7 ms·

Daring Fireball: GIF, H.264, and Patents

83 points by barredo 17y ago

koblas 17y ago
Just one point of interest is that Unisys only attempted to charge for the compression of data not the playback. So, browsers were never subject to the licensing fees that Unisys was asking for, only products like Photoshop which created/compressed data. Also, they were nice enough to grandfather many programs so things like the PBM tools were not subject to licensing fees.
- btilly 17y ago
  That was not out of any sense of generosity. That was because their patent clearly only applied to a (good) method for compressing gifs. Therefore their patent did not apply to creating or reading gifs.
Nwallins 17y ago
> But they can’t say Firefox only supports free and open video formats while still supporting Flash. Mr. Gruber should be more precise by what he means by support. Firefox's support for Flash is not like the proposed support for H.264. There is no Flash code in the Firefox codebase, to my knowledge. There is only a generic plugin interface, and there is one dominant, proprietary Flash plugin that Mozilla has nothing to do with (in addition to other less-featured Flash plugins). What Mr. Gruber seems to be saying is that he wants Firefox to distribute H.264 code with their browser. Either that or Firefox should rely on codecs that may or may not be installed on the underlying system. In the former case, the analogy is fatally flawed, while if the latter is intended, it should be explicitly addressed.
- matasar 17y ago
  I believe Mozilla distributes Flash as a plugin in the Firefox download. If they don't, they certainly make special allowances to make Flash easier to download and install than other plugins. I assume Firefox has a public API for video codecs, and they choose to distribute codecs or not. So I don't see the difference, really.
  - wmf 17y ago
    I assume Firefox has a public API for video codecs No, Theora is hardcoded in.
  - kinetik 17y ago
    I believe Mozilla distributes Flash as a plugin in the Firefox download. This is most definitely false. Why make a claim like this when you could easily verify it?
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - blasdel 17y ago
      He's only misstating it somewhat. Firefox (at least on Windows) has a special Flash installer baked into it for several years -- if it can't find the plugin, it prompts you with an infobar, which then kicks off a streamlined installer that downloads a xpi package and installs it even without administrative privileges. When they first implemented it, they got a special license to distribute the Flash xpi from addons.mozilla.org, and did so happily. Mozilla has absolutely distributed the Flash binaries themselves before, but I think the file is hosted by Adobe these days. Fairly recently they baked in a special Flash updater too -- if your Flash plugin has known security vulnerabilities Firefox will prompt you to automatically update it: http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/09/16/helping-people-upgrade-flash/ http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/09/16/helping-people-up...
      - kinetik 17y ago
        There's no "special Flash installer". I think you're talking about the Plugin Finder Service, which is generic and works with any plugin. PFS serves metadata that points the user to the vendor's plugin download page (possibly to a streamlined installer built by the plugin vendor): https://wiki.mozilla.org/PFS https://wiki.mozilla.org/PFS The "special Flash updater" detects if the user has Flash installed and is out of date, and only if so, it points them to Adobe's website to download the latest version. This is likely to happen for all widely used plugins. Flash is the first because it's so widely installed. More details here: http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/09/04/helping-users-keep-plugins-updated/ http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/09/04/helping-users-ke... It's pretty easy to find this all out with a search engine, so I'm beginning to wonder if your "slightly incorrect" claims are deliberate misrepresentations. I'd question your agenda, but honestly I don't care. The facts are available for anybody with a search engine handy.
- mrshoe 17y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Doesn't this also hint to a possible solution to this HTML5 video problem? Someone should just make a FF plugin that provides the H.264 code to work with the video element. Maybe Google could be that someone?
- gvb 17y ago
  And, just to swirl the controversy, support for Flash is also support for H.264: http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/9/releasenotes.html http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/9/... "Fixes and improvements in Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, Version 9.0.115.0 Flash Player 9 Update 3 extends the performance and standards compliance advances introduced in Flash Player 9. Of key importance, this update adds H.264 video and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio codec support that opens up a broad ecosystem and selection of standards-based video — up to HD quality — that developers can leverage in their applications. The update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers." (my emphasis)
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    >"support for Flash is also support for H.264" That's largely irrelevant to the issue at hand being just Adobe trying to grasp the last few straws of universal flash desirability before browsers offer the codecs necessary aside from Flash and Canvas becomes the standard format for online animation.
uriel 17y ago
A bit sad that he made the usual silly argument that somehow Theora is more susceptible to submarine patents than H.264. Sure there can be submarine patents in Theora, but they can exists for H.264 too, and then you have to deal with the patent trolls and the MPEG-LA. Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent licensing whims is not a very good business decision. And of course, he didn't touch at all on the whole open source issue, which was a big part of the problem with .gif, and which in my opinion are the main reason H.264 is not acceptable: it is not acceptable to basically bar open source from a huge part of the web. (And expecting all open source projects and users to just ignore the insane patent laws is not acceptable either.) Yes, Flash is even worse, but that is besides the point, flash is not part of the standard web ecosystem and never will be.
- GHFigs 17y ago
  Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent licensing whims is not a very good business decision. This is an hard pill to swallow for companies who have profited greatly from the interoperability that such licensing affords them. it is not acceptable to basically bar open source from a huge part of the web Who exactly is doing that? H.264 is not proposed to be part of the HTML5 spec. It's just what people use. flash is not part of the standard web ecosystem In the sense of de jure standards, neither is H.264. In the sense of de facto standards, it is even more of a standard than H.264.
  - aw3c2 17y ago
    On the web, people use H.264 involuntarily because Flash supports it and most video sites use Flash. Theora is a good equivalent to the commonly used Baseline profile.
    - m_eiman 17y ago
      It appears that it's not equivalent in the quality/bit sense: http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356 http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356
kinetik 17y ago
If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court with MPEG LA, not individual licensees. This is incorrect in multiple ways: - The MPEG-LA is a licensing body, so it's extremely unlikely to be practicing the patent in question. Therefore it would be hard to sue them directly for infringement. It'd also be very difficult to sue them for inducing infringement due to the following point. - The H.264 license explicitly disclaims warranty that the license provided by the MPEG-LA covers all essential patents to practice H.264. This is also mention in the public FAQ: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx Like most people on the internet, I Am Not A Lawyer.
please 17y ago
> If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court with MPEG LA, not individual licensees. This is not true, check your facts! From http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx Q: Are all AVC essential patents included? A: No assurance is or can be made that the License includes every essential patent. The purpose of the License is to offer a convenient licensing alternative to everyone on the same terms and to include as much essential intellectual property as possible for their convenience. Participation in the License is voluntary on the part of essential patent holders, however. If someone holds additional patents on H264 and is not part of the licensing pool they can sue individual licensees, they even get a nice list of parties to sue at http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensees.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensees.aspx
- mjhnghfh 17y ago
  The patent holder can also decide not to bother MS/Apple/etc, and only prosecute open source implementations. The patent holder could be bought by MS/Apple/etc Unlike copyright there is no requirement to assiduously defend a patent.
  - natrius 17y ago
    You're thinking of trademarks, not copyright.
    - mjhnghfh 17y ago
      Yes sorry, however the point remains. It's perfectly legitimate (and common) for a patent holder to sue a single strategic competitor while leaving a larger player alone. An impartial (commercial) industry body could decide to sue only FOSS implementations in order to keep the field open for their members.
      - blasdel 17y ago
        You can't sue FOSS authors for infringing patents (source code) -- you can only sue the distributors of executable implementations (binaries) The text of an ideal software patent is (or has a direct mapping to) the source code of an implementation, just as an ideal steam engine patent would be blueprints and schematics. The text of patents must always be publicly available to be enforceable -- it's the whole point, absolutely central to "the promotion of the useful arts and sciences". You license the production of artifacts, not the spread of ideas.
zppx 17y ago
If Gruber was not a well known defender of whatever Apple wants to happen in the world I would say that his viewpoint was meaningful, but it's not, he simply want to advance the Apple wishes... if we will need to migrate to other formats after some time, because of patent enforcement, then why adopt a format as a standard? Why not just adopt multiple formats or no format at all? What about the legacy devices that will not support the new format? See, he also does not have any practical concerns, he just lives in a world where Apple idealism is the norm. That said, my demands from a codec is simple: it must be free to encode/decode using the codec, free to be included in the nightly builds/repository of WebKit and Gecko (H.264 is not) or every other project, free for a guy in a university dorm develop a new product using the codec without paying for any royalties, it must be patent free as it is the desirable for every other W3C standard, I think it will be better to not have a standard at all if we do not have these guarantees. EDIT: lanaer and GHFigs comments were eye-openers for me, I recommend you people to read them.
- lanaer 17y ago
  Since there is no standard video codec for HTML5 playback, it sounds like your last clause, at least, is satisfied. Personally, I'll probably use H.264. Why? Because I find it preferable than flash, and if I want my web video to be viewable without flash to most of my visitors, H.264 seems like the only practical solution (and possibly encoding in Theora as well). It's not a standard, and browser vendors & others can continue to offer alternatives, one of which may supplant H.264, as PNG replaced GIF. Or maybe Theora will turn out to infringe on patents that H.264 legally relies on, and H.264 will stay around for a while. Whatever the case may be, this is only the first generation of video-capable browsers. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see future generations be much more flexible in terms of codec support.
- GHFigs 17y ago
  Why not just adopt multiple formats or no format at all? HTML5's video tag supports multiple formats (it always has) and the spec does not mandate any specific codec. Nobody is proposing to adopt h.264 as part of the standard.
  - 17y ago
nod 17y ago
"web site publishers are clearly betting on H.264 remaining free to use for freely distributed web video"... Yes, and MPEG LA might be perfectly content with a $5 million check from every browser maker every year.
hackermom 17y ago
Gruber nails it again. Mozilla's hypocrisy is as always overly evident. Their stance is fuelled by sheer greed, obviously - it's about money, about them not wanting to cut down on their yearly economical influx, not about being "open and free", as their actions of trying to sweep the bleeding case of Flash under the carpet is so obviously telling. I wonder, did any of the non-Mozilla developers, whose work spans the majority of the project today, ever see a single dime of the _tens of millions_ of USD (yes, that's their revenue) going into the Mozilla Foundation from their search engine sponsor choice? No, I didn't think so either.
- jerf 17y ago
  Mozilla's money comes from Google. Google owns YouTube, the world's largest video site. YouTube is using h264. If your theory was correct that Mozilla is solely concerned with money, your theory would predict that they would support h264, rabidly.
  - hackermom 17y ago
    How? Whatever does Google Search have to do with YouTube? Google Search is not affected in any way what so ever by neither Google's nor Mozilla's love or hate for h.264. Also, YouTube is fully enjoyable with Flash. No matter how I twist and turn your response, I just can't see the red line you're trying to draw here.
    - jerf 17y ago
      Yes, weak critical thinking does seem to be a problem here. Let me collapse the three simple implications for you down to "All of Mozilla's money comes from a known h264 supporter." If you're going to make some sort of bizarre conspiracy theory about money making Mozilla hypocrites, then following that up with "And therefore Mozilla is not going to support h264" just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. If they were slaves of their money, they would be supporting h264 loudly; this is sticking a finger in the eye of their money source, not kowtowing to them.
- Daishiman 17y ago
FlorinAndrei 17y ago
Marginally related: MP4 as a container, H.264 (AVC) for the video track, AAC for the audio track - this video file format is playable everywhere. Windows, Linux, Mac, PS3, PSP, iPhone... if the kitchen sink had a display, it would probably play it. When I get a new file, if it's playable on the devices where it's supposed to be viewed, I don't do anything. Otherwise, I convert it to the format indicated above. No deliberation, I just convert it by default to MP4 AVC/AAC. Often I'll use MeGUI if I need some kind of GUI to simplify the process. Very often, .flv files from Youtube are just AVC/AAC (I think they use x264 to encode the video track) encapsulated as Flash - a simple re-encapsulation (ffmpeg on Linux, Yamb on Windows) solves the problem and - voila - the result is an MP4 that is playable pretty much anywhere. Blu-Ray and AVCHD disks use AVCHD (H.264 at high rez) almost always. HD camcorders use AVCHD. And so on. So, I guess my point is - H.264 is already used by many people. It's more or less everywhere. Very likely, it's here to stay.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Could anyone explain the if it was really about idealism, Firefox would remove the plugin API that Flash (and e.g. Silverlight) uses argument? I'm genuinely curious as I've seen this from both Gruber and Mark Pilgrim so clearly some people who aren't known for being loonies think there's logic there, but I'm just not seeing it. Basically I read it as if they are saying you're not allowed to choose your battles, or be pragmatic in pursuit of an idealistic goal, you have only two options; to be more extreme than Richard Stallman or you have to shut up and follow the crowd. And even that ignores all the plugins that don't push patent encumbered formats that would be collateral damage (or is he suggesting a plugin blacklist? For patented code, all proprietary code, any code that Gruber thinks makes them hypocrites?). Or is there more here I'm not seeing?
loup-vaillant 17y ago
But I think history shows that practical concerns, not idealism, is what drives web publishers to adopt new formats. A bit off topic, but if you replace "practical" and "idealism" by their true meaning ("short term", and "long term" respectively), you quickly realize that this attitude is nearly universal: "Short term concerns, not long term ones, is what drives most people".

83 points by barredo 17y ago

Just one point of interest is that Unisys only attempted to charge for the compression of data not the playback. So, browsers were never subject to the licensing fees that Unisys was asking for, only products like Photoshop which created/compressed data. Also, they were nice enough to grandfather many programs so things like the PBM tools were not subject to licensing fees.

btilly 17y ago
That was not out of any sense of generosity. That was because their patent clearly only applied to a (good) method for compressing gifs. Therefore their patent did not apply to creating or reading gifs.

Nwallins 17y ago

> But they can’t say Firefox only supports free and open video formats while still supporting Flash. Mr. Gruber should be more precise by what he means by support. Firefox's support for Flash is not like the proposed support for H.264. There is no Flash code in the Firefox codebase, to my knowledge. There is only a generic plugin interface, and there is one dominant, proprietary Flash plugin that Mozilla has nothing to do with (in addition to other less-featured Flash plugins). What Mr. Gruber seems to be saying is that he wants Firefox to distribute H.264 code with their browser. Either that or Firefox should rely on codecs that may or may not be installed on the underlying system. In the former case, the analogy is fatally flawed, while if the latter is intended, it should be explicitly addressed.

matasar 17y ago
I believe Mozilla distributes Flash as a plugin in the Firefox download. If they don't, they certainly make special allowances to make Flash easier to download and install than other plugins. I assume Firefox has a public API for video codecs, and they choose to distribute codecs or not. So I don't see the difference, really.
- wmf 17y ago
  I assume Firefox has a public API for video codecs No, Theora is hardcoded in.
- kinetik 17y ago
  I believe Mozilla distributes Flash as a plugin in the Firefox download. This is most definitely false. Why make a claim like this when you could easily verify it?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - blasdel 17y ago
    He's only misstating it somewhat. Firefox (at least on Windows) has a special Flash installer baked into it for several years -- if it can't find the plugin, it prompts you with an infobar, which then kicks off a streamlined installer that downloads a xpi package and installs it even without administrative privileges. When they first implemented it, they got a special license to distribute the Flash xpi from addons.mozilla.org, and did so happily. Mozilla has absolutely distributed the Flash binaries themselves before, but I think the file is hosted by Adobe these days. Fairly recently they baked in a special Flash updater too -- if your Flash plugin has known security vulnerabilities Firefox will prompt you to automatically update it: http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/09/16/helping-people-upgrade-flash/ http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/09/16/helping-people-up...
    - kinetik 17y ago
      There's no "special Flash installer". I think you're talking about the Plugin Finder Service, which is generic and works with any plugin. PFS serves metadata that points the user to the vendor's plugin download page (possibly to a streamlined installer built by the plugin vendor): https://wiki.mozilla.org/PFS https://wiki.mozilla.org/PFS The "special Flash updater" detects if the user has Flash installed and is out of date, and only if so, it points them to Adobe's website to download the latest version. This is likely to happen for all widely used plugins. Flash is the first because it's so widely installed. More details here: http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/09/04/helping-users-keep-plugins-updated/ http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/09/04/helping-users-ke... It's pretty easy to find this all out with a search engine, so I'm beginning to wonder if your "slightly incorrect" claims are deliberate misrepresentations. I'd question your agenda, but honestly I don't care. The facts are available for anybody with a search engine handy.
mrshoe 17y ago
My thoughts exactly. Doesn't this also hint to a possible solution to this HTML5 video problem? Someone should just make a FF plugin that provides the H.264 code to work with the video element. Maybe Google could be that someone?
gvb 17y ago
And, just to swirl the controversy, support for Flash is also support for H.264: http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/9/releasenotes.html http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/9/... "Fixes and improvements in Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, Version 9.0.115.0 Flash Player 9 Update 3 extends the performance and standards compliance advances introduced in Flash Player 9. Of key importance, this update adds H.264 video and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio codec support that opens up a broad ecosystem and selection of standards-based video — up to HD quality — that developers can leverage in their applications. The update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers." (my emphasis)
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  >"support for Flash is also support for H.264" That's largely irrelevant to the issue at hand being just Adobe trying to grasp the last few straws of universal flash desirability before browsers offer the codecs necessary aside from Flash and Canvas becomes the standard format for online animation.

uriel 17y ago

A bit sad that he made the usual silly argument that somehow Theora is more susceptible to submarine patents than H.264. Sure there can be submarine patents in Theora, but they can exists for H.264 too, and then you have to deal with the patent trolls and the MPEG-LA. Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent licensing whims is not a very good business decision. And of course, he didn't touch at all on the whole open source issue, which was a big part of the problem with .gif, and which in my opinion are the main reason H.264 is not acceptable: it is not acceptable to basically bar open source from a huge part of the web. (And expecting all open source projects and users to just ignore the insane patent laws is not acceptable either.) Yes, Flash is even worse, but that is besides the point, flash is not part of the standard web ecosystem and never will be.

GHFigs 17y ago
Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent licensing whims is not a very good business decision. This is an hard pill to swallow for companies who have profited greatly from the interoperability that such licensing affords them. it is not acceptable to basically bar open source from a huge part of the web Who exactly is doing that? H.264 is not proposed to be part of the HTML5 spec. It's just what people use. flash is not part of the standard web ecosystem In the sense of de jure standards, neither is H.264. In the sense of de facto standards, it is even more of a standard than H.264.
- aw3c2 17y ago
  On the web, people use H.264 involuntarily because Flash supports it and most video sites use Flash. Theora is a good equivalent to the commonly used Baseline profile.
  - m_eiman 17y ago
    It appears that it's not equivalent in the quality/bit sense: http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356 http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356

kinetik 17y ago

If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court with MPEG LA, not individual licensees. This is incorrect in multiple ways: - The MPEG-LA is a licensing body, so it's extremely unlikely to be practicing the patent in question. Therefore it would be hard to sue them directly for infringement. It'd also be very difficult to sue them for inducing infringement due to the following point. - The H.264 license explicitly disclaims warranty that the license provided by the MPEG-LA covers all essential patents to practice H.264. This is also mention in the public FAQ: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx Like most people on the internet, I Am Not A Lawyer.

please 17y ago

> If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court with MPEG LA, not individual licensees. This is not true, check your facts! From http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx Q: Are all AVC essential patents included? A: No assurance is or can be made that the License includes every essential patent. The purpose of the License is to offer a convenient licensing alternative to everyone on the same terms and to include as much essential intellectual property as possible for their convenience. Participation in the License is voluntary on the part of essential patent holders, however. If someone holds additional patents on H264 and is not part of the licensing pool they can sue individual licensees, they even get a nice list of parties to sue at http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensees.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensees.aspx

mjhnghfh 17y ago
The patent holder can also decide not to bother MS/Apple/etc, and only prosecute open source implementations. The patent holder could be bought by MS/Apple/etc Unlike copyright there is no requirement to assiduously defend a patent.
- natrius 17y ago
  You're thinking of trademarks, not copyright.
  - mjhnghfh 17y ago
    Yes sorry, however the point remains. It's perfectly legitimate (and common) for a patent holder to sue a single strategic competitor while leaving a larger player alone. An impartial (commercial) industry body could decide to sue only FOSS implementations in order to keep the field open for their members.
    - blasdel 17y ago
      You can't sue FOSS authors for infringing patents (source code) -- you can only sue the distributors of executable implementations (binaries) The text of an ideal software patent is (or has a direct mapping to) the source code of an implementation, just as an ideal steam engine patent would be blueprints and schematics. The text of patents must always be publicly available to be enforceable -- it's the whole point, absolutely central to "the promotion of the useful arts and sciences". You license the production of artifacts, not the spread of ideas.

zppx 17y ago

If Gruber was not a well known defender of whatever Apple wants to happen in the world I would say that his viewpoint was meaningful, but it's not, he simply want to advance the Apple wishes... if we will need to migrate to other formats after some time, because of patent enforcement, then why adopt a format as a standard? Why not just adopt multiple formats or no format at all? What about the legacy devices that will not support the new format? See, he also does not have any practical concerns, he just lives in a world where Apple idealism is the norm. That said, my demands from a codec is simple: it must be free to encode/decode using the codec, free to be included in the nightly builds/repository of WebKit and Gecko (H.264 is not) or every other project, free for a guy in a university dorm develop a new product using the codec without paying for any royalties, it must be patent free as it is the desirable for every other W3C standard, I think it will be better to not have a standard at all if we do not have these guarantees. EDIT: lanaer and GHFigs comments were eye-openers for me, I recommend you people to read them.

lanaer 17y ago
Since there is no standard video codec for HTML5 playback, it sounds like your last clause, at least, is satisfied. Personally, I'll probably use H.264. Why? Because I find it preferable than flash, and if I want my web video to be viewable without flash to most of my visitors, H.264 seems like the only practical solution (and possibly encoding in Theora as well). It's not a standard, and browser vendors & others can continue to offer alternatives, one of which may supplant H.264, as PNG replaced GIF. Or maybe Theora will turn out to infringe on patents that H.264 legally relies on, and H.264 will stay around for a while. Whatever the case may be, this is only the first generation of video-capable browsers. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see future generations be much more flexible in terms of codec support.
GHFigs 17y ago
Why not just adopt multiple formats or no format at all? HTML5's video tag supports multiple formats (it always has) and the spec does not mandate any specific codec. Nobody is proposing to adopt h.264 as part of the standard.
- 17y ago

nod 17y ago

"web site publishers are clearly betting on H.264 remaining free to use for freely distributed web video"... Yes, and MPEG LA might be perfectly content with a $5 million check from every browser maker every year.

hackermom 17y ago

Gruber nails it again. Mozilla's hypocrisy is as always overly evident. Their stance is fuelled by sheer greed, obviously - it's about money, about them not wanting to cut down on their yearly economical influx, not about being "open and free", as their actions of trying to sweep the bleeding case of Flash under the carpet is so obviously telling. I wonder, did any of the non-Mozilla developers, whose work spans the majority of the project today, ever see a single dime of the _tens of millions_ of USD (yes, that's their revenue) going into the Mozilla Foundation from their search engine sponsor choice? No, I didn't think so either.

jerf 17y ago
Mozilla's money comes from Google. Google owns YouTube, the world's largest video site. YouTube is using h264. If your theory was correct that Mozilla is solely concerned with money, your theory would predict that they would support h264, rabidly.
- hackermom 17y ago
  How? Whatever does Google Search have to do with YouTube? Google Search is not affected in any way what so ever by neither Google's nor Mozilla's love or hate for h.264. Also, YouTube is fully enjoyable with Flash. No matter how I twist and turn your response, I just can't see the red line you're trying to draw here.
  - jerf 17y ago
    Yes, weak critical thinking does seem to be a problem here. Let me collapse the three simple implications for you down to "All of Mozilla's money comes from a known h264 supporter." If you're going to make some sort of bizarre conspiracy theory about money making Mozilla hypocrites, then following that up with "And therefore Mozilla is not going to support h264" just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. If they were slaves of their money, they would be supporting h264 loudly; this is sticking a finger in the eye of their money source, not kowtowing to them.
Daishiman 17y ago

FlorinAndrei 17y ago

Marginally related: MP4 as a container, H.264 (AVC) for the video track, AAC for the audio track - this video file format is playable everywhere. Windows, Linux, Mac, PS3, PSP, iPhone... if the kitchen sink had a display, it would probably play it. When I get a new file, if it's playable on the devices where it's supposed to be viewed, I don't do anything. Otherwise, I convert it to the format indicated above. No deliberation, I just convert it by default to MP4 AVC/AAC. Often I'll use MeGUI if I need some kind of GUI to simplify the process. Very often, .flv files from Youtube are just AVC/AAC (I think they use x264 to encode the video track) encapsulated as Flash - a simple re-encapsulation (ffmpeg on Linux, Yamb on Windows) solves the problem and - voila - the result is an MP4 that is playable pretty much anywhere. Blu-Ray and AVCHD disks use AVCHD (H.264 at high rez) almost always. HD camcorders use AVCHD. And so on. So, I guess my point is - H.264 is already used by many people. It's more or less everywhere. Very likely, it's here to stay.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

Could anyone explain the if it was really about idealism, Firefox would remove the plugin API that Flash (and e.g. Silverlight) uses argument? I'm genuinely curious as I've seen this from both Gruber and Mark Pilgrim so clearly some people who aren't known for being loonies think there's logic there, but I'm just not seeing it. Basically I read it as if they are saying you're not allowed to choose your battles, or be pragmatic in pursuit of an idealistic goal, you have only two options; to be more extreme than Richard Stallman or you have to shut up and follow the crowd. And even that ignores all the plugins that don't push patent encumbered formats that would be collateral damage (or is he suggesting a plugin blacklist? For patented code, all proprietary code, any code that Gruber thinks makes them hypocrites?). Or is there more here I'm not seeing?

loup-vaillant 17y ago

But I think history shows that practical concerns, not idealism, is what drives web publishers to adopt new formats. A bit off topic, but if you replace "practical" and "idealism" by their true meaning ("short term", and "long term" respectively), you quickly realize that this attitude is nearly universal: "Short term concerns, not long term ones, is what drives most people".