Firefox 3.5 Supporting Open Video Formats


flash and mov aren't open formats.

It means that websites now have the option to use open formats instead of flash, for instance.

Hopefully some websites will start to feature these formats now.
 
michaeljustman said:
I thought Adobe/Apple/etc got pissy that they tried to include Ogg as a part of the specification?
It was apple, they're blocking W3C from making OGG the standard by refusing to support it on bullshit licensing grounds and want to force everyone to be locked into the H.264 codec. Since Firefox, Opera and Chrome all support OGG, IE supports nothing and no-one uses Safari I doubt it really matters.
I am ecstatic about the <video> tag as I have a personal deep seated hatred of Flash in all it's forms.
 
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femngi said:
michaeljustman said:
I thought Adobe/Apple/etc got pissy that they tried to include Ogg as a part of the specification?
It was apple, they're blocking W3C from making OGG the standard by refusing to support it on bullshit licensing grounds and want to force everyone to be locked into the H.264 codec. Since Firefox, Opera and Chrome all support OGG, IE supports nothing and no-one uses Safari I doubt it really matters.
I am ecstatic about the <video> tag as I have a personal deep seated hatred of Flash in all it's forms.

I understand why they wouldn't want an open format to be stardard, but what justification could they give... aren't standards that the W3C make supposed to be open and therefore using an open container format would make sense.
 
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michaeljustman said:
I understand why they wouldn't want an open format to be stardard, but what justification could they give... aren't standards that the W3C make supposed to be open and therefore using an open container format would make sense.
File size, they say. And they have a point.

Anyways, I don't think that it'll be necessary for the W3C guys to enforce a codec; they did the same thing when the <img> tag was introduced, and it worked out all right.
Because who would today put a BNMG file in an <img> tag if no browsers support the format? Same thing for H.264.

Also, if the Apple guys want to use H.264 as the video format, this means that they'll need to integrate it into Safari → WebKit, which is based on KDE → KHTML and therefore GNU GPL licensed, and thus they'll need to make their codec open-source too to be able to include it. Either that, or they might also provide a plugin for all browsers à la Flash, but who would honestly use it then? Consequently, I think that OGG Theora has won already.
 
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You would think. But it wouldn't be the first and certainly won't be the last time that a proprietary format gained standardization over something more open. You really don't have to look much farther than .GIF to see how hard it is to move from a old proprietary standard to something more open like .PNG. There's no money is open standards, so they only get the voice of the community at large. Closed standards get well paid lawyers.
 
another problem with h264 is that next year when they renew the licence there are plans to include a licence cost on makeing movies available on the net. That would mean that youtube couldn't use it and any one having videos on their site has to pay
 
Bagera said:
another problem with h264 is that next year when they renew the licence there are plans to include a licence cost on makeing movies available on the net. That would mean that youtube couldn't use it and any one having videos on their site has to pay
Way to fail, Apple, way to fail...
I don't understand why they suggest the use of h.264 when they at the same time do something like that.
 
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Yeah, the whole thing is slowing down. Hopefully we won't have to deal too much with Apple for full html 5 support. http://ishtml5readyyet.com :)
 
File size is an issue but it's not the reason Apple gave for not wanting to support it. They say that since the Xiph.Org Foundation maintains OGG they could potentially start charging browsers to use it if it became the standard. All this is pure bullshit and everyone knows it, "Both software libraries are free software, released under the new BSD license." the real irony is Apple offers h.264 as an alternative.
 
I think how the video tag fares will be greatly influenced by one factor...what Youtube does.

Youtube is a massive website for non-techies, I think it will set the template that other websites will follow. It is a one-website standards setting machine in this area.

If it were owned by anyone else I think it'd stay with flv and maintain the status quo. But being owned by Google I think there's hope. Google have a vested interest in kicking IE in the nuts, they may convert to using the video tag just to push Chrome. If Google have the balls to effectively break Youtube for IE users it will either force M$ to support the video tag more quickly than they might have otherwise done so or force users onto alternative browsers. Either is a win in my opinion, the former means that flv is no longer the standard, the latter means that IEs market share falls. Either is progress.

Basically if Youtube drops flash then other websites will follow in my opinion. I know just before the video tag was introduced Google showcased a Youtube that used the video tag, I just hope this makes it out of the proof-of-concept stage and becomes reality.
 
Google was against OGG on YouTube too, just so you know.
source

However, it seems like Theora will be the most likely choice anyways. Google might just decide to create their own video encoding format, too, of course, as this seems to be their usual approach to things recently. Who knows?
 
dflemstr said:
Google was against OGG on YouTube too, just so you know.
source

However, it seems like Theora will be the most likely choice anyways. Google might just decide to create their own video encoding format, too, of course, as this seems to be their usual approach to things recently. Who knows?

That wasn't Google being against OGG. That was the guy heading the HTML5 development, who happens to work for Google, saying that they decided to not go with OGG as a standard, and just have there be no standard.
 
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Vorporeal said:
dflemstr said:
Google was against OGG on YouTube too, just so you know.
source

However, it seems like Theora will be the most likely choice anyways. Google might just decide to create their own video encoding format, too, of course, as this seems to be their usual approach to things recently. Who knows?

That wasn't Google being against OGG. That was the guy heading the HTML5 development, who happens to work for Google, saying that they decided to not go with OGG as a standard, and just have there be no standard.
I beg to differ.
Google has implemented both H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. However, Google cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, the Linux version of Chrome, and has indicated a belief that Ogg Theora's quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube, according to Hickson.
 
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djmaddis said:
Jourdy288 said:
Yay! Wait, what does this have to do with Pandora?

I am sure you all know Firefox will be used on the pandora for web browsing so i started the thread to find out how this would (if any) benefit us all.
Also it means we may be less reliant on some broken flash port for web content.
 
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dflemstr said:
Vorporeal said:
dflemstr said:
Google was against OGG on YouTube too, just so you know.
source

However, it seems like Theora will be the most likely choice anyways. Google might just decide to create their own video encoding format, too, of course, as this seems to be their usual approach to things recently. Who knows?

That wasn't Google being against OGG. That was the guy heading the HTML5 development, who happens to work for Google, saying that they decided to not go with OGG as a standard, and just have there be no standard.
I beg to differ.
Google has implemented both H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. However, Google cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, the Linux version of Chrome, and has indicated a belief that Ogg Theora's quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube, according to Hickson.

Ah - missed the link to his email. Was just reading the directly linked article, which loosely implied otherwise.
 
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