Ask YouTube for Ogg support

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/youtube-ogg

by tjr • 17 years ago

57 67 17 years ago

xal• 17 years ago

Where can we ask Firefox for h264 support instead? The web will not support two different video formats at the same time, the whole idea is madness. Storage is expensive.

please• 17 years ago

You would have to ask MPEG-LA for royalty free licensing for encoding, decoding and any internet use of h264 and aac.

blasdel9• 17 years ago

Practically, you'd just need licensing for decoding if Mozilla wanted to distribute the binary themselves.

Even they weren't shitheaded enough to remove their GIF decoder when the encoder was revealed to be patent-encumbered.

mmastrac3• 17 years ago

Storage is not expensive. Even at Amazon's S3's base prices, I can store data at 0.150/GB. Bandwidth is far more of a big deal than storage these days. You can get away with significantly lower costs per GB by building and hosting your own storage.

jonknee6• 17 years ago

At YouTube's scale (petabytes), both storage and bandwidth are very expensive. Ogg would mean larger files which means lots of new hard drives, but also more money for every view. Considering they're pushing over a billion videos a day, even very small differences compound into huge figures.

travisbell• 17 years ago

Agreed. I think this should be re-titled, "Ask Firefox for H264 support".

With YouTube and Vimeo adopting h264 and not Ogg, I'd say I have a feeling I know how this is going to end.

JeremyBanks• 17 years ago

YouTube using H264 initially may just have been because they already have their videos H264-encoded, because that's what they use for the high-res content in their Flash player. They may also be selecting it because of Chrome's support, but I think it's too early to assume for sure that they don't have plans to support Ogg at some point.

Supporting H264 <video> was just a matter of writing some front-end player code (which they already had from their HTML5 demo) and feeding it the same video file they gave the Flash player. Supporting Ogg, on the other hand, would require massive transcoding.

slig• 17 years ago

I thought that they did the encoding to H264 to make youtube iPhone-compatible.

kevingadd4• 17 years ago

Is it going to end with Mozilla wasting millions of dollars on H264 patent licenses?

ars• 17 years ago

I have ffmpeg on my machine right now with H264 support. Have mozilla just use it.

Mozilla does not need to distribute H264 support - just use what is already there. A similar library exists for windows.

felixc3• 17 years ago

Firefox cannot ship with H.264 licenses, regardless of whether they can afford the cost or not. The GPL is incompatible with that idea.

As a side note, I'm not sure why you want H.264 to become the de-facto standard, given that it would require you to pay licensing fees just to host your own videos.

drats• 17 years ago

But you can say this to anything open, "why not .doc support?" for example, there are benefits other than bitrates to open standards. Think video editing and re-mixing/quoting for academic and news purposes (fair use/fair dealing). Think of the open source voice recognition to subtitling that proprietary audio codecs, over vorbis, would prevent (vorbis actually saves you bandwidth vs a lot of the other audio codecs because it is better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Quality:_Codec_compariso...). Think of browser, service and device innovators who will be locked out of competition by the big guys. I thought this was a forum for hackers, dreamers and entrepreneurs, not for videophiles making rather picky distinctions (I really don't see what the big deal is, if you look at the ogg comparison page posted elsewhere on the thread there isn't much difference and it's clear this is mainly about Apple protecting their iTouch/iPhone/Quicktime/iMovie/Finalcut video stack from those who would disrupt the market with Google and MS along with Apple for the ride).

senko• 17 years ago

Your .doc example is a good one. Mozilla explicitly refusing to support both H264 and Theora (because they want to make a stand) is like OpenOffice refusing to read both doc and odt, because doc is proprietary format.

I would prefer to see open, unpatented and free video codec used for the majority of web video. I applaud Mozilla for taking a stance. I don't applaud them taking a stance by limiting their users' freedom, instead of directly talking to Google, Vimeo and others and lobbying for the use of more open formats. Surely, a letter from Mozilla "hey guys, we really think you should support Theora too, let's meet and we'll tell you why we think it's very important" would have more effect than random blog articles & what amounts to blackmail?

sailormoon3• 17 years ago

Agreed 100%. Mozilla has plenty of money from its Google ad revenue. They should just do the reasonable thing and license h264. It can't be THAT expensive.

The alternative is the continued domination of Flash. Is that what they really want? Because that's what they're choosing to get.

I admire their principles but in the end it's the outcome that matters.

windsurfer• 17 years ago

How do they license it for their derivatives?

sailormoon3• 17 years ago

And they should support MP3 for HTML5 audio, too!

vegai• 17 years ago

Would H264 that mean the end of all non-major browsers?

zppx• 17 years ago

This is stupid, sorry for the strong word, if H.264 succeeds it will be the free market that will lose and not mozilla, any startup that works with videos (say a new video editing on the cloud) will have to pay licensing fees just to serve its users, well, I do not know about people in the USA, but where I live founders generally don't have piles of money to spend in patents, the majority use dedicated servers at rackspace with linux and other open source software because it's cheaper than running your own server with Windows or Mac OS X server. Are you people not considering this as an "outcome"?

smcq• 17 years ago

As someone who hosts videos, I hope that you don't get control over the internets. Bandwidth is already expensive enough without having to pay licenses per-stream!

mmastrac3• 17 years ago

Before dismissing Ogg, I suggest taking a look at a somewhat recent head-to-head comparison:

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

It appears that Theora could easily replace H.263 as a low-end codec and would be competitive with H.264 as a high-end codec.

jrockway7• 17 years ago

No DRM support. Media companies are not interested in "freedom", they are interested in the opposite.

(Google is the same; they are just another media company. If you think Google is about "openness", ask yourself why Google can crawl your site, but you can't crawl Google's site.)

elblanco2• 17 years ago

I've never quite understood why the resistance to the various Ogg formats?

I certainly falls into that "good enough" category for encoding audio and video, the same as Divx and mp3. And it appears to stream at rates a few percentage points lower than the prevalent licensed formats.

My little Sansa clip player plays it quite happily and I like that I can stuff more songs onto its little 4GB memory if I reencode everything in Ogg, with really no perceptible different in sound. The few Ogg encoded videos I've seen seem perfectly fine and take up less space and use less bandwidth off of my disk to watch...

I was mystified when Google and Chrome went h264. Seems like lots of expensive licenses for something that's cross platform and well supported with no real expense associated with it.

seriously, why the hate?

jonknee6• 17 years ago

Hardware decoding makes h264 usable on low-power devices like phones which Google sees as the future of the internet. It's technically superior and also supported out of the box by 97% of new computers.

It's not a real surprise that Google built in support for h264--they have petabytes of h264 video and sell phones that play h264 with built-in hardware decoding. Oh and it looks better.

kevingadd4• 17 years ago

If one of Microsoft's video codecs like VC-1 offered even better power efficiency and technical superiority, and "looked better" than h264 (whatever THAT means), would you still be a fan of using the "best available" proprietary codec? Would you be in favor of Google and other companies paying Microsoft license fees to use the codec? Or would you be arguing for the use of the "inferior" h264?

jrockway7• 17 years ago

Hardware decoding makes h264 usable on low-power devices like phones which Google sees as the future of the internet.

This is true. But, if I had to choose between paying $20 extra for a better processor (that can play Theora) or $20 extra for a patent license (to legally play h.264), I would pick the former. At least I can use the better processor when I'm not watching video; the patent license only works for the 10 minutes a year I feel like looking at Youtube on my phone.

It's technically superior and also supported out of the box by 97% of new computers.

Nice statistic. What percentage of Internet users have "new computers", though? (I work at a company with 300,000 employees. We still use Windows XP; two versions behind the latest stable version of Windows!)

You are right that h.264 is technically superior to Theora. The Space Shuttle is technically superior to my bicycle, but due to cost concerns, I have to ride my bike to work rather than fly there on the space shuttle. Sometimes the best solution is not the one you can afford.

(I can't afford an h.264 license. Or rather, I won't afford it. I don't care that much about seeing a cat flushing a toilet on my phone.)

blasdel9• 17 years ago

The Vorbis audio codec is well worth using: slightly better compression/quality than AAC, and natively VBR. It's widely used in commercial video games. Unfortunately for consumer use, the native container formats are awful, the decoder is computationally expensive, and it can't do CBR.

On the other hand the Theora video codec has nothing going for it technically: it's worse than any of its competitors across the board. It was written for the commercial market, but was abandoned after no customers ever bought licenses. There are no independent implementations: there's only a transliteration of the decoder to Java, and a fork of the encoder to not suck quite as pointlessly within the bounds of the spec.

Theora's few proponents are pushing it for purely ideological reasons. Has that ever worked?

jrockway7• 17 years ago

I've never quite understood why the resistance to the various Ogg formats?

My guess is that because there's no support for Digital Restrictions Management. Apple has already widely deployed software and devices that can play restricted h.264, and that's what the media companies that produce the content "want". (Of course, I never watch "media-company content" on Youtube. I doubt anyone whose videos I watch on Youtube would want Restriction Management on their files.)

Incidentally, all of the music I've bought recently has been in FLAC format. Seems like everyone I listen to offers it in addition to mp3s.

(It's just video-producers that think I am going to pay them $2 for a TV show I can't watch on my portable device. Haha, fat chance.)

ZeroGravitas6• 17 years ago

I find it interesting that you can now buy music in FLAC format (from well known digital pioneers such as Metallica!) yet you can't play them on your Apple devices, instead they push their own home grown format, which they don't seem to licence widely and so generally undermine the whole concept of lossless audio.

Kind of shows up their stance of we want to use the best and most widespread format (as does the crappiness of their H.264 encoder compared with the x264 encoder that they could just adopt).

They never made any official announcement, but there were reports of Apple employees claiming that the ever handy bogeyman of patents were preventing them implementing FLAC.

Shortly after they implemented their own ALAC (note that's the exact same name with Free replaced with Apple) which reverse engineering showed to be built with the exact same technology they claimed was under a patent cloud with a few extra bits which were actively avoided by FLAC because of patent worries.

Having experienced that, and been quite disappointed as an Apple fan and owner, I can't take their stance of H.264 seriously.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

I honestly think part of it is the stupid name. I think it's an outstanding technical achievement and generally wonderful, but while 'Vorbis' sounds (somewhat) hip and cool, talk of encoding your audio as 'ogg files' is a one-way ticket to nerd Siberia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Name

This obviously has nothing to do with companies like google and their licensing decisions, but I do honestly think it's a major reason the format never caught on with the general public.

scythe• 17 years ago

I'm surprised Dirac hasn't come up more in this discussion. It's as free as Theora - perhaps freer, since the BBC can guarantee there are no submarine patents - and it's miles ahead of Theora, comparable to h.264.

ZeroGravitas6• 17 years ago

Dirac does come up, and it's interesting technology but not suitable for web video, being considerably worse at this task than both Theora and H.264.

And no-one, not even the BBC, can guarantee they won't get patent trolled. That's part of the delicious brokenness of patents, you have prove a negative, prove that there are no black swans and while reasonable people will go forward based on probabilities and heuristics, the wider discussion about Theora moved onto politics and business a long time ago, where demanding people prove a negative is a good rhetorical trick even when it applies just as much, if not more, to your own side.

guelo• 17 years ago

Does anyone have any idea when the h264 related patents expire? If you recall the big gif shitfest, the end result was that png was able to establish itself but when the patent threat expired gif and png have been able to coexist fine. I expet the same to happen here, theora uses this opportunity to establish itself and then h264 and theora are able to coexist. Btw, fuck software patents!

blasdel9• 17 years ago

Except that in that case GIF was a mediocre established format, and PNG was a terrific new one. The GIF decoder was never encumbered, just the encoder.

In this case Theora is both mediocre and unestablished, which is not a winning combination.

jrockway7• 17 years ago

Theora is not exactly mediocre, it just isn't the best. But the "best" is expensive to license, and Theora is a reasonable substitute that is completely Free.

People complain about the extra CPU power it takes to decode Theora, but if I have to choose between paying extra for a more-powerful CPU or a patent license, I would choose the former. At least I can make use of the more-powerful CPU when I'm not watching videos of cats flushing the toilet.

aw3c2• 17 years ago

2017

moron4hire• 17 years ago

What value does this provide to me as a user? I'm not interested in formats for formats' sake, neither am I - as a consumer - interested in "openness"; I'm interested in "workingness".

felixc3• 17 years ago

Right now, nothing. That's not why this is important.

Think about the consequences of this for just one moment. How much support and developer time is Firefox going to lose if it can't play videos if/when YouTube switches over fully and doesn't use Flash? How much support and developer time is Linux going to lose if there are no browsers for it that can play internet videos, if H.264 becomes the de-facto standard (note that only Chrome works, not Chromium)? If you don't care about that at all, and are happy using IE (or Chrome, these days) on Windows for ever, then by all means move along, there is nothing for you to see here. The rest of us care.

blasdel9• 17 years ago

That's not true at all: the patent coverage has no practical effect.

Chromium supports all the codecs your local ffmpeg install supports, if you put symlinks to the libraries in /usr/lib/chromium-browser/. Everyone installs it this way, and it actually supports way more codecs than the official Chrome (Google didn't buy licenses for MPEG2, Xvid, etc.).

drivingmenuts• 17 years ago

Why can't all of these browsers be format-neutral and have support done through a plug-in? Leave it up to the end-user to decide what they want to have running on their system?

Ask YouTube for Ogg support

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