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Ok, can someone explain this to me: if H.264 licensing is an issue, why not offload the whole thing to the platform's video codec APIs? If the OS vendor alread
by CrLf 17y ago
Ok, can someone explain this to me: if H.264 licensing is an issue, why not offload the whole thing to the platform's video codec APIs?
If the OS vendor already pays license fees for the decoders, than that should cover it. If the vendor doesn't, well, then that's a problem.
- xenonite 17y agowhy not? if you distribute h.264 videos on a large scale (>100k viewers), you need to pay licensing fees. if you want to bundle a h.264 decoder with your software, you need to pay, too. Only if you use the OS' native decoder, you don't need to pay. But Firefox is multiplatform. WinXP, Linux do not support h.264 out of the box.
- CrLf 17y ago"if you distribute h.264 videos on a large scale (>100k viewers), you need to pay licensing fees." Clearly, the likes of Youtube and Vimeo don't care about this. They do seem to care about using a codec that is standard, widely supported and with good and varied implementations (both encoding and decoding, with or without hardware acceleration). Theora has neither of these characteristics. "Only if you use the OS' native decoder, you don't need to pay. But Firefox is multiplatform. WinXP, Linux do not support h.264 out of the box." Well, WinXP and Linux do not support Flash out of the box, but that doesn't seem to pose any problems.
- didroe 17y agoBecause for Mozilla it's not a case of side-stepping the law. It's a case of their moral intentions. They want the web to be usable for people who want to run free software, or at least for it to be possible to write a browser stack based on open code.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]