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(I think the "chrome" in your post is a typo, do you mean Safari?) Apple doesn't support Theora in Safari because the iPhone doesn't have a Theora hardware dec

(I think the "chrome" in your post is a typo, do you mean Safari?) Apple doesn't support Theora in Safari because the iPhone doesn't have a Theora hardware decoder. They bluster a bit about submarine patents, but really, their refusal boils down to the iPhone. If desktop Safari supports Theora and the iPhone doesn't, users will complain. If playing some videos on the iPhone uses the battery faster than advertised, users will complain. Microsoft, of course, has a long-lasting and well-documented dislike towards open formats. Whether IE9 supports Theora and Vorbis will depend on internal company politics -- "Free Is Bad" vs. "Lets Not Fuck Up IE Again".

buster 17y ago
It's funny how one can see that you are a mac/iPhone user.. You are, aren't you? ;) No, Apple stated that they don't support Theora "claiming that the lack of known patents on Theora doesn't rule out the threat of submarine patents that could eventually be used against adopters." http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the... They also said that they have no hardwaredecoder, but this is just an excuse, imo. Video decoding is done by DSPs and DSP are designed to be programmable quite flexible. Apple/Whoever just would have to do that. All in all, the whole situation is very clear when you look at it with the "patent view" ;) MS: -has Windows Media Player, WMV, pays MPEG Patent fees anyway -> H.264 Apple: -has Quicktime, pays MPEG Patent fees anyway -> H.264 Mozilla: -no license -> Theora Opera: -no license -> Theora Goole: -no Codecs but youtube is in mpeg, but can easily switch to theora -> H.264+theora MS and Apple have reasons to use the H.264 format: they already pay those fees, have expertise with the format, can "supress" the competition with it. Because MS could build in theora support, but what Mozila can't is to build in h.264 format (without paying). Mozilla can only lose this battle and MS&Apple are quite happy about it. There goes the competition. Typical stupid, "selfish", proprieatry bullshit-decission.
- blasdel 17y ago
  It's not 'just an excuse' — the fosstards+Nokia only started working on a DSP decoder in the last year, and haven't shipped anything yet. Before that there were ZERO independent efforts at implementing Theora decoders — there was the original On2 code dump, and a transliteration of that to Java called Cortado (used in an applet player by Wikimedia). There are no independent encoders, just the original code dump and a deshittifying refactoring (v1.1, Thusnelda) that was just released a few months ago. Before it was tied as an anchor around the necks of the FOSS partisans, Theora was a really awful totally proprietary (in the original sense) codec. It was open sourced because it was never once licensed to a customer, and On2 only pushed one codec at a time (they never improved them, just forked off a new one). As for the patents, MS has been shipping h.264 decoders with their OSes for a while now (they always left MPEG2 decoding the OEMs to bundle until recently too). Apple actually has patents in the h.264 licensing pool!
  - buster 17y ago
    I see, h.264 support is a really bad idea. With "Apple actually has patents in the h.264 licensing pool!" you scared atleast me away. So one competitor has patents and the competition should use that too? nooo, sir. So, dirac it shall be then? edit: Also you mention technical reason. My reasoning still is: This is not about technical reasons it is a pure political decision to get rid of competition in a shameless way. You don't want to tell me that two of the biggest software companies in the world which did their own codecs (quicktime, wmv) arent capable of shipping a decent theora decoder in their browsers? It's just a stupid manager decision in the likes of "haha, mozilla can't/won't pay mpeg fees, we'll use that".
    - blasdel 17y ago
      The patent licensing is dirt cheap, the people paying in are almost exclusively hardware makers, shipping hundreds of millions of embedded devices a year. Apple having a few patents in the pool just makes a janitorial-sized line-item in their budget even cheaper since they get payments back too. Apple has paid to license a suite of codecs for every install since the dawn of Quicktime (though they charged $20 for an MPEG2 encoder for a long time), supporting h.264 <video> costs them nothing — they already paid a nickel for your iTunes install. Dirac is terrific, but it'll be another few years before it's ready; and it'll be much longer before the available bandwidth and demand for quality exists — it'll pick up among people pirating 1080p video, but it doesn't scale down enough for the youtubes of the world. QuickTime is not a codec and never has been, it's a container, which happens to have been standardized as the MPEG4 container, because it doesn't suck ass like everything else (save Matroska). WMV is mostly a container too — they had a good 'proprietary' WMV codec called VC-1, but they got pwned with submarine patents after they lobbied it into the HD standards war.
      - niczar 17y ago
        > The patent licensing is dirt cheap, the people paying in are almost exclusively hardware makers That is absolutely incorrect. The MPEG-LA even wants per unit royalties on decoders (as well as on encoders AND content providers). This is simply incompatible with Free/Open Source Software, at least where SW Patents exist. Note that Chrome is not F/OSS even though it's 99.9% identical to Chromium that is. Firefox is 100% F/OSS.
- jmillikin 17y ago
  It's funny how one can see that you are a mac/iPhone user.. You are, aren't you? ;) I don't own a smartphone; if I did, it would never ever be an iPhone. I do own a macintosh laptop, but run Linux on it. The reason I think the submarine patent is fake is that submarine patents are a risk for H.264 as well. MPEG LA are laying low until H.264 is widespread and they can really apply the thumbscrews; who know how many dozens of other companies are using the same strategy, biding their time until payday?
- KirinDave 17y ago
  What this all dances around is that, from a technical standpoint, the H.264 codec delivers superior results in nearly every situation that Apple, Microsoft, and Google want to use video. So why should they use Theora? Are we really making ideological arguments for technology decisions now? The way to stop patents from ossifying the tech industry is to stop filing patents. To do this, people like us are going to have to start pushing back in our companies and displaying prior art whenever the subject of patents comes up with corporate lawyers. Meanwhile, Mozilla is a corporation. They're a big kid making sums with an "m" at the end. They're one of the majority shares of the browser market last time I looked. They're going to have to start to play the game like a real company and stop expecting everyone to softball them. Already they're behind on the technology front; I only see Chrome and Safari on every hacker's screen that _I_ see these days. If they keep expecting the industry they've so eagerly entered to coddle them, then their future prospects are dim at best.
  - carussell 17y ago
    "They're one of the majority shares of the browser market last time I looked." (Emphasis mine.) There can be only one majority share by definition.
    - KirinDave 17y ago
      Cool story, bro.

buster 17y ago

It's funny how one can see that you are a mac/iPhone user.. You are, aren't you? ;) No, Apple stated that they don't support Theora "claiming that the lack of known patents on Theora doesn't rule out the threat of submarine patents that could eventually be used against adopters." http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the... They also said that they have no hardwaredecoder, but this is just an excuse, imo. Video decoding is done by DSPs and DSP are designed to be programmable quite flexible. Apple/Whoever just would have to do that. All in all, the whole situation is very clear when you look at it with the "patent view" ;) MS: -has Windows Media Player, WMV, pays MPEG Patent fees anyway -> H.264 Apple: -has Quicktime, pays MPEG Patent fees anyway -> H.264 Mozilla: -no license -> Theora Opera: -no license -> Theora Goole: -no Codecs but youtube is in mpeg, but can easily switch to theora -> H.264+theora MS and Apple have reasons to use the H.264 format: they already pay those fees, have expertise with the format, can "supress" the competition with it. Because MS could build in theora support, but what Mozila can't is to build in h.264 format (without paying). Mozilla can only lose this battle and MS&Apple are quite happy about it. There goes the competition. Typical stupid, "selfish", proprieatry bullshit-decission.

blasdel 17y ago
It's not 'just an excuse' — the fosstards+Nokia only started working on a DSP decoder in the last year, and haven't shipped anything yet. Before that there were ZERO independent efforts at implementing Theora decoders — there was the original On2 code dump, and a transliteration of that to Java called Cortado (used in an applet player by Wikimedia). There are no independent encoders, just the original code dump and a deshittifying refactoring (v1.1, Thusnelda) that was just released a few months ago. Before it was tied as an anchor around the necks of the FOSS partisans, Theora was a really awful totally proprietary (in the original sense) codec. It was open sourced because it was never once licensed to a customer, and On2 only pushed one codec at a time (they never improved them, just forked off a new one). As for the patents, MS has been shipping h.264 decoders with their OSes for a while now (they always left MPEG2 decoding the OEMs to bundle until recently too). Apple actually has patents in the h.264 licensing pool!
- buster 17y ago
  I see, h.264 support is a really bad idea. With "Apple actually has patents in the h.264 licensing pool!" you scared atleast me away. So one competitor has patents and the competition should use that too? nooo, sir. So, dirac it shall be then? edit: Also you mention technical reason. My reasoning still is: This is not about technical reasons it is a pure political decision to get rid of competition in a shameless way. You don't want to tell me that two of the biggest software companies in the world which did their own codecs (quicktime, wmv) arent capable of shipping a decent theora decoder in their browsers? It's just a stupid manager decision in the likes of "haha, mozilla can't/won't pay mpeg fees, we'll use that".
  - blasdel 17y ago
    The patent licensing is dirt cheap, the people paying in are almost exclusively hardware makers, shipping hundreds of millions of embedded devices a year. Apple having a few patents in the pool just makes a janitorial-sized line-item in their budget even cheaper since they get payments back too. Apple has paid to license a suite of codecs for every install since the dawn of Quicktime (though they charged $20 for an MPEG2 encoder for a long time), supporting h.264 <video> costs them nothing — they already paid a nickel for your iTunes install. Dirac is terrific, but it'll be another few years before it's ready; and it'll be much longer before the available bandwidth and demand for quality exists — it'll pick up among people pirating 1080p video, but it doesn't scale down enough for the youtubes of the world. QuickTime is not a codec and never has been, it's a container, which happens to have been standardized as the MPEG4 container, because it doesn't suck ass like everything else (save Matroska). WMV is mostly a container too — they had a good 'proprietary' WMV codec called VC-1, but they got pwned with submarine patents after they lobbied it into the HD standards war.
    - niczar 17y ago
      > The patent licensing is dirt cheap, the people paying in are almost exclusively hardware makers That is absolutely incorrect. The MPEG-LA even wants per unit royalties on decoders (as well as on encoders AND content providers). This is simply incompatible with Free/Open Source Software, at least where SW Patents exist. Note that Chrome is not F/OSS even though it's 99.9% identical to Chromium that is. Firefox is 100% F/OSS.
jmillikin 17y ago
It's funny how one can see that you are a mac/iPhone user.. You are, aren't you? ;) I don't own a smartphone; if I did, it would never ever be an iPhone. I do own a macintosh laptop, but run Linux on it. The reason I think the submarine patent is fake is that submarine patents are a risk for H.264 as well. MPEG LA are laying low until H.264 is widespread and they can really apply the thumbscrews; who know how many dozens of other companies are using the same strategy, biding their time until payday?
KirinDave 17y ago
What this all dances around is that, from a technical standpoint, the H.264 codec delivers superior results in nearly every situation that Apple, Microsoft, and Google want to use video. So why should they use Theora? Are we really making ideological arguments for technology decisions now? The way to stop patents from ossifying the tech industry is to stop filing patents. To do this, people like us are going to have to start pushing back in our companies and displaying prior art whenever the subject of patents comes up with corporate lawyers. Meanwhile, Mozilla is a corporation. They're a big kid making sums with an "m" at the end. They're one of the majority shares of the browser market last time I looked. They're going to have to start to play the game like a real company and stop expecting everyone to softball them. Already they're behind on the technology front; I only see Chrome and Safari on every hacker's screen that _I_ see these days. If they keep expecting the industry they've so eagerly entered to coddle them, then their future prospects are dim at best.
- carussell 17y ago
  "They're one of the majority shares of the browser market last time I looked." (Emphasis mine.) There can be only one majority share by definition.
  - KirinDave 17y ago
    Cool story, bro.