Mozilla Foundation Vice President of Engineering Mike Shaver provided insight this weekend on why Firefox isn’t compatible with last week’s introduction of HTML5 video players from of web’s largest video sharing sites.
The issue, Shaver said, is centered on the choice between two video codecs: The open source Ogg Theora or the patented H.264. Whereas the former may be freely implemented, the latter requires costly licensing fees made out to the MPEG-LA.
“Without such a license, it is not legal to use or distribute software that produces or consumes H.264-encoded content. Indeed, even distributing H.264 content over the internet or broadcasting it over the airwaves requires the consent of the MPEG-LA, and the current fee exemption for free-to-the-viewer internet delivery is only in effect until the end of 2010,” Shaver said.
“These license fees affect not only browser developers and distributors, but also represent a toll booth on anyone who wishes to produce video content. And if H.264 becomes an accepted part of the standardized web, those fees are a barrier to entry for developers of new browsers, those bringing the web to new devices or platforms, and those who would build tools to help content and application development.”
The issue is clearer for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari browsers as the two firms are licensors to the H.264 video codec. In other words, they have provided technology essential to the operation of the standard and, therefore, most likely receive radically different licensing terms (though Microsoft has not yet built HTML5 video support into its browser). Google’s Chrome supports H.264 as well, but there is some ambiguity surrounding the ability for others to roll their own version of the browser from source without violating the H.264 license.
“Mozilla has decided differently, in part because there is no apparent means for us to license H.264 under terms that would cover other users of our technology, such as Linux distributors, or people in affiliated projects like Wikimedia or the Participatory Culture Foundation,” Shaver said.
“Even if we were to pay the $5,000,000 annual licensing cost for H.264, and we were to not care about the spectre of license fees for internet distribution of encoded content, or about content and tool creators, downstream projects would be no better off.”
Finally, Shaver cited several concerns unrelated to licensing that preempt the inevitable suggestions that Mozilla simply use codec support already installed on a user’s PC.
“There are issues there related to principle (fragmentation of format under the guise of standardized HTML), to effectiveness (about 60% of our users are on Windows XP, which provides no H.264 codec), to security (exposure of arbitrary codecs to hostile content), and to user experience (mapping the full and growing capabilities of <video> to the system APIs provided),” he said.
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