Firefox will support H264 and MP3 decoding with OS codecs

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platform/browse_thread/thread/fb14de8b9ad84e15#

by gcp • 14 years ago

127 73 14 years ago

groups.google.com

avar• 14 years ago

So they're now just using OS codecs which is exactly what they refused to do when they made a big fuss about H264 patents a while back?

joelhaasnoot• 14 years ago

This is on Android initially. Cheaper android devices (anything less than ~ 200 dollars) don't ship with H264 decoders built it, nor does Cyanogenmod. You have to install something off the Market, which is hard since they're often chipset/ARM version specific...

gcp12• 14 years ago

To me this looks like a capitulation, probably brought on by the following factors:

* Chrome was supposed to drop H264 support a >1 year ago in favor of WebM. It never happened.

* The spread of H264 video wasn't slowed down by Mozilla's stance.

* Firefox users were effectively forced to install Flash (a far more closed solution) to view videos.

* The split in HTML5 video support (Firefox and Opera being the lone holdouts with no H264 support) weakened HTML5 compared to alternatives.

* Flash is going away on Mobile devices, which mean that Firefox Mobile users had no way to view videos. This is why it's going into B2G + Android first.

cheatercheater• 14 years ago

You don't remember what the original argumentation was. Firefox is free, Mozilla can't afford the patent licensing, that's all. If you own a h.264 license and want to use it with your software, feel free. By buying a phone or windows 7 you get the license to use a h.264 codec. Microsoft already brought support to Firefox ( http://www.osnews.com/story/24137/Microsoft_Brings_H264_to_F... ), now it's happening on Android. It's one thing to promote open standards - that's great and Firefox is doing that with WebM - but it's another thing to completely disregard existing capabilities and put the user back in the stone age of the internet.

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

It could've been slowed down a lot if Google made Youtube in WebM by default by now. But they didn't, and that's probably because they don't think it's ready yet. Too bad. They might've missed their chance, or they will miss it if they don't do it very soon.

mbrubeck2• 14 years ago

Also:

* Adobe announced two years ago that Flash would support WebM, but it never happened. (And since then they have stopped updating Flash for mobile platforms, and for non-Chrome browsers on Linux.)

azakai2• 14 years ago

> * Chrome was supposed to drop H264 support a >1 year ago in favor of WebM. It never happened.

This is pivotal. A big part of why WebM looked like it could win was Chrome's announced support for it and the dropping of H.264. It looks like Chrome has backtracked on that - over a year passed, no follow through on Chrome's promise to remove H.264 - so it is forcing Mozilla to reconsider it's position.

Does anyone know more about Chrome's current stance?

icebraining2• 14 years ago

They made their position. Obviously, no one except them (and possibly Opera) cares enough about the problems they pointed out with h.264. There's no point is fighting a lost battle and lose most of their user-base over it.

carmen• 14 years ago

mozplugger has long played every media format ever by hooking into system ffmpeg/mplayer tooling, on firefox/iceweasel. likewise most minimalist webkit wrapers (midori, surf) just seem to use gstreamer/ffmpeg too, which has clean-roomed free support of even nasty old codecs like realvideo. arguing over what is officialy 'shipped' when the browser supports plugins, Xembed and so on is kind of a pointless tempest in a teapot

AndrewDucker• 14 years ago

Just to be clear - this is on Android, at least to start with. Whether it gets opened up to work with Windows later is an open question.

Stratego• 14 years ago

A lovely way to admit being wrong while still remaining slightly user-hostile.

icebraining2• 14 years ago

Wrong in what?

Joeboy• 14 years ago

Wrong about thinking they could do the right thing and get away with it?

tacokakos• 14 years ago

Stratego > So true :)

chrisfarms• 14 years ago

> For the desktop, this could be problematic. While Windows 7 does provide access to an already installed and licensed h.264 codec, Windows XP does not. If we simply enable system codecs where available, how will Web developers know when they can and cannot count on system codecs?

Isn't the whole point of the <source> tag to solve this very issue?

fpgeek3• 14 years ago

<source> lets you serve different formats of the same audio/video object to accommodate the different formats your users may need. However, <source> doesn't do anything to help you figure out which formats you need to serve to cover your user base, which is the problem being referenced here, I believe.

gcp12• 14 years ago

In theory (only) this doesn't help web designers much, as they still need to keep supporting the same formats.

In practice, web designers already seem to use H264 exclusively, so at the very least Firefox users won't have to install Flash to see videos.

Fice2• 14 years ago

This will surely help MPEG LA make their encumbered codec a standard for publishing video on the web. I would rather use a browser that does not support non-free codecs.

Maxious• 14 years ago

For h264 to be enabled in Firefox, you must already be using a mobile device or in the future an operating system that (financially and technically) supports non-free codecs.

ugh3• 14 years ago

Make?! Are you serious? It already is. Currently Firefox is just using Flash to play h.264 videos, not OS codecs. There is little practical difference between those two things.

This was always about booting h.264 from its position as the standard for publishing video on the web.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

Is that really such an issue? For a highly published patent like that I am sure some prior art can be found, if necessary.

streptomycin• 14 years ago

If it were so simple, someone would have done it already. In reality, you're talking about a massively expensive legal battle with an uncertain outcome.

pwthornton2• 14 years ago

Is there a remotely modern video codec that isn't encumbered? Just because it is offered up as free software or open source doesn't mean that someone else's patent doesn't already cover it.

I have no faith that WebM is non-encumbered. The real issue is our patent system, not codecs.

Fice2• 14 years ago

The patent system is so that almost every non-trivial software can be considered encumbered. Yet the chances of being sued successfully are different. Why will MPEG LA need to push their codec if they could profit from selling patent licenses to WebM users?

I suspect that the real motivation of the H.264 supporters is that the patent encumbered codec will allow content providers and proprietary software vendors to control who is allowed to produce video playback software (at least, they could make it impossible for free software to support the codec), and impose mandatory content protection. That will make the content industry giants closer to their ultimate goal of eliminating all the culture they do not control.

paulrouget4• 14 years ago

No. There is no plan to support H264.

Seriously - there is not decision been taken here. This is just a discussion about gecko on Android, and the implication for Desktop.

Saying "Firefox will support H264 and MP3 decoding with OS codecs" is just speculation.

Edit: to be clear: I am saying that there's no plan to support H264 on Firefox Desktop.

gcp12• 14 years ago

Saying "Firefox will support H264 and MP3 decoding with OS codecs" is just speculation.

Quoting directly from the link:

Initially this will be enabled on Gonk (B2G). In a few weeks we will add support for Android as well. We will support encoding any video/audio format that is supported by existing decoders present on the system, including H.264 and MP3.

Of course it's possible that the bug doesn't land. But calling this speculation? Please.

paulrouget4• 14 years ago

I was talking about Firefox Desktop.

joeybaker• 14 years ago

If there's a workable solution for supporting codecs in gecko via a system license, why not use the same method on the desktop? Why fragment the engine?

wahnfrieden3• 14 years ago

Because Firefox Mobile is some bullshit if it can't play any video content (it doesn't support Flash.)

pkmays• 14 years ago

I wonder how hostile people will be once the H.264 patents expire. (Remember GIF hate?) It will happen within most of our lifetimes.

gcp12• 14 years ago

MP3 will go there first.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

Not necessarily. High profile patents can always be made to expire, there is surely some prior art stashed somewhere.

And if that fails, Google can always buy a couple of senators to fix it.

Scaevolus• 14 years ago

They won't all expire until around the end of 2017, according to this: http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/

magicalist• 14 years ago

wait, did the grandparent originally say something about MP3?

h264's last patent will expire in november 2027 (or september 2028, but I think there's some technicality that makes that one not count) according to http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_pat...

That's a really long time from now.

ZeroGravitas3• 14 years ago

I would expect the hostility to rise towards the end as you realise that you're still locked in to a format that is no longer technically competitive and people start dropping support for it in ways that inconvenience you and force you onto an unnecessary upgrade treadmill e.g. see current state of mpeg-2 support and the near future for Xvid/MPEG4.

sho_hn5• 14 years ago

From the article:

"There is really no justification to stop our users from using system decoders already on the device"

Mozilla just spent two years telling everyone that they were not going to do this, and posting justifications as for why not. To me this is a serious blow to their credibility.

Examples:

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2009/06/directshow-and-platform-...

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/01/video-freedom-and-mozill... ("Mozilla should pick up and use H.264 codecs that are already installed on the user's system.")

paulrouget4• 14 years ago

Not an article, a post in a forum.

One person opinion != Mozilla opinion

sho_hn5• 14 years ago

Aye, but the person in question is a high-ranking Mozilla employee, and his "opinion" is presented in a very done-deal sort of way.

(As for "article", that was just me using a generic term for the context of a HN thead.)

gcp12• 14 years ago

Mozilla just spent two years telling everyone that they were not going to do this, and posting justifications as for why not. To me this is a serious blow to their credibility.

They fought 2 years for getting patent-free video recognized, probably at the cost of some of their userbase, and a lot of anger from web-developers who saw their lives complicated.

Today, they seem to be reconsidering their position because they think it's a lost fight.

How is this a blow to their credibility? What should they have done? Instantly bend over next time? Stubbornly refuse to reconsider and lose the best hope for a truly free phone OS because nobody would want to use it?

If you lose a war, it's never pretty. Kudos to Mozilla for taking a hard stance against patented standards for as long as they could. They deserve credit for that.

sho_hn5• 14 years ago

> How is this a blow to their credibility?

Because he's not saying "we tried, but it didn't work out in the end". He's saying there is no justification not to use available platform decoders. Yet they were not shy to provide them in the past. He's not addressing why those are no longer relevant arguments.

Obviously the real reason they're doing this now is because on their new mobile platform, the Gecko runtime is all there is, and without it supporting H.264 playback, the platform would be considered incomplete at launch more so than their desktop browser is for not supporting it. I get the motivation. I'm not saying it's wrong - I don't agree with it, but that's not the point here. The point is how bad it makes Mozilla look to change their stance so willy-nilly.

astrodust2• 14 years ago

It was a stupid, misguided effort from the beginning. Due to the way patents work, there is no such thing as a patent-free video library. You can't make one. It's impossible. Any non-trivial program will have some kind of infringement and if someone's trolling for "infringements" then they will find them.

They should've worked instead to get proper buy-in from the various parties supporting the current standards to ensure that another GIF incident doesn't happen.

Aissen2• 14 years ago

2 years ago, while working at a SoC vendor, they were explicitely taking into account WebM support for their next generations of chips: not having hardware decoding for a major web codec would be a great failure: with Google + Mozilla + Opera we could see almost 1 billion users affected by this. This is a make or break to have design wins.

A SoC lifecycle can take 5 years to materialize in customer shipping hardware. Yet Mozilla is giving up before collecting the fruit of their previous policy (no system codec).

That's a shame.

gcp12• 14 years ago

What good is WebM support in the SoC, or what effect does it have, if there is zero content out there using it anyway? If WebM video would be popular by any measure, this wouldn't have happened.

Note that there are SoC already out there that support VP8/WebM. As far as I know Tegra 2 is one of them. What does it change? Nothing. All those chips support H264 as well. So H264 is what content producers use.

Aissen2• 14 years ago

There is content. Youtube has started pushing html5+webm videos to modern webrowsers without flash installed. This includes Android 4.0+.

azakai2• 14 years ago

> Yet Mozilla is giving up before collecting the fruit of their previous policy (no system codec).

The bigger issues are that

* Google never followed through on its declaration it would remove H.264 from Chrome, which would have made almost 50% of browsers that don't support H.264.

* Flash never followed through on its declaration it would include WebM, which would have enabled WebM in IE and Safari and made it possible for YouTube to go WebM-only (on desktop).

Mozilla using system H.264 codecs on mobile (not even desktop) doesn't matter at all compared to those.

ZeroGravitas3• 14 years ago

If they're going to do this, they should still not support AAC in html5 audio tags, even if they support it in video tags when bundled with H.264.

With MP3 and Vorbis (with Opus a potential new entrant) you already have wide compatibility (everyone that supports AAC supports mp3 too) and top quality covered and mp3 patents expire a lot sooner than AAC. Ubuntu also has a free (as in beer) mp3 decoder available.

I'm all for pragmatism, but there's still utility and principle in avoiding unnecessary reliance on patented codecs where possible.

Firefox will support H264 and MP3 decoding with OS codecs

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