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Comment by fungi | Hacker News Reader

this really isn't fair

mozilla is in no position to be directly supporting h264, to suggest otherwise is just naive. its not a free codec and they simply can't afford to bet their future on the liability of massive royalties when the licensing regime changes (and it will).

their reasons for not indirectly supporting h264 via the OS is in my view valid but weak, would assume that this will be overcome with an extension of some sort in the future.

in any case encoding video twice really isn't a big deal.

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To suggest that the only way to handle H.264 is to directly write and ship a codec for it is such an uninformed position that I'm surprised you're sitting at a positive score.

Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media framework with support available for H.264. Mozilla's policy is to refuse to delegate to the OS for media handling, largely so that they'll have a political bargaining chip to try to push Theora on everyone else.

In other words, this is not a pragmatic or economic decision by Mozilla; it is purely an ideological decision, because they could -- if they chose -- support H.264 video easily and at zero financial cost to themselves and their users. What we should be talking about, then, is whether this is a good ideological stand to take.

(and, personally, I think it's the wrong stand at the wrong time; Mozilla should be holding off from making any decisions until the Bilski case is decided, because it may well turn out that there's no such thing as a software patent in the US)

So, then can you enlighten us a bite more? Personally i have read pretty much every kind of "myth" about mpeg licensing. One blog post i remember was "according to their terms you (theoretically) would have to pay when a friend sends a video with copyrighted material to you" which more or less sounds like "wherever there is mpeg video they have the right to demand fees" (because even your holiday movie may contain a copyrighted soundtrack).

According to http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalti... there are "royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video". And this is just what is happening in the internet all over the place. Firefox can't even know if you look a "free" broadcast or just paid for an online stream, so they just have to pay to support this codec?

And in the end, it's not at last the uncertainty about the codec. MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't. Because there probably is quite a good amount of money to be earned from fees.

Screw that H.264 stuff, support theora or dirac and problems are solved.

Well, you'll notice I was talking about the point of view of a browser vendor, because H.264 licensing is irrelevant to that use case: the right thing to do is delegate to the operating system's media framework, and let codec support and licensing be the OS vendor's problem.

But since you mention it:

MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't.

Personally I'm against having HTML5 specify any codec of any sort. HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 are each over ten years old now, and HTML5 won't be broadly usable as a replacement for at least another year or two; given the rate of development in video codecs, mandating one in a spec with that sort of expected lifespan would simply be stupid.

But it's worth pointing out that MPEG-LA is currently exempting H.264-encoded online video from royalties (so long as it's provided free of charge to users -- hence YouTube and other video sites don't have to pay every time a video is played), and will continue to do so until at least 2015 (by which point the whole question of software patents may be moot), so rushing to draw lines in the sand now is -- as I already said -- rather premature.

Last time i checked there a lot of video services out there with subscription/premium service. Vimeo has premium subscription.

Ok, so you don't want to specify the codec. Technically a good reason. But think about it, what will happen then? MS will support wmv by default, Apple will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora. This is a freaking nightmare for every enduser! Now on a desktop you can probably tell the user to install the correct decoder (my family/mother/older people certainly would never be able to do that!). But on a phone? So Windows Mobile 7 will ship with "hardcoded" wmv support? iPhone with quicktime?

As i told you, this is not technical, it's political. Now i don't know you, but when you have ever worked in a bigger revenue driven software company every f*cking decision is first made by money. It doesnt matter if something is technically the best solution as long as another solution provides a "benefit" in terms of money, marketshare, whatever the manager thinks will drive the competition away. MS in particular has proven to be driven by such decisions in the past, why would they change now?

Last time i checked there a lot of video services out there with subscription/premium service.

Vimeo doesn't charge to watch videos, so far as I know, and that's what triggers the licensing exemption.

But think about it, what will happen then? MS will support wmv by default, Apple will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora.

If HTML5 were to mandate Theora support, that part of the spec would simply be ignored by browser vendors who don't want to support Theora. Thus the mandate or lack of mandate in the spec produces no practical difference whatsoever in the end result: Apple's browsers would do H.264, Mozilla's browsers would do Theora, etc., etc.

But on a phone?

Again, it seems unlikely that anyone other than Mozilla will bother with Theora on mobile devices. Apple and Nokia have already taken pretty clear stances against supporting Theora, for example, so what good would it do to put a mandate in the spec? It'll just be ignored.

As i told you, this is not technical, it's political.

You seem to have a misunderstanding of how web standards actually work; without buy-in from the companies which will implement them, the standards might as well not exist at all. That's why HTML5 currently doesn't mandate a video codec; originally it required Theora support, but several major players basically said "if you leave that in there we're just going to ignore it".

Since this is a recurring problem with what you seem to be saying, what's your solution? Any approach to video codecs must take into account the fact that browser vendors can't be forced to ship an implementation of any particular codec, and will make their own decisions independently of what you might like them to do. As far as I can see right now, delegating to the operating system's media framework is the only way to get the sort of broad support that's needed, since those frameworks have to ship with a wide range of codecs already.

(and, honestly, the manual codec install really only turns out to be an issue with Theora; Windows and OS X both ship pretty much everything else out of the box)

But think about it, what will happen then?

You make it sound like this is a hypothetical scenario, but the codec mandate was removed from the HTML5 spec last June.

The reality is that Microsoft will support h.264, Apple supports h.264, Google supports h.264 (and Theora). Opera currently supports only Theora, but their implementation can support h.264. Mozilla is the only browser vendor that willfully forbids its users from viewing h.264 (or any other format but Theora) in <video>. In addition: Flash, Silverlight, and QuickTime all support h.264.

Bear in mind that the <video> tag has always been codec agnostic and able to support multiple codecs in the same tag. The codec mandate was only to specify a common codec across all browsers, but there is no point in mandating something that won't be implemented.

> Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media framework with support available for H.264.

thats what i meant by support via the OS. sorry i thought that that was clear?

linux generally doesn't ship with h264 and html5 offers video features beyond just embedding a video smack on a page. really think its more complicated then a "pure ideological decision".

but thanks, point taken and i will try to make my point more clear in the future.

How do you account for them directly supporting GIF? I'm not disagreeing in principle; but history shows that Mozilla as an organization is capable of picking it's battles and even supporting patent encumbered formats if doing so will make the Web a better place.

Being an employee of a one of the largest online video providers, I can assure you that both we and our customers see multiple encoding formats as a big deal.

The GIF patents expired while Firefox was still in early development. And it was not the GIF format itself which was patented, but a particular compression algorithm used with it -- decoders, as used in Mozilla, were not patented.

People could (and did) create uncompressed GIFs to avoid the patent risk. For obvious reasons, uncompressed H.264 is not useful.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html

The Mozilla appsuite was released as a 1.0 product in 2002 Firefox was released as a 1.0 product in 2004

The last GIF patents expired in 2006 (the first, in 2003 after the 1.0 version of the Mozilla App Suite)

Looking further, there were no patents on GIF decoders (from < http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html >). So Mozilla was completely in the clear.

There was only one patent, for LZW, but it was held in multiple countries. It first expired in 2003, and had expired in the last country by 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Uni...

What about Flash then?

what do you mean?

GIF is a different situation. It was already a well established format before Unisys started enforcing the patent it held on it. The patent was a "submarine" patent, so it was not publically known before the format became widely used. It's also worth pointing out that the GIF fiasco was well underway (1993-1999) before Mozilla ever existed. The Mozilla organization formed in 1998, and was mostly influenced by the vast number of participating Netscape employees until 2002-2003. By 2003 Unisys's patent had expired.

If anything, Mozilla's stance towards H.264 is an attempt to avoid the web ending up in a similar situation it did with GIF, where the format was deeply entrenched before the companies controlling the licensing began asking users to pay license fees. The MPEG-LA's recent announcement that internet streaming would remain free until 2015 is a direct attempt to achieve further entrenchment of the format. There is a very real possibility that they will ask for licensing fees come 2015. And we have no idea how much they might cost. Even with free streaming, most of the people in the video production chain need to pay license fees to the MPEG-LA right now.

I believe that by 2015, when the free use license of H264 will end, we'll have another more powerful encoding algorithms ready to take its place. So losing this battle may allow open-source community still to win the war.

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