Comment by aloneinkyoto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aloneinkyoto | Hacker News Reader

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The whole codec discussion instigated by the Mozilla Foundation is so mind-numbingly odd that it makes me cringe. I fully understand the arguments that creating a completely free and open source web browser is an important and non-negotiable goal. Nevertheless the (non-existent) dilemma relies on the false assumptions that:

1. Deciding on a single codec that everyone should use for everything, forever (or until we get to have the same discussion again with HTML6) is the only way forward. Which is just stupid and ignorant. Different codecs are good for different use cases. There is no "one true codec"and there never will be. H.264 is a good all-around video codec for hi-def internet video, which is why it is popular on sites like YouTube, etc.

2. "Support" does not have to mean including code in the Firefox browser for decoding H.264 video. It simply means that the browser makes a best effort try to play the video. That's all that the end user really cares about, and that is easily accomplished by using the codec frameworks already present in most modern operating systems. Webkit uses Quicktime to play media on OS X and thus supports all formats that Quicktime supports, for example.

> Which is just stupid and ignorant. Different codecs are good for different use cases.

That's irrelevant, any codec(s) has to be implemented across the board or everything's broken. That's the point. There are basically 3 image formats at this point, but everybody supports them. If half the browsers only supported GIF and the other half only supported PNGs (and nobody supported JPEG at all), displaying image would be a chore.

And it's not like recompressing images is a big deal, that can be automated and takes a fraction of a second for most images. Compressing video on the other hand... takes hours and quite a bit of fiddling with a dozen of mind-numbingly boring compressor options to get the best bang for your buck.

> That's all that the end user really cares about, and that is easily accomplished by using the codec frameworks already present in most modern operating systems.

Yes, and now your cross-platform browser has widely different behaviors from one platform to the next, fantastic.

But most browsers will support all of them: Safari and IE will use whatever is in the OS, and Chrome supports both.

Only Firefox (and Opera) has decided not to support AVC.

To me Firefox sounds like they want things their way and they can't compromise in any form. They won't use whatever is installed in the OS, nor will they include a codec they have to pay for. If they wanted they could implement it as a plug-in, and then FOSS people will be able to use it like they use Flash.

It seems Firefox can't choose between compromising on either principles (be that free software, or no external dependencies) and therefore is forcing everyone else to adapt to them.

> Only Firefox (and Opera) has decided not to support AVC.

And Chromium. Because Google's h.264 license only covers the Chrome they distribute themselves, which leads us to...

> To me Firefox sounds like they want things their way and they can't compromise in any form.

They don't have the money to pay for it, and even if they did the money would only cover Firefox distributed by the Mozilla Foundation themselves in binary form. Which means for instance that no unice out there would be covered (neither linux nor BSD) as they pretty much all repackage upstream and each of them would have to pay for its own license. So that option is dumb, to start with.

As to the OS stuff, as I said above that implies the capabilities of firefox would be widely different depending on the OS and its precise configuration. Not to mention most of the Firefox userbase is still on Windows XP, which doesn't get Microsoft's built-in h.264 support.

Nobody compiles Chromium that way — it has a dependency on libavcodec (ffmpeg), and everyone just links it with the version already installed on their system.

If you're a freetard running gNewSense, you'll only have support for WAV, Vorbis, and Theora in OGG containers. Everyone else will have support for every codec under the sun.

>They don't have the money to pay for it,

I find that hard to believe. They get a whole bunch of money from Google and last known, were paying their CEO about $500k an year even in the days when they were asking donations for the NYTimes ad.

"Deciding on a single codec that everyone should use for everything, forever (or until we get to have the same discussion again with HTML6) is the only way forward. Which is just stupid and ignorant."

Mozilla never dictated that there should _be only one codec_. It's my understanding that they are happy to support any coded, which is not encumbered by patents.

You're putting words into their mouth, which they never said in this form.

Not quite. Mozilla was one of those pushing for the HTML5 spec to require support for Ogg Theora. Fortunately, saner minds prevailed and explained what a stupid thing it would be for a spec with an expected lifetime of a decade or so to mandate a 2009-era (when this first started being an issue) codec.

Correct, except that Theora (née VP3) is really a 2000-era codec (and one of the worst of its generation)

However, because they have that stipulation, instead of having championing for the browser to use any and all OS codecs, they have declared that only Theora and WebM shoul be part of the standard.

Actually, they just wanted Theora (now WebM) blessed as the one codec you knew would always be available. They were quite happy for "better" codecs to be provided in specific circumstances as long there was a baseline that would be guaranteed to be supported everywhere. It was Apple & Nokia that pushed for only one codec (namely H.264, which coincidentally couldn't be mandated as part of the standard and implemented everywhere because of patents).

Firefox does not support OS provided codecs. Not that it's not possible, but they don't. Regardless of what Apple/Nokia do, Mozilla is very much pushing to not support h264.

If they were being open about it, we'd already be able to do it.

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