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This "twice the work" argument was clearly addressed by the post. Firefox has a much larger market share than Chrome and has already clearly stated they will no

by cracell 16y ago

This "twice the work" argument was clearly addressed by the post. Firefox has a much larger market share than Chrome and has already clearly stated they will not support h.264. If anyone created a problem of having to do "twice the work" it was Firefox and Google has just decided to support them in it. And using their position as owner of YouTube to force h.264 out before WebM is ready would just hurt YouTube and make everyone with a mobile device made prior to WebM decoders being included (assuming that gains momentum) unable to watch YouTube videos.

kenjackson 16y ago
The twice the work wasn't really addressed. No one really cares about the desktop. You can get whatever codec you need whenever. It's mobile that people care about. That's where HTML5 will really make a difference. Firefox is nowhere in Mobile. If this was just about the desktop I'd say just randomly encode every video. I'm going to have every codec installed anyways. But that's not the discussion.
- pornel 16y ago
  > No one really cares about the desktop. Last time I checked desktop usage was still is 90-99% range, 3G bandwidth — even with H.264 — allowed only low-quality video streaming, and operators were tightening limits on their "Unlimited†" tariffs. If you really care about mobiles today, you're encoding special mobile-only (low-res baseline profile) version anyway. Codec war on desktop doesn't really affect that yet.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    No one cares about the desktop, not because of popularity today, but because of popularity tomorrow. And more importantly is the other point I made. On my desktop I have ever codec ever created. It doesn't matter what <video> uses. But it's all of my mobile (and embedded) devices that don't have support for every codec, and I generally can't install a new codec on them. To put it another, if there were no mobile devices, this would be a complete non-issue.
    - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
      No one cares about H.264 via HTML5, not because of popularity today, but because of popularity tomorrow. Devices with the fastest growing mobile OS and hardware WebM decode are shipping this month (they also support H.264 and legacy VP6 via Flash). The hardware churn rate in mobile will solve this problem rapidly and the gaps can be filled quite easily by software wherever there is a will.
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        Devices with the fastest growing mobile OS and hardware WebM decode are shipping this month That doesn't make any sense. What you meant to say was that the fastest growing segment of mobile devices, prior to the iPhone/Verizon, is Android with devices that don't have WebM HW acceleration. Again, I'm fine with a fragmented HTML5 world. There will be the Google WebM world. And the MS/Apple H264 world. I'm perfectly happy with that.
    - pornel 16y ago
      So you care only about tomorrow's popularity, but are worried about today's hardware? Tomorrow decoding of WebM on mobiles might not be a problem, even for battery life. Mutlicore SIMD and programmable GPUs are coming already, and their power efficiency steadily increases. Google has got Qualcomm, Broadcom and few others on board with WebM. If WebM takes off, Apple will need to take all their chipset production in house in order to get chipset without WebM acceleration ;)
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        Did you miss where I say, "And more importantly..."? And which chips are on the roadmap to have WebM support? I don't know of any announced QCOM or NVidia devices that have WebM support. The only I've seen is Broadcoms, and its certainly not on par with the existing H264 HW accelerators. And if Intel doesn't add WebM support, which I don't believe they have commited to doing, this could be long haul. Because desktop isn't sufficient with respect to codecs, you do need desktop chipset support with respect to acceleration. No one will be happy if they can't watch 720P video on their high end computer. Best case scenario is that we see WebM having the level of coverage as H264 has TODAY is probably 2013. Like I've said, there will be those of that fight against WebM and you'll fight for it. Maybe we just end up with a fragmented world.
TomOfTTB 16y ago
If they were to force H.264 out they'd clearly have to make an exception for devices that were not capable of playing WebM. To think otherwise would be idiotic (and is an obnoxious straw man argument on your part). But that's not hard to do. So that doesn't invalidate my point which is they should either REALLY force the issue or drop it. Right now they're making a half hearted effort that guarantees fragmentation. (As for your first point I agree with the other reply)
rwl 16y ago
> If anyone created a problem of having to do "twice the work" it was Firefox... Huh? As I understand it, H.264 was never an option for Firefox due to the patent encumbrance and licensing fees they would incur for distributing it. The people who chose to use H.264, despite knowing that the second most popular browser wouldn't support it, made twice the work for themselves.
- KuraFire 16y ago
  Not really; by choosing H.264 they chose only one format to keep their videos in, and relied on Flash to offer it to the desktop browsers refusing to support H.264 natively.
- CountSessine 16y ago
  There were three options. One was to build in explicit support for h.264 in Firefox and for Mozilla to pay the MPEG-LA ~$5million/year in licensing fees. Another was to punt to the operating system and let gstreamer/directmedia/quicktime do the decode. Even though it would have been without cost to them, Mozilla chose not to do this as part of their moral stand against h.264. This was why they were so sharply criticized. The third option was to let the Firefox Flash plugin do the decoding, which is what we have today.

by cracell 16y ago

kenjackson 16y ago

The twice the work wasn't really addressed. No one really cares about the desktop. You can get whatever codec you need whenever. It's mobile that people care about. That's where HTML5 will really make a difference. Firefox is nowhere in Mobile. If this was just about the desktop I'd say just randomly encode every video. I'm going to have every codec installed anyways. But that's not the discussion.

pornel 16y ago
> No one really cares about the desktop. Last time I checked desktop usage was still is 90-99% range, 3G bandwidth — even with H.264 — allowed only low-quality video streaming, and operators were tightening limits on their "Unlimited†" tariffs. If you really care about mobiles today, you're encoding special mobile-only (low-res baseline profile) version anyway. Codec war on desktop doesn't really affect that yet.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  No one cares about the desktop, not because of popularity today, but because of popularity tomorrow. And more importantly is the other point I made. On my desktop I have ever codec ever created. It doesn't matter what <video> uses. But it's all of my mobile (and embedded) devices that don't have support for every codec, and I generally can't install a new codec on them. To put it another, if there were no mobile devices, this would be a complete non-issue.
  - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
    No one cares about H.264 via HTML5, not because of popularity today, but because of popularity tomorrow. Devices with the fastest growing mobile OS and hardware WebM decode are shipping this month (they also support H.264 and legacy VP6 via Flash). The hardware churn rate in mobile will solve this problem rapidly and the gaps can be filled quite easily by software wherever there is a will.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      Devices with the fastest growing mobile OS and hardware WebM decode are shipping this month That doesn't make any sense. What you meant to say was that the fastest growing segment of mobile devices, prior to the iPhone/Verizon, is Android with devices that don't have WebM HW acceleration. Again, I'm fine with a fragmented HTML5 world. There will be the Google WebM world. And the MS/Apple H264 world. I'm perfectly happy with that.
  - pornel 16y ago
    So you care only about tomorrow's popularity, but are worried about today's hardware? Tomorrow decoding of WebM on mobiles might not be a problem, even for battery life. Mutlicore SIMD and programmable GPUs are coming already, and their power efficiency steadily increases. Google has got Qualcomm, Broadcom and few others on board with WebM. If WebM takes off, Apple will need to take all their chipset production in house in order to get chipset without WebM acceleration ;)
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      Did you miss where I say, "And more importantly..."? And which chips are on the roadmap to have WebM support? I don't know of any announced QCOM or NVidia devices that have WebM support. The only I've seen is Broadcoms, and its certainly not on par with the existing H264 HW accelerators. And if Intel doesn't add WebM support, which I don't believe they have commited to doing, this could be long haul. Because desktop isn't sufficient with respect to codecs, you do need desktop chipset support with respect to acceleration. No one will be happy if they can't watch 720P video on their high end computer. Best case scenario is that we see WebM having the level of coverage as H264 has TODAY is probably 2013. Like I've said, there will be those of that fight against WebM and you'll fight for it. Maybe we just end up with a fragmented world.

TomOfTTB 16y ago

If they were to force H.264 out they'd clearly have to make an exception for devices that were not capable of playing WebM. To think otherwise would be idiotic (and is an obnoxious straw man argument on your part). But that's not hard to do. So that doesn't invalidate my point which is they should either REALLY force the issue or drop it. Right now they're making a half hearted effort that guarantees fragmentation. (As for your first point I agree with the other reply)

rwl 16y ago

> If anyone created a problem of having to do "twice the work" it was Firefox... Huh? As I understand it, H.264 was never an option for Firefox due to the patent encumbrance and licensing fees they would incur for distributing it. The people who chose to use H.264, despite knowing that the second most popular browser wouldn't support it, made twice the work for themselves.

KuraFire 16y ago
Not really; by choosing H.264 they chose only one format to keep their videos in, and relied on Flash to offer it to the desktop browsers refusing to support H.264 natively.
CountSessine 16y ago
There were three options. One was to build in explicit support for h.264 in Firefox and for Mozilla to pay the MPEG-LA ~$5million/year in licensing fees. Another was to punt to the operating system and let gstreamer/directmedia/quicktime do the decode. Even though it would have been without cost to them, Mozilla chose not to do this as part of their moral stand against h.264. This was why they were so sharply criticized. The third option was to let the Firefox Flash plugin do the decoding, which is what we have today.