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Comment by tumult | Hacker News Reader

You can actually control the buffering/playback with JavaScript. There are various ways to do this; one is with the TimeRanges object http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#normalize... which will give you a representation of available time regions in the video resource. You can use this to determine when you want the client to begin playback. Your code can receive this after registering for an event and seeking the video.

Another way is with the readyState of the media element. In particular you want to look for numeric value 4, HAVE_ENOUGH_DATA. From the WHATWG:

All the conditions described for the HAVE_FUTURE_DATA state are met, and, in addition, the user agent estimates that data is being fetched at a rate where the current playback position, if it were to advance at the rate given by the defaultPlaybackRate attribute, would not overtake the available data before playback reaches the end of the media resource.

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I could understand this in mp4, which has a global index giving locations of all frames in the file, but how would this be possible in ogg, which has no global index? Without a global index, you can't know anything about time regions that you haven't yet downloaded.

Then it probably doesn't work with ogg :)

I personally think it's a huge mistake for Firefox to support only ogg. It's a bad time for fragmentation in the push for open video on the web.

It should still be possible to get a rough estimate for when to start playback. Good enough for buffered autoplay.

The problem being patents/licensing. mp4 is patented up the 'wazoo' and has onerous licensing terms.

How can Firefox distribute the H.264 codecs without infringing on patents?

How do Linux distributions distribute H.264 and AAC decoders? Debian does, Ubuntu does, Fedora does, basically everything in the world except GNUsense does--yet they do just fine with themselves.

The best solution would be to simply use system decoders, like Safari does. On Windows, this would be Directshow, on Linux this would be Gstreamer, and on OS X this would be Quicktime. The browser should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with video and audio decoding.

> Debian does, Ubuntu does, Fedora does,

They do not. For Debian and Ubuntu, it is in Multiverse (non-free) repositories. For Fedora, it in RPM Fusion repository. In other words, there is no distribution that distributes H.264 or AAC, so system decoders would not help at all.

We've had that kind of "standard" for embedding movies for years. The only reason you don't know that is due to it's unpopularity.

>The browser should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with video and audio decoding.

I know! While we're at it, who had the brilliant idea to put image decoders in browsers? I say let QuickTime decode GIFs and PNGs.

If firfox does do it I believe they would still technically be required to pay licensing fees. The only reason they wouldn't is because mpeg la does not pursue them.

They could take their mountain of cash and pay the licensing fee like Chrome does.

IIRC the licensing terms on MPEG4 are pretty onerous.

It's capped at a few million dollars. A pittance for Mozilla.

Firefox could pay the licensing fee for the copies of Firefox they distribute themselves, but they can't pay the licensing fee for unknown downstream users - the various Linux distros who build their own Firefox builds, projects like Seamonkey and Camino, any random people who want to use the Gecko source for something. Mozilla is pretty committed to making sure that anyone who uses Gecko has access to all the HTML features that Firefox has, so having a special feature-filled Mozilla-branded version and leaving everybody else out in the cold is not really an option.

Although Chrome supports H.264 video, I believe Chromium does not.

If Mozilla is more committed to open source ideology than making video actually work that's their choice, but they could do things differently if they wanted to.

Mozilla is a non-profit org dedicated to the open web. They can no more do things differently than a shareholder owned corporation can just decide to not make profits.

The patents (and thus the license fees) only apply to object code -- distributing the source code ain't infringing shit.

Mozilla already has compile flags that generate binaries other people aren't allowed to distribute -- the logo and trademarks are decidedly non-free, hence IceWeasel.

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