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You can actually control the buffering/playback with JavaScript. There are various ways to do this; one is with the TimeRanges object http://www.whatwg.org/spec
by DarkShikari 17y ago
You can actually control the buffering/playback with JavaScript. There are various ways to do this; one is with the TimeRanges object http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#normalize.. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#normalize.... which will give you a representation of available time regions in the video resource.
I could understand this in mp4, which has a global index giving locations of all frames in the file, but how would this be possible in ogg, which has no global index? Without a global index, you can't know anything about time regions that you haven't yet downloaded.
- tumult 17y agoThen it probably doesn't work with ogg :) I personally think it's a huge mistake for Firefox to support only ogg. It's a bad time for fragmentation in the push for open video on the web. It should still be possible to get a rough estimate for when to start playback. Good enough for buffered autoplay.
- pyre 17y agoThe problem being patents/licensing. mp4 is patented up the 'wazoo' and has onerous licensing terms.
- windsurfer 17y agoHow can Firefox distribute the H.264 codecs without infringing on patents?
- DarkShikari 17y agoHow do Linux distributions distribute H.264 and AAC decoders? Debian does, Ubuntu does, Fedora does, basically everything in the world except GNUsense does--yet they do just fine with themselves. The best solution would be to simply use system decoders, like Safari does. On Windows, this would be Directshow, on Linux this would be Gstreamer, and on OS X this would be Quicktime. The browser should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with video and audio decoding.
- vetinari 17y ago> Debian does, Ubuntu does, Fedora does, They do not. For Debian and Ubuntu, it is in Multiverse (non-free) repositories. For Fedora, it in RPM Fusion repository. In other words, there is no distribution that distributes H.264 or AAC, so system decoders would not help at all.
- windsurfer 17y agoWe've had that kind of "standard" for embedding movies for years. The only reason you don't know that is due to it's unpopularity.
- just_the_tip 17y ago>The browser should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with video and audio decoding. I know! While we're at it, who had the brilliant idea to put image decoders in browsers? I say let QuickTime decode GIFs and PNGs.
- chrischen 17y agoIf firfox does do it I believe they would still technically be required to pay licensing fees. The only reason they wouldn't is because mpeg la does not pursue them.
- wmf 17y agoThey could take their mountain of cash and pay the licensing fee like Chrome does.
- pyre 17y agoIIRC the licensing terms on MPEG4 are pretty onerous.
- kierank 17y agoIt's capped at a few million dollars. A pittance for Mozilla.
- thristian 17y agoFirefox could pay the licensing fee for the copies of Firefox they distribute themselves, but they can't pay the licensing fee for unknown downstream users - the various Linux distros who build their own Firefox builds, projects like Seamonkey and Camino, any random people who want to use the Gecko source for something. Mozilla is pretty committed to making sure that anyone who uses Gecko has access to all the HTML features that Firefox has, so having a special feature-filled Mozilla-branded version and leaving everybody else out in the cold is not really an option. Although Chrome supports H.264 video, I believe Chromium does not.
- wmf 17y agoIf Mozilla is more committed to open source ideology than making video actually work that's their choice, but they could do things differently if they wanted to.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoMozilla is a non-profit org dedicated to the open web. They can no more do things differently than a shareholder owned corporation can just decide to not make profits.
- blasdel 17y ago