing the full site on iPhone and switched to HTML5 mode. Doesn't seem to work, just displays a crossed over play-icon.
kaiser soze (Score:3, Insightful)
hmm...I'm testing out this vimeo html5 player and I'm looking at the source...I see calls using mootools 1.11 to a mootools class named "Kaiser Soze".....gotta love programmers with a sense of humor.
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if web video formats follow the precedents of home video, porn will be the deciding factor. See Betamax v. VHS, and Bluray v. HD DVD. As goes porn so goes mainstream content providers, right? I should probably do some research into the delivery method of choice in online stag films, but it's just so tedious.
I believe they are currently standardizing on Microsoft Fleshlight...
Re:This may not be an apt analogy, but (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I have always heard that the consortium pushing Betamax at the time was actively preventing porn to be released on Betamax.
In case of Beta/VHS and HDDVD/Bluray I have no idea what would stop a publisher (porn or mainstream) from shipping both formats, especially if they have a reasonably large sales volume. This particularly looking at the Beta/VHS case where there is nothing special like menus or so to be added. It's plain video.
Re: (Score:3)
Come talk to me when you feel like saying what's wrong, rather than just using the word "half-assed" a lot.
kthxbye
Re:All hail HTML5 what a crock of shit (Score:4, Informative)
Box model, input model, floating model, version model etc. etc.
Think it through, then think through all of the kludges you have to come up with to make these work correctly then you will understand.
We had to wait for 5 versions of of HTML before we got an input type defined to handle things like numbers (floating, integer, fixed point), time, date?!
Or how about a property to mark an input element as required instead of either having to come up with some javascript to then ripple through the controls to see if they are filled in, this should be handled by DOM and refuse to fire the submit method of a form unless all the fields marked in such a way are populated.
How about a check box that actually is sent back in the post method to indicated that fact that it is NOT checked instead of having to write code that has to check if 1 of n check boxes are not there to figure out if the user decided not to check it.
Or how about that Text Area is not considered an INPUT tag. Seems to me it should be since it accepts, wait for it.... INPUT for fucks sake.
How about being able to float a DIV center and have text flow around it and conform to the DIV's margins, nope that don't work either.
The box model where changing the internal padding, essentially an internal margin, changes the size of the box and shoves everything around it all over the place or adding a border stripe changes the external size of the box, don't even get me started...
The list goes on and on and on. Get this shit fixed first the video will take care of itself.