Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

http://briancrescimanno.com/2010/03/17/dear-mozilla-please-dont-kill-html5-video/

by bcrescimanno • 16 years ago

119 125 16 years ago

jmillikin8• 16 years ago

You should be directing this towards Microsoft and Apple; all of my videos work fine in Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and Opera but currently do not in IE (54.5% market share) or Safari (5.3% share). If IE9 supports Theora, then that's one less browser which will require Java- or Silverlight-based fallbacks.

H.264 is great, and I look forward to being able to use it in 15 years or so[1]. But the only reasonable codecs I can use today are Theora and Dirac.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the...

freetard3• 16 years ago

Mozilla is waiting for google to open source On2's codec.

evgen2• 16 years ago

What benefit if there for Google to do this anytime soon? They can wait for Mozilla to implode, scoop up most of their marketshare and continue to use the On2 codec as a veiled threat to keep MPEG-LA in line. The On2 codec is more useful to Google if it stays locked in a drawer.

freetard3• 16 years ago

Google doesn't want to kill mozilla. Open standards are good for the web and therefor good for Google. Google explicitly said that they want other browsers to copy the features of chrome because great broswers mean a better web experience for everyone which is good for google. A competitor such as mozilla that embraces open standard is actually a good thing for google, that's the kind of browser competitor they want, not IE.

As for freeing On2 codec, google made it clear on their press release when they bought on2 that having an open video standard was primordial for the web. And again, it's in their interest to make the web the best platform possible, and having a free and open video codec usable by all is a huge part of achieving that goal.

Letting the On2 codec locked in a drawer would be a huge mistake, it would help mpeg4 be the ubiquitous standard making any alternative irrelevant and useless (like vorbis or aac were with mp3, even though vorbis and aac were actually better). If there is any time to make use of On2, it's now and that's by making it open source.

jimmyjim2• 16 years ago

It isn't in Google's long-term interest to do any such thing for its future expansion. Especially with the news of Android on TV's, it would seem that it'll have to cave in to DRM-encumbered technologies in order to play ball with big media.

freetard3• 16 years ago

Having an open codec doesn't prevent at all using DRM.

jimmyjim2• 16 years ago

And on a related note, Google's visions come to light quite clearly if you look at what they're focusing on: cloud computing, ultra-high speed connections. They don't want users to have any local storage. They just want to serve ads on all media. Very obvious of course, but it's interesting to see the grand scheme coming together.

blasdel13• 16 years ago

Noone really wants On2's proprietary codec implementations — that got us the Theora shitpile.

What we could use is their independent patent portfolio.

evgen2• 16 years ago

Don't worry, Mozilla is taking a principled stand that will become the impetus for their final jump into irrelevance. If IE9 does what their recent noises regarding HTML5 have been suggesting then Mozilla will join Opera in the "cute but useless" category and Chrome & IE9 will divvy up the Firefox marketshare within three years.

CoreDumpling• 16 years ago

Sorry, my sarcasm meter needs some calibration. While HTML5 video driving forward web standards is certainly nice, I can't even bring myself to believe that we will rid ourselves of the rotting carcass that is IE6 within the next three years, let alone Flash as a video delivery platform. I don't think Mozilla feels threatened yet, but we'll see if they change their minds once they see this affecting their bottom line.

Strangely enough, my gripes with Firefox have driven me to Opera, despite the "cute but useless" label you have slapped on it in such a cavalier fashion.

jmillikin8• 16 years ago

Opera is sort of "cute but useless" -- on some sites I maintain for non-technical users, Opera has a smaller market share than IE5. IE6 will probably be around until we're all dead of age.

bad_user2• 16 years ago

That's not necessarily the case.

Silverlight runs on top of IE6. Silverlight 3 has support for "plugable media codecs", which means that you can stream Theora/OGG content in Silverlight (I don't know if it can be hardware accelerated ... but it would work for non-HD content anyway).

Silverlight also has good browser/JS interoperability, which means it is possible to add support for HTML5 Theora in any IExplorer version without even asking the user if it wants to or not.

I couldn't find better references, but see here ...

http://www.atoker.com/blog/2010/02/04/html5-theora-video-cod...

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Mar-23-1.html

Penetration is already pretty good, and I'm pretty sure that within the next 2 years all IExplorer users will have Silverlight installed (Microsoft can always push it using their update mechanism).

You could do the same in Firefox ... add support for H.264 by using a Flash or a Silverlight applet in combination with a JS script that manipulates the HTML5 tags and communicates with the applet.

Since Silverlight is also running in Safari, you can add Theora support to it too (wouldn't work for iPhones, but still, it's pretty cool).

And it's all transparent. No confirmation dialogs.

It all depends on penetration rate of Silverlight of course, but recent stats (from riastats.com or statowl.com) puts it at ~ 45% ... jumping 10% from September (probably because of events like the Vancouver Olympics requiring it).

So web developers that are looking for a solution to streaming media that's standards compliant, can just do something like this.

Pretty ironic that the technical solution for this new format war comes from Microsoft.

docgnome3• 16 years ago

I like how Mozilla gets all the blame for refusing to support a non-free solution, instead of Google, Apple, and Microsoft for choosing a proprietary solution.

bcrescimanno5• 16 years ago

I'd personally contend that MS, Apple, and Google didn't "choose proprietary," they chose 1) the current market leading format 2) ...that has the most video content available online already 3) ...that can be hardware accelarated 4) ...that offers the best quality to size ratio.

daleharvey• 16 years ago

none of those change the fact that they "chose proprietary"

docgnome3• 16 years ago

You're right of course. Free vs Non-Free had nothing to do with it. I just really hate how everyone is hating on Mozilla for making a choice that is consistent with their principles.

jmillikin8• 16 years ago

I don't think it's fair to blame Google here -- after all, Chrome supports Theora and Vorbis natively. If they want to pay for licenses, that's their decision.

The problem is when a browser doesn't support Theora/Vorbis at all, such as Safari or current news regarding IE9. I'm personally hoping that the released version of IE9 will support Theora/Vorbis -- very unlikely, but a man can dream.

andrewfox• 16 years ago

I think the idea that the article is “hating” or “blaming” Mozilla for anything is just a little bit overdoing it. To say the least. The article goes out of its way to empathise with and respect the Mozilla position.

fungi3• 16 years ago

this really isn't fair

mozilla is in no position to be directly supporting h264, to suggest otherwise is just naive. its not a free codec and they simply can't afford to bet their future on the liability of massive royalties when the licensing regime changes (and it will).

their reasons for not indirectly supporting h264 via the OS is in my view valid but weak, would assume that this will be overcome with an extension of some sort in the future.

in any case encoding video twice really isn't a big deal.

bcrescimanno5• 16 years ago

How do you account for them directly supporting GIF? I'm not disagreeing in principle; but history shows that Mozilla as an organization is capable of picking it's battles and even supporting patent encumbered formats if doing so will make the Web a better place.

Being an employee of a one of the largest online video providers, I can assure you that both we and our customers see multiple encoding formats as a big deal.

jmillikin8• 16 years ago

The GIF patents expired while Firefox was still in early development. And it was not the GIF format itself which was patented, but a particular compression algorithm used with it -- decoders, as used in Mozilla, were not patented.

People could (and did) create uncompressed GIFs to avoid the patent risk. For obvious reasons, uncompressed H.264 is not useful.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html

kinetik6• 16 years ago

GIF is a different situation. It was already a well established format before Unisys started enforcing the patent it held on it. The patent was a "submarine" patent, so it was not publically known before the format became widely used. It's also worth pointing out that the GIF fiasco was well underway (1993-1999) before Mozilla ever existed. The Mozilla organization formed in 1998, and was mostly influenced by the vast number of participating Netscape employees until 2002-2003. By 2003 Unisys's patent had expired.

If anything, Mozilla's stance towards H.264 is an attempt to avoid the web ending up in a similar situation it did with GIF, where the format was deeply entrenched before the companies controlling the licensing began asking users to pay license fees. The MPEG-LA's recent announcement that internet streaming would remain free until 2015 is a direct attempt to achieve further entrenchment of the format. There is a very real possibility that they will ask for licensing fees come 2015. And we have no idea how much they might cost. Even with free streaming, most of the people in the video production chain need to pay license fees to the MPEG-LA right now.

vrode2• 16 years ago

I believe that by 2015, when the free use license of H264 will end, we'll have another more powerful encoding algorithms ready to take its place. So losing this battle may allow open-source community still to win the war.

ubernostrum6• 16 years ago

To suggest that the only way to handle H.264 is to directly write and ship a codec for it is such an uninformed position that I'm surprised you're sitting at a positive score.

Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media framework with support available for H.264. Mozilla's policy is to refuse to delegate to the OS for media handling, largely so that they'll have a political bargaining chip to try to push Theora on everyone else.

In other words, this is not a pragmatic or economic decision by Mozilla; it is purely an ideological decision, because they could -- if they chose -- support H.264 video easily and at zero financial cost to themselves and their users. What we should be talking about, then, is whether this is a good ideological stand to take.

(and, personally, I think it's the wrong stand at the wrong time; Mozilla should be holding off from making any decisions until the Bilski case is decided, because it may well turn out that there's no such thing as a software patent in the US)

buster4• 16 years ago

So, then can you enlighten us a bite more? Personally i have read pretty much every kind of "myth" about mpeg licensing. One blog post i remember was "according to their terms you (theoretically) would have to pay when a friend sends a video with copyrighted material to you" which more or less sounds like "wherever there is mpeg video they have the right to demand fees" (because even your holiday movie may contain a copyrighted soundtrack).

According to http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalti... there are "royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video". And this is just what is happening in the internet all over the place. Firefox can't even know if you look a "free" broadcast or just paid for an online stream, so they just have to pay to support this codec?

And in the end, it's not at last the uncertainty about the codec. MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't. Because there probably is quite a good amount of money to be earned from fees.

Screw that H.264 stuff, support theora or dirac and problems are solved.

fungi3• 16 years ago

> Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media framework with support available for H.264.

thats what i meant by support via the OS. sorry i thought that that was clear?

linux generally doesn't ship with h264 and html5 offers video features beyond just embedding a video smack on a page. really think its more complicated then a "pure ideological decision".

but thanks, point taken and i will try to make my point more clear in the future.

Qz• 16 years ago

I'm so glad the patent system is spurring creativity and innovation.

mkyc• 16 years ago

It seems to have gotten us h264. The variant that isn't patented is clearly inferior - look at the screenshots.

andrewf• 16 years ago

Theora is patented. On2 granted people the right to use their patented technology without fear of legal reprisal. http://theora.org/faq/#24

fnid2• 16 years ago

In the end, this was a good move from Google, Apple, and Microsoft if they want to kill off FireFox. Why do any of those three want FF to survive? They're rich, they got money. They want to dominate the browser market. FF is all of their enemies, so in this instance, they are friends.

I don't see anyway that FF could compete against them all if people can't watch videos in the browser.

Additionally, they are all owners of massive content sites that will be able to distribute the content as well, so it's a win win for them. They beat out FF as a browser and they beat out rival content distributors.

rimantas• 16 years ago

Why would anyone want to kill something that looks suicidal anyway?

jsz0• 16 years ago

I think the Mozilla folks are just trying to make a point here but ultimately it's hard to see how they back it up against IE/WebKit. They'll have to give in eventually or they'll be left behind.

tmsh2• 16 years ago

I imagine I'm missing something. But why couldn't Mozilla use an extension that supports H264? Similar to Ubuntu's nonfree packages?

I imagine the HTML5 video tags are pretty deep in Gecko, but surely they could 'pave the way' with a clear interface for such an extension. And then use one that is developed by others. Isn't that one of the advantages of having a standardized <video> tag?

Reading this: http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codec...

It sounds like Mozilla is worried about (a) encouraging a non-free web and (b) passing on licensing fees to other people who use their product downstream. But surely there is less risk in being 'side-stream' so to speak with licensed technologies, esp. under a standardized markup. Anyway, curious legal issue.

pingou• 16 years ago

But who will make this extension ? Who will pay 5 millions $ each year to use H264 on Firefox ? If H264 become standard, every browser will have to pay the license fee. What if a new team of developers decide that all browsers sucks and they want to create their own, just like the Mozilla team did ? They will have to pay 5 millions if they want to distribute a browser that people could really use (almost nobody would use a browser that doesn't play their favorite videos).

tmsh2• 16 years ago

Good point. Though they could theoretically setup a separate financial entity that paid 5 million but was separate from the Mozilla foundation. And this separate entity might not really have to pay fees until 2015 or something unless I'm reading it wrong. Anyway, viva theora. It would be cool if there were some legal move they could do to get around the issue is all..

tpz• 16 years ago

"Who will pay 5 millions $ each year to use H264 on Firefox ?"

I've already paid for my H.264 licenses. Now I just want to use them. The PC to my left has a video card with licensed H.264 that I paid for and free software that harnesses it, the Mac in front of me has both a video card with licensed H.264 and a licensed software decoder and I paid for both, the Windows 7 VM running in the Mac even has a licensed H.264 decoder that I paid for, the phone to my right has licensed H.264 that I paid for, heck the linux-based set-top box in the living room has hardware in it with licensed H.264 decoding and as I'm sure you can guess I'll point out that I paid for that license too. :)

"If H264 become standard, every browser will have to pay the license fee."

Why? I just want Firefox to let me use the licenses I have already paid for.

All they have to do is defer to the appropriate operating system -level decoding support as many have suggested. That they are refusing to do so suggests to me that this has nothing to do with licensing fees and has everything to do with something else we've not quite uncovered yet.

At the end of the day, though, unless the Mozilla folks change their course I can easily see techies supporting family and/or business by saying "just install Chrome" the same way they used to (and to an extent still do, I suppose) say "just install Firefox" when their supported userbase complained about IE. The real risk now is that even if in the end Mozilla's issue is purely one of ideology it won't stop them from having become irrelevant in the process.

carussell4• 16 years ago

"But why couldn't Mozilla use an extension that supports H264? Similar to Ubuntu's nonfree packages?"

That might not be an unreasonable approach concerning some other aspect of video on the Web, but has only bad consequences in this particular debate.

As you can see, this debate involves Mozilla and co. versus detractors over the following two non-exclusive decision problems:

Support Theora? Support h.264?

But it's incredibly important to keep in mind the greater issue here motivating these questions, which is the desire for a baseline video format. As soon as anyone suggests delegating video decoding to the operating system, they're clearly divorcing themselves from this particular debate. Perhaps that kind of delegation is a solution to a problem concerning another aspect of video on the Web, but not this one, because it gains nothing in the pursuit for a baseline video format.

DannoHung• 16 years ago

Things I don't understand:

* Fork?

* H.264 HTML Video support via a plugin?

Why aren't these valid solutions?

blasdel13• 16 years ago

Yes, someone could fork Gecko + XULrunner + Firefox; but it is a huge pain-in-the-ass to even track it as upstream, much less diverge from it.

It's purposefully architected to make a plugin very unsavory — you could do it with a plugin/extension that inspected every DOM for failed <video> embeds, dynamically replacing them with an <embed> of its own NSAPI plugin. You'd be guaranteed to get FOUC, poor detectablity, and regular breakage. At that point the author is better off just seamlessly falling back to Flash.

carussell4• 16 years ago

"It's purposefully architected to make a plugin very unsavory"

I'd like a citation for this please, or at least some synthesis based on some explicit rationale (which is what I expected on the with that em dash, instead of a non-sequitur).

allyt3• 16 years ago

Because you need to pay licensing fees measured in "millions of USD per year" if you're going to distribute software which decodes H.264.

ubernostrum6• 16 years ago

Or you just delegate to the OS, which either already ships a licensed copy of the codec (Windows and OS X) or has users who ignore patents and install unlicensed codecs (Linux). By doing this you incur a whopping license fee of... zero dollars, because licensing becomes someone else's problem.

KirinDave3• 16 years ago

So? Mozilla is making a fair amount of money now. It's a big expense to license, but it's not an unobtainable one. Part of being a big player is sometimes paying out to license the best technology.

Mozilla is asking us to side with them based purely on ideology and an impact to their bottom line as a corporation. And Mozilla is not a tiny garage operation anymore.

rlpb• 16 years ago

It's a valid solution for a client. For a web developer, chances are that your visitor isn't using the fork and hasn't installed the plugin. This means that web sites won't be able to rely on HTML5 to deliver video, and so will use something else (such as Flash).

ja2ke• 16 years ago

Firefox has been slowly winning Joe consumers in the past few years by simply doing it better. Faster, less complicated, no spyware, displays everything. Regular users don't give a crap about the ideology behind any of those decisions, they just cared that FF sucks less than IE in almost every measurable way.

From a consumer standpoint, not playing the video format everyone else plays goes against why so many started using FF in the first place.

I don't care if Theora is great, it's not what people are using right now. Maybe Mozilla can fight this battle on the next go-round, but right now they're the odd man out in a split which has all major browsers and many many content creators on the other side.

If Mozilla was Microsoft they could maybe try this, but they're not, and I think many people are frustrated by this video thing because to people who "just want good software," that was the message behind adopting FF from day one. Not militant idealism or everything should be free hippie coder talk or anything else - the impression they gave at least, was of practical and clean decisions to uncomplicated the lives of average users. Sometimes that means going with the flow, even if only for the time being.

The moment they reintroduce "why doesn't this just work" into the equation, they fail at the expectation they spent so much trying to create when Firefox first caught on. This fight is weird because it feels like "Mozilla the ideological open source organization" is battling against "Mozilla the practical and uncomplicated software for your previously complicated and annoying life" marketing campaign.

wazoox• 16 years ago

This is utterly stupid. Mozilla can't support H264 and distribute freely its browser and conform to the (moronic) US law. This guy can whine as long as he want, there is no way around. Mozilla is a real US company with real money, not a couple of hackers in a garage; unfortunately they must comply to the unfortunate state of patent laws.

ubernostrum6• 16 years ago

I'm going to go round to the homes of everyone who assumes that shipping a hard-wired copy of a codec in a browser is the only way to support video, and smack them all upside the head with a printout of the source to gstreamer.

It won't cause them any sort of enlightenment, but it will make me feel a bit better.

avar• 16 years ago

The issue isn't that it's technically impractical to support H.264 but rather that it's legally impractical.

Sure you could just offload the problem to the operating system via something like GStreamer but that just moves the target, it doesn't eliminate it. It just means anyone who distributes your OS gets into trouble rather than your browser distributor.

This is about eliminating the possibility of submarine patents for an essential feature like video, not just moving the target around.

planettrash3• 16 years ago

Here here.

Surely it's not hard to make an operating system and browser that makes it almost transparent to install a codec or bit of software.

I agree, get gstreamer or something else to work seamlessly. And at the same time, give me the ability to turn the damn thing off. I can already imagine, the state of web pages to come, it will be like a license to put video adds all over my webpage, and drag my cpu into hades.

Robin_Message• 16 years ago

> I hope you can at least agree that going from two proprietary formats to one is a marked improvement.

I think I'd argue one proprietary format is worse than two in terms of lock-in, monopoly power and misaligned incentives.

bcrescimanno5• 16 years ago

Not when, in the case of two formats, the formats aren't competing and one, in fact, includes the other.

nivals• 16 years ago

Keep Mozilla patent free. The HTML5 video jockeys want Flash dead more than they want the future of the internet to be open, they are being blinded by short term problems.

Support Mozilla for making the tough, but correct choice.

jrockway• 16 years ago

Dear Apple, Microsoft, and Google: Please don't kill HTML5 Video. ("Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!")

anr• 16 years ago

How old is h264? When will the patents expire?

planettrash3• 16 years ago

I am lost in this debate.

If the decoder is a paid for plugin. Then it makes sense for it not to be shipped.

Why can't Google buy out the h.264 tech and give it to us all?

Why do we need the video tag anyway?

Doesn't it make more sense to use existing codecs that already sit on the system? Why bundle the codecs in the browser, wouldn't it be better to work on a common architecture that can interface with codecs?

Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

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