Comment by briansmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briansmith | Hacker News Reader

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AFAICT, we (Mozilla) are trying to solve TWO problems:

1. We need a video codec that everybody agrees on for WebRTC.

2. We need a way to play H.264 on Windows XP and other operating systems that don't provide native H.264 playback, for compatibility with almost all HTML5 <video> content on the web.

If it weren't for problem #2, then I would agree with you more. But, really what Mozilla seems to have said is "Hey, if you provide a free H.264 decoder without field-of-use restrictions, then we'll compromise on WebRTC so we can make sure everybody on every platform can play all the HTML5 video content available on the web."

I don't have an opinion on VP9. But, there's no VP9 content on the web now. There's tons of H.264 content on the web. Mozilla got burned waiting for other players to help with WebM adoption before. Waiting for VP9 would probably just end up with us getting burned again.

FWIW, I work at Mozilla but not on this stuff, and I learned all I know on this topic from Brendan Eich's blog post.

I think I am beginning to get the picture here:

1. Mozilla is the only browser that has no legal way to provide integrated H.264. Every other major browser is backed by a corporation and can afford the MPEG LA fee.

2. While Google probably would prefer VP8/VP9 becoming the WebRTC standard, its not like they can't do H.264. So they have been dropping the ball on pushing people towards WebM and away from H.264.

3. (Speculation) Cisco probably made an exploding offer - "We can enable legal H.264 for all your users and foot the bill for it, but only if you agree to it before the WebRTC meeting".

4. No matter what codec wins at the WebRTC meeting, H.264 content ain't going away anytime soon. Mozilla has to have it either way.

This is an interesting maneuver by the H.264 lobby. It leaves Mozilla very little wriggle room. In hindsight, I have to wonder if a better deal could have been worked out by Mozilla actively seeking a license from MPEG LA for some fixed one-time sum in perpetuity in return for Mozillas' compromise on H.264. Maybe a kickstarter could have been then done to raise the required one-time fee. Who knows - maybe Redhat, Ubuntu etc could have been asked to chip in.

Sigh. Big money tends to get its way. :(

1. Both Chromium (nominally backed by Google) and Opera lack the H.264 codec by default.

Chromium and Opera are not major browsers.

There are markets where Opera has significant marketshare and cannot be ignored; I'm unaware of anywhere where that is true of Chromium, however.

At least according to the wikipedia page, it looks like the Mozilla Foundation brings in $300M a year in revenue. I still wouldn't say that $6M a year is trivial for them, but it certainly isn't an impossible bridge to cross. Up until now the Mozilla party line has been that they don't want to pay the patent fees for reasons of principle.

So it looks to me like there was another option: bite the bullet, pay the licensing fee and distribute their own blessed binaries (they still couldn't grant a license to people building from source), then feel free to take whatever position on WebRTC they thought was best.

This just makes me wonder where the hell the reference implementation of Dalaa is already.

Honestly who cares ? Without Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Sony on board (all are in MPEG-LA and will adopt H.265) it is dead on arrival.

If Daala is significantly better in CPU efficiency, compression ratio, and/or perceived quality, then it will be used.

it won't. video is all about hardware codecs now and it's even worse in mobile - the codec has to be in the SoC or it doesn't get used full stop.

>Without Sun, HP, Digital and Microsoft on board Linux is dead on arrival.

I think the main reason H.264 is so popular is because of the absolutely fantastic x264 encoder. If anybody delivers something radically better (Daala promises to do) it will gain traction. See Opus. I listen only to podcasts by very technical people, and Opus took them in a storm, even without the MPEG LA.

https://git.xiph.org/?p=daala.git

"1. Mozilla is the only browser that has no legal way to provide integrated H.264. Every other major browser is backed by a corporation and can afford the MPEG LA fee."

Mozilla could afford to pay MPEGLA but that doesn't help any of Mozilla's downstream distributions and it doesn't help other developers building open source software that want to include H264 capabilities. (Not to mention that millions of dollars a year in patent fees could be better spent on initiatives like building a better video future with Daala.)

Mozilla's mission is about more than just Firefox, it's about the Web, and solutions that only work for Mozilla distributed products generally aren't great solutions for the long-term health of the Web.

Mozilla could have shelled out the cash to license patents from MPEG-LA and adopted an existing open source H264 implementation. That would certainly have been better sooner for Firefox users, and possibly for <video> on the Web, but that would not have been enough for Mozilla because we are not in this game for our own profit. We're here because the Web needs us on its side, looking out for the interests that BigCos generally won't.

Finally, there is no chance that Mozilla, even with a giant Kickstarter campaign, could buy out the MPEG-LA patents for H.264. Not gonna happen. (Unless I'm missing all the multi-billion dollar Kickstarter success stories.)

Don't forget about Firefox OS! Imagine what impact H.264 would do there. Firefox OS and Tizen are the BigBets now, because TelCo's manufacturers don't like to rely on Google for delayed OS updates anymore. That's why these OS have a good chance of becoming as popular as android in a few years. But that's only valid, when Firefox OS and Tizen get their shit together and finally create a robust, independent, secure and most importantly not only beautiful, but usable user interface.

(Firefox does silent upgrades, just so you know. Luckily on Windows only.)

Most Firefox OS devices will probably have H.264 hardware decoders.

Good point, I totally forgot about hardware decoders.

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