6 ms·

this really isn't fair mozilla is in no position to be directly supporting h264, to suggest otherwise is just naive. its not a free codec and they simply can't

by fungi 17y ago

this really isn't fair mozilla is in no position to be directly supporting h264, to suggest otherwise is just naive. its not a free codec and they simply can't afford to bet their future on the liability of massive royalties when the licensing regime changes (and it will). their reasons for not indirectly supporting h264 via the OS is in my view valid but weak, would assume that this will be overcome with an extension of some sort in the future. in any case encoding video twice really isn't a big deal.

bcrescimanno 17y ago
How do you account for them directly supporting GIF? I'm not disagreeing in principle; but history shows that Mozilla as an organization is capable of picking it's battles and even supporting patent encumbered formats if doing so will make the Web a better place. Being an employee of a one of the largest online video providers, I can assure you that both we and our customers see multiple encoding formats as a big deal.
- jmillikin 17y ago
  The GIF patents expired while Firefox was still in early development. And it was not the GIF format itself which was patented, but a particular compression algorithm used with it -- decoders, as used in Mozilla, were not patented. People could (and did) create uncompressed GIFs to avoid the patent risk. For obvious reasons, uncompressed H.264 is not useful. [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
  - bcrescimanno 17y ago
    The Mozilla appsuite was released as a 1.0 product in 2002 Firefox was released as a 1.0 product in 2004 The last GIF patents expired in 2006 (the first, in 2003 after the 1.0 version of the Mozilla App Suite)
    - jmillikin 17y ago
      Looking further, there were no patents on GIF decoders (from < http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html >). So Mozilla was completely in the clear.
    - kinetik 17y ago
      There was only one patent, for LZW, but it was held in multiple countries. It first expired in 2003, and had expired in the last country by 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Uni...
  - vrode 17y ago
    What about Flash then?
    - fungi 17y ago
      ? what do you mean?
- kinetik 17y ago
  GIF is a different situation. It was already a well established format before Unisys started enforcing the patent it held on it. The patent was a "submarine" patent, so it was not publically known before the format became widely used. It's also worth pointing out that the GIF fiasco was well underway (1993-1999) before Mozilla ever existed. The Mozilla organization formed in 1998, and was mostly influenced by the vast number of participating Netscape employees until 2002-2003. By 2003 Unisys's patent had expired. If anything, Mozilla's stance towards H.264 is an attempt to avoid the web ending up in a similar situation it did with GIF, where the format was deeply entrenched before the companies controlling the licensing began asking users to pay license fees. The MPEG-LA's recent announcement that internet streaming would remain free until 2015 is a direct attempt to achieve further entrenchment of the format. There is a very real possibility that they will ask for licensing fees come 2015. And we have no idea how much they might cost. Even with free streaming, most of the people in the video production chain need to pay license fees to the MPEG-LA right now.
vrode 17y ago
I believe that by 2015, when the free use license of H264 will end, we'll have another more powerful encoding algorithms ready to take its place. So losing this battle may allow open-source community still to win the war.
ubernostrum 17y ago
To suggest that the only way to handle H.264 is to directly write and ship a codec for it is such an uninformed position that I'm surprised you're sitting at a positive score. Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media framework with support available for H.264. Mozilla's policy is to refuse to delegate to the OS for media handling, largely so that they'll have a political bargaining chip to try to push Theora on everyone else. In other words, this is not a pragmatic or economic decision by Mozilla; it is purely an ideological decision, because they could -- if they chose -- support H.264 video easily and at zero financial cost to themselves and their users. What we should be talking about, then, is whether this is a good ideological stand to take. (and, personally, I think it's the wrong stand at the wrong time; Mozilla should be holding off from making any decisions until the Bilski case is decided, because it may well turn out that there's no such thing as a software patent in the US)
- buster 17y ago
  So, then can you enlighten us a bite more? Personally i have read pretty much every kind of "myth" about mpeg licensing. One blog post i remember was "according to their terms you (theoretically) would have to pay when a friend sends a video with copyrighted material to you" which more or less sounds like "wherever there is mpeg video they have the right to demand fees" (because even your holiday movie may contain a copyrighted soundtrack). According to http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what-you-need-to-know.html http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalti... there are "royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video". And this is just what is happening in the internet all over the place. Firefox can't even know if you look a "free" broadcast or just paid for an online stream, so they just have to pay to support this codec? And in the end, it's not at last the uncertainty about the codec. MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't. Because there probably is quite a good amount of money to be earned from fees. Screw that H.264 stuff, support theora or dirac and problems are solved.
  - ubernostrum 17y ago
    Well, you'll notice I was talking about the point of view of a browser vendor, because H.264 licensing is irrelevant to that use case: the right thing to do is delegate to the operating system's media framework, and let codec support and licensing be the OS vendor's problem. But since you mention it: MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't. Personally I'm against having HTML5 specify any codec of any sort. HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 are each over ten years old now, and HTML5 won't be broadly usable as a replacement for at least another year or two; given the rate of development in video codecs, mandating one in a spec with that sort of expected lifespan would simply be stupid. But it's worth pointing out that MPEG-LA is currently exempting H.264-encoded online video from royalties (so long as it's provided free of charge to users -- hence YouTube and other video sites don't have to pay every time a video is played), and will continue to do so until at least 2015 (by which point the whole question of software patents may be moot), so rushing to draw lines in the sand now is -- as I already said -- rather premature.

by fungi 17y ago

bcrescimanno 17y ago

How do you account for them directly supporting GIF? I'm not disagreeing in principle; but history shows that Mozilla as an organization is capable of picking it's battles and even supporting patent encumbered formats if doing so will make the Web a better place. Being an employee of a one of the largest online video providers, I can assure you that both we and our customers see multiple encoding formats as a big deal.

jmillikin 17y ago
The GIF patents expired while Firefox was still in early development. And it was not the GIF format itself which was patented, but a particular compression algorithm used with it -- decoders, as used in Mozilla, were not patented. People could (and did) create uncompressed GIFs to avoid the patent risk. For obvious reasons, uncompressed H.264 is not useful. [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
- bcrescimanno 17y ago
  The Mozilla appsuite was released as a 1.0 product in 2002 Firefox was released as a 1.0 product in 2004 The last GIF patents expired in 2006 (the first, in 2003 after the 1.0 version of the Mozilla App Suite)
  - jmillikin 17y ago
    Looking further, there were no patents on GIF decoders (from < http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html >). So Mozilla was completely in the clear.
  - kinetik 17y ago
    There was only one patent, for LZW, but it was held in multiple countries. It first expired in 2003, and had expired in the last country by 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Uni...
- vrode 17y ago
  What about Flash then?
  - fungi 17y ago
    ? what do you mean?
kinetik 17y ago
GIF is a different situation. It was already a well established format before Unisys started enforcing the patent it held on it. The patent was a "submarine" patent, so it was not publically known before the format became widely used. It's also worth pointing out that the GIF fiasco was well underway (1993-1999) before Mozilla ever existed. The Mozilla organization formed in 1998, and was mostly influenced by the vast number of participating Netscape employees until 2002-2003. By 2003 Unisys's patent had expired. If anything, Mozilla's stance towards H.264 is an attempt to avoid the web ending up in a similar situation it did with GIF, where the format was deeply entrenched before the companies controlling the licensing began asking users to pay license fees. The MPEG-LA's recent announcement that internet streaming would remain free until 2015 is a direct attempt to achieve further entrenchment of the format. There is a very real possibility that they will ask for licensing fees come 2015. And we have no idea how much they might cost. Even with free streaming, most of the people in the video production chain need to pay license fees to the MPEG-LA right now.

vrode 17y ago

I believe that by 2015, when the free use license of H264 will end, we'll have another more powerful encoding algorithms ready to take its place. So losing this battle may allow open-source community still to win the war.

ubernostrum 17y ago

To suggest that the only way to handle H.264 is to directly write and ship a codec for it is such an uninformed position that I'm surprised you're sitting at a positive score. Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media framework with support available for H.264. Mozilla's policy is to refuse to delegate to the OS for media handling, largely so that they'll have a political bargaining chip to try to push Theora on everyone else. In other words, this is not a pragmatic or economic decision by Mozilla; it is purely an ideological decision, because they could -- if they chose -- support H.264 video easily and at zero financial cost to themselves and their users. What we should be talking about, then, is whether this is a good ideological stand to take. (and, personally, I think it's the wrong stand at the wrong time; Mozilla should be holding off from making any decisions until the Bilski case is decided, because it may well turn out that there's no such thing as a software patent in the US)

buster 17y ago
So, then can you enlighten us a bite more? Personally i have read pretty much every kind of "myth" about mpeg licensing. One blog post i remember was "according to their terms you (theoretically) would have to pay when a friend sends a video with copyrighted material to you" which more or less sounds like "wherever there is mpeg video they have the right to demand fees" (because even your holiday movie may contain a copyrighted soundtrack). According to http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what-you-need-to-know.html http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalti... there are "royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video". And this is just what is happening in the internet all over the place. Firefox can't even know if you look a "free" broadcast or just paid for an online stream, so they just have to pay to support this codec? And in the end, it's not at last the uncertainty about the codec. MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't. Because there probably is quite a good amount of money to be earned from fees. Screw that H.264 stuff, support theora or dirac and problems are solved.
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  Well, you'll notice I was talking about the point of view of a browser vendor, because H.264 licensing is irrelevant to that use case: the right thing to do is delegate to the operating system's media framework, and let codec support and licensing be the OS vendor's problem. But since you mention it: MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't. Personally I'm against having HTML5 specify any codec of any sort. HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 are each over ten years old now, and HTML5 won't be broadly usable as a replacement for at least another year or two; given the rate of development in video codecs, mandating one in a spec with that sort of expected lifespan would simply be stupid. But it's worth pointing out that MPEG-LA is currently exempting H.264-encoded online video from royalties (so long as it's provided free of charge to users -- hence YouTube and other video sites don't have to pay every time a video is played), and will continue to do so until at least 2015 (by which point the whole question of software patents may be moot), so rushing to draw lines in the sand now is -- as I already said -- rather premature.