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Comment by travisbell | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I think this should be re-titled, "Ask Firefox for H264 support".

With YouTube and Vimeo adopting h264 and not Ogg, I'd say I have a feeling I know how this is going to end.

But you can say this to anything open, "why not .doc support?" for example, there are benefits other than bitrates to open standards. Think video editing and re-mixing/quoting for academic and news purposes (fair use/fair dealing). Think of the open source voice recognition to subtitling that proprietary audio codecs, over vorbis, would prevent (vorbis actually saves you bandwidth vs a lot of the other audio codecs because it is better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Quality:_Codec_compariso...). Think of browser, service and device innovators who will be locked out of competition by the big guys. I thought this was a forum for hackers, dreamers and entrepreneurs, not for videophiles making rather picky distinctions (I really don't see what the big deal is, if you look at the ogg comparison page posted elsewhere on the thread there isn't much difference and it's clear this is mainly about Apple protecting their iTouch/iPhone/Quicktime/iMovie/Finalcut video stack from those who would disrupt the market with Google and MS along with Apple for the ride).

Your .doc example is a good one. Mozilla explicitly refusing to support both H264 and Theora (because they want to make a stand) is like OpenOffice refusing to read both doc and odt, because doc is proprietary format.

I would prefer to see open, unpatented and free video codec used for the majority of web video. I applaud Mozilla for taking a stance. I don't applaud them taking a stance by limiting their users' freedom, instead of directly talking to Google, Vimeo and others and lobbying for the use of more open formats. Surely, a letter from Mozilla "hey guys, we really think you should support Theora too, let's meet and we'll tell you why we think it's very important" would have more effect than random blog articles & what amounts to blackmail?

YouTube using H264 initially may just have been because they already have their videos H264-encoded, because that's what they use for the high-res content in their Flash player. They may also be selecting it because of Chrome's support, but I think it's too early to assume for sure that they don't have plans to support Ogg at some point.

Supporting H264 <video> was just a matter of writing some front-end player code (which they already had from their HTML5 demo) and feeding it the same video file they gave the Flash player. Supporting Ogg, on the other hand, would require massive transcoding.

I thought that they did the encoding to H264 to make youtube iPhone-compatible.

IIRC, the iPhone version is H.264, but at a lower bitrate, so they have 3-4 h.264 files per video:

  * 720p version for hdtv videos
  * 480p version for non hd web viewing
  * High bitrate version for iPhone streaming on wifi 
  * Low bitrate version for iPhone streaming on 3g or edge.

Firefox cannot ship with H.264 licenses, regardless of whether they can afford the cost or not. The GPL is incompatible with that idea.

As a side note, I'm not sure why you want H.264 to become the de-facto standard, given that it would require you to pay licensing fees just to host your own videos.

Is it going to end with Mozilla wasting millions of dollars on H264 patent licenses?

I have ffmpeg on my machine right now with H264 support. Have mozilla just use it.

Mozilla does not need to distribute H264 support - just use what is already there. A similar library exists for windows.

That's an absurd suggestion. Mozilla can't just "pretend" that patents and licensing fees don't exist. FFMPEG gets away with it because they're not a commercial entity. Do you really think Google would have willfully paid to license H264 if they could 'just use ffmpeg' instead?

Until W7, Microsoft didn't ship a decoder for H.264. Neither Microsoft nor Apple ship support for MPEG2 (you have to pay extra), and nobody supports Xvid.

Yet Microsoft's Windows Media Player 'just uses ffmpeg' to play these formats when you have one of the many DirectShow packages installed, and has since the beginning. Apple's Quicktime does the same when you have Perian installed. Opera uses GStreamer for <video>, and does the same when you have gst-ffmpeg installed.

Google is mostly paying for H.264 decoder licenses because they were already going to have to pay broadcaster-level encoder licenses.

Opera only uses the system gstreamer on Linux, on Windows (and probably Mac when they get around to it) they bundle their own gstreamer that only supports Theora.

I can see Firefox doing similar on Linux, so if it's just (ironically) the Linux geeks that are desperate for the patented codecs then I wouldn't worry too much about it. For the 60% of Firefox users on XP though, Mozilla aren't going to rely on system codecs that aren't there.

I'd be surprised if you couldn't drop your own gstreamer plugins into Opera's directory on Windows/Mac.

You'd be surprised at the hundreds of millions of XP users with codec packs installed already. For the remainder Mozilla would just need a nice 'codec not found, go here' dialog like they already have for Flash.

Chrome does actually "just use ffmpeg".

As someone who hosts videos, I hope that you don't get control over the internets. Bandwidth is already expensive enough without having to pay licenses per-stream!

Agreed 100%. Mozilla has plenty of money from its Google ad revenue. They should just do the reasonable thing and license h264. It can't be THAT expensive.

The alternative is the continued domination of Flash. Is that what they really want? Because that's what they're choosing to get.

I admire their principles but in the end it's the outcome that matters.

How do they license it for their derivatives?

I don't know, but c'mon, they're a $100m/yr foundation. They can find a way. Maybe a plugin or something.

And they should support MP3 for HTML5 audio, too!

Would H264 that mean the end of all non-major browsers?

And all non-major video platforms, since you pay fees on that side too. You'll note the current drama is around two major video platforms who can easily meet the (capped) costs and probably don't want to encourage people to host their video elsewhere, or even host their own video themselves.

There would be no Wordpress equivalent if putting text on the web was taxed.

> There would be no Wordpress equivalent if putting text on the web was taxed.

Ironically, there is VideoPress.

This is stupid, sorry for the strong word, if H.264 succeeds it will be the free market that will lose and not mozilla, any startup that works with videos (say a new video editing on the cloud) will have to pay licensing fees just to serve its users, well, I do not know about people in the USA, but where I live founders generally don't have piles of money to spend in patents, the majority use dedicated servers at rackspace with linux and other open source software because it's cheaper than running your own server with Windows or Mac OS X server. Are you people not considering this as an "outcome"?

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