Firefox is on the HTML5 train; it's isn't on the H.264 train. If someone's implementing HTML5 video only using the H.264 codec, that doesn't make Mozilla's implementation less compliant since the spec doesn't specify codec for this very reason.
“Even if we were to pay the <b>$5,000,000</b> 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.â€
$5,000,000!?!?! a year 0_0 HTML5 sites definitely just need to go with the Ogg codec.
Bloody hell, this is such a stupid business move for H.264 in my opinion. Doing this causes so many potential users to not have access to H.264 content at all. I think it would make more sense to charge more for a license on the encode end and make the license for decoding free.
Yay. Happy to read the comments here and not see "Who cares. Mozilla should just use H.264 so I can see daily nutshots."
I'm sure Mozilla could afford the $5M for the codec, in literal monetary terms. But, then we'd have to fork off into private vs public code, because you could never download the Firefox source code and build the complete product - which you can, right now.
We could also pass the buck to locally-installed codecs, but those differ from machine to machine and OS to OS. That doesn't make for a standard way of doing things across the web.
And, really, we're tired of things like Adobe Flash crashing Firefox and us getting blamed for it. Not to mention opening the way for sites pwning you via buggy codecs we have no power to fix.
Open video on the web is more important than your immediate access to daily nutshots.
I personally want Theora to win. Attaching a standard to proprietary and/or patented technology is what got the entire memory industry into trouble with Rambus and their band of serial litigants.
That said, I don't think Theora will win this war. With Google on the boat and Microsoft+Apple sub-patent holders, it already looks pretty bleak, and that makes me sad.
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
Comments
I'm kinda surprised with Vimeo... probably because their flash video files were already H.264.
Did you do the interview?
$5,000,000!?!?! a year 0_0 HTML5 sites definitely just need to go with the Ogg codec.
I'm sure Mozilla could afford the $5M for the codec, in literal monetary terms. But, then we'd have to fork off into private vs public code, because you could never download the Firefox source code and build the complete product - which you can, right now.
We could also pass the buck to locally-installed codecs, but those differ from machine to machine and OS to OS. That doesn't make for a standard way of doing things across the web.
And, really, we're tired of things like Adobe Flash crashing Firefox and us getting blamed for it. Not to mention opening the way for sites pwning you via buggy codecs we have no power to fix.
Open video on the web is more important than your immediate access to daily nutshots.
That said, I don't think Theora will win this war. With Google on the boat and Microsoft+Apple sub-patent holders, it already looks pretty bleak, and that makes me sad.