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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

This is on a fully-patched RHEL6 workstation:

http://i.imgur.com/NleqJTD.png

Another example of "use bleeding-edge tech or go fuck yourself" from the modern web.

Support for mp4 isn't bleeding-edge tech on other operating systems / distributions, unfortunately. It's a couple of years old in terms of being supported by Chrome; it's supported in Firefox as of last August.

At this point, desktop configurations that can't play mp4s are at risk of being considered "broken."

Is it really that difficult to supply a free format like WebM in addition to patent-encumbered H.264? If you only supply H.264, you're cutting out Firefox on OS X, Chromium, and Opera.

It does mean you need to transcode and store twice as many files, which can be a serious pain if you've got a number of different bitrate H.264 assets. It can be a big pain if your software assumes there'll only be a single media file. Not insurmountable but painful for small operations (and for large operations, where there may be a back-catalogue to worry about)

I'm with you in spirit, but in practice I think we can all understand why people often just go for H.264

This is a new feature launched by one of the biggest web brands there is, so presumably theres no back catalogue.

Interestingly, the gif->mp4 in the source link uses Constrained Baseline H264, the only profile that's supported by Cisco's BSD-licensed OpenH264[1]. The MPEG-LA patent fees are already covered, so that small projects can freely use the decoder/encoder.

[1] https://github.com/cisco/openh264

Yes, until we get client-side transcoding, it is that difficult. Video files, even files compressed with modern codecs, are really big, and the concepts are generally really hard for most people to grok. The knowledge is so arcane that if you have a basic grasp of ffmpeg you are already a wizard. Most people's eyes will glaze over the second you start talking about how they should use a different container, or codec, or whatever. That's why GIFs (for sub-one-minute videos) and Flash (for long videos and/or videos with sound) became the universal language of video; there was no more "Here's this video, but you have to install WMP/RealPlayer/QuickTime/Bonzai Buddy to see it!" In fact, Flash probably became the standard because it did such a good job at integrating with the rest of the browser and didn't shove obtrusive branding in the user's face.

The tl;dr is that the support needs to very near universal for this to work, and no one is interested in WebM. Google probably could've forced the issue with YouTube, and they initially claimed they were going to, but they chickened out for some reason. I've heard it's because VP8 didn't live up to expectations and that they'll renew the push when VP9 is done, but whatever the motive, the reality is that if you want HTML 5 video to work, you must use H.264, as even Mozilla has been forced to admit.

> Video files, even files compressed with modern codecs, are really big, and the concepts are generally really hard for most people to grok.

As the article points out, the video files are generally much smaller than the source gifs.

Similarly, while there are real impediments to transcoding for many developers, I'm confident that the Twitter engineers in this specific case are capable of building a VP8 pipeline. After all, they built one for H.264.

At that point, achieving universal support is as simple as having two <source> tags inside your <video> tag. It's not difficult at all: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/video/basics/#toc-spe...

Yes, in this specific case, application-specific compression codecs are better for the storage of video, but that doesn't mean that video is small and that you can afford to transcode 4-8 different copies for every single image that would be uploaded (avail resolutions * formats * single piece of content), as that requires both a lot of CPU and a lot of disk space. It also doesn't mean any person around you has the expertise to figure out how to do this in a semi-reasonable manner, because as stated, most people don't understand the concepts used in modern video storage. You also assume that either WebM or H.264 will be supported by the user's browser. I don't think this is entirely correct, and in any case, it may always change, at which point the demand on the individual site becomes that much worse.

I think the real solution is to automate this and allow the client to request on-the-fly transcodes to the formats the browser can support, similar to the way some UPnP servers work.

Chrome on Mavericks is "broken?" How shall I upgrade this?

Chrome supports mp4 on Mavericks (as well as on older versions of OS X).

Actually I'm on Chrome/Mavericks and I get the same thing.

Chrome + Mavericks here - I see the video just fine. Did you mean Chromium?

This is what modern support gets you with this method:

http://imgur.com/Qr3tohD http://imgur.com/Qr3tohD,8okaMlP#1

So... Flash.

This has the added bonus of stealing focus if you click on it, making the "GIF" a UX nightmare.

This is very far from bleeding-edge; we're talking technology between five and 10 years old. Set up gstreamer already; it's time to move past gifs.

WebM works fine on this machine. mp4 does not. This is why there was a bit of scuffle, as you may recall, about video formats on the web.

Are you saying that WebM, a file format introduced in 2010, is less bleeding-edge than H.264 MP4, a file format introduced in 2003? What definition of "bleeding-edge" are we using here?

The introduction date of the format doesn't seem very relevant, since what we are talking about is native inline browser support.

Same story. Most browsers supported H.264 first (because it was dominant before WebM was even born). Internet Explorer, Safari and MobileSafari still do not support WebM. I don't see any reasonable way to say that WebM is well-established and H.264 is not.

It does weird things on some mobile devices that do support it, too, mostly interrupting the audio player (on some devices, movie playback grabs the audio).

I suspect some implementation issues rather than a GFY attitude, it doesn't work on FF or Chrome on OSX 10.9. Safari works though.

I'm looking at it right now in Chrome on Mavericks. Are you sure you checked with the right browser?

I'm using Chrome 35 on Mavericks and I also get the message. Clicking through to Twitter will display the video.

I recall reading on gfycat's subreddit that desktop Chrome's H264 support is occasionally spotty, so they chose to force on VP8/WebM in Chrome.

The upside is that users get a reliable experience. the downside is that laptop Chrome users get a reliably lower battery life, as VP8 isn't typically hardware accelerated.

Chrome on OSX 10.9 works just fine. I'm looking at the example video now.

Strangely I get that same message on my win7 machine running current chrome as well as my lubuntu machine running chromium. On both when I click the "click to view on original site" link it works fine.

What percentage of Twitter's users do you think use Linux for browsing? Much less RHEL. Anyway, this is purely a front-end enhancement mostly for the benefit of mobile users.

Also lol @ mp4 being "bleeding edge" tech. It certainly is not. Even in the Linux community.

Changing the fundamental format of the content is a 'front-end enhancement' now? If it's for mobile users, why not present it just to mobile users?

also lol @ your opinion about technology. even in the "linux community"

It is an enhancement for the benefit of front-end performance. I'd like to hear how you think that is not true?

Anyway, that is why I asked the loaded question about how many users you think there are that browse Twitter.com on their RHEL box? Hint: HN is not a good sample to answer this.

And how is a ~14-year old technology (that has been ubiquitous now for at least 6 years) considered bleeding edge?

More like, "stop using technology from the late 80s or go fuck yourself". GIF is awful and nobody should reasonably expect sites to accommodate it anymore.

Huh? HTML is older than GIF images. Should we stop accommodating that too?

Huh yourself? HTML dates from 1993, GIF dates from 1987.

Okay, so take my question and s/HTML/hierarchical file systems/ or s/HTML/C/ or make any other substitution. Why ditch something just because it's old?

Well, there's a reason for the second half of my comment. GIF isn't bad because it's old, it's bad and old, and it's unreasonable to expect it to continue to be supported because that's a nasty combination.

If something sucks but is still the standard technique in recent years then it's reasonable to think it should be supported. Similarly, if something is old but great, it's reasonable to think it should be supported. But GIF is old and crappy and there's no reason to expect support for something old and crappy to continue indefinitely.

I'd also note that your other examples have received substantial revisions over the years that have improved them enormously. I'd happily say the same thing about not supporting 1987-era C or filesystems.

GIF itself is not so bad, for its intended purpose and time, but the animated GIF bit is a serious hack that was a bad idea from the start.

That's a good point, I shouldn't treat them as the same.

I get this on Chromium despite embedded h.264 working everywhere else :P

mp4 is "bleeding-edge"?

You choose not to use the appropriate software to experience what is being offered. This is akin to riding a decrepit horse on a racetrack while whining about how everyone else that is riding a healthy horse is going faster and having a better experience than you.

Just upgrade.

Your analogy is stupid and your comments are not helpful. I'm not modifying 3,600 workstations because some web programmer decided to mangle user-uploaded content without doing fundamental work to ensure graceful degradation.

But that's your choice, as was Twitter's choice to make a modification compatible with the majority of its users.

you're seeing that because they wanted to show you what it looked like as an MP4. My understanding was that twitter would ship you the GIF if your browser didn't support MP4.

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