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Right now, nothing. That's not why this is important. Think about the consequences of this for just one moment. How much support and developer time is Firefox

by felixc 17y ago

Right now, nothing. That's not why this is important. Think about the consequences of this for just one moment. How much support and developer time is Firefox going to lose if it can't play videos if/when YouTube switches over fully and doesn't use Flash? How much support and developer time is Linux going to lose if there are no browsers for it that can play internet videos, if H.264 becomes the de-facto standard (note that only Chrome works, not Chromium)? If you don't care about that at all, and are happy using IE (or Chrome, these days) on Windows for ever, then by all means move along, there is nothing for you to see here. The rest of us care.

blasdel 17y ago
That's not true at all: the patent coverage has no practical effect. Chromium supports all the codecs your local ffmpeg install supports, if you put symlinks to the libraries in /usr/lib/chromium-browser/. Everyone installs it this way, and it actually supports way more codecs than the official Chrome (Google didn't buy licenses for MPEG2, Xvid, etc.).
- felixc 17y ago
  Thanks for that titbit -- I have to disagree that "everyone installs it this way", because I certainly hadn't! (I installed on Ubuntu from the chromium-daily launchpad ppa). That fix makes me feel a bit better, but it's still a nasty blow against the idea of open and free formats. Edit: I must be doing something wrong, because I can't get it to work. This might be a distro/version/phase of moon-specific fix?
  - blasdel 17y ago
    Yeah, install the erroneously-named [1] chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree [1] Ubuntu's default ffmpeg package has all the decoders turned on without being 'nonfree'.
Wiz 17y ago
What do you mean by not Chromium ? I'm using chromium 4.0.249.64 right now on Archlinux x64 and can watch Youtube videos using html5. In fact this demo works on my setup : http://html5demos.com/video-canvas http://html5demos.com/video-canvas so that's theora & h264

by felixc 17y ago

blasdel 17y ago

That's not true at all: the patent coverage has no practical effect. Chromium supports all the codecs your local ffmpeg install supports, if you put symlinks to the libraries in /usr/lib/chromium-browser/. Everyone installs it this way, and it actually supports way more codecs than the official Chrome (Google didn't buy licenses for MPEG2, Xvid, etc.).

felixc 17y ago
Thanks for that titbit -- I have to disagree that "everyone installs it this way", because I certainly hadn't! (I installed on Ubuntu from the chromium-daily launchpad ppa). That fix makes me feel a bit better, but it's still a nasty blow against the idea of open and free formats. Edit: I must be doing something wrong, because I can't get it to work. This might be a distro/version/phase of moon-specific fix?
- blasdel 17y ago
  Yeah, install the erroneously-named [1] chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree [1] Ubuntu's default ffmpeg package has all the decoders turned on without being 'nonfree'.

Wiz 17y ago

What do you mean by not Chromium ? I'm using chromium 4.0.249.64 right now on Archlinux x64 and can watch Youtube videos using html5. In fact this demo works on my setup : http://html5demos.com/video-canvas http://html5demos.com/video-canvas so that's theora & h264