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Yet another indicator of how powerful modern CPUs and modern javascript has become. Yet when I see projects like this, I think about how everyone's video cards

Yet another indicator of how powerful modern CPUs and modern javascript has become. Yet when I see projects like this, I think about how everyone's video cards & chips already have hardware video decoding. Why are we not given access to those APIs? This seems fundamental, yet never a peep about them. I want access to my own friggen hardware. And it's about time video decoding got standardized, isn't it? Why, other than media publishers being afraid of it, do we not have access to these APIs?

wmf 14y ago
This has been discussed extensively. Different systems have different codecs installed, so having the browser pass through to OS/hardware codecs leads to non-interoperability (the same problem as with EME). Also, Mozilla and Google were trying for a while to strong-arm the world into adopting VP8 by denying access to other codecs, but that didn't pan out.
- anonymfus 14y ago
  MP3 would be standard codec for audio if the only concern was interoperability. It was officially motivated by non-encouraging of usage of patented formats.
michael_miller 14y ago
We do, in some sense. The <video> tag is hardware accelerated on many platforms. It's not a direct "decode this frame using the hardware" API, but if you're trying to serve up a video, it does the job. Is there something specific you're looking to do with a lower-level API?
ajross 14y ago
You certainly do have access to those APIs. You can use DirectShow on windows, libva on linux, OpenMAX on android, whatever Apple picked on iOS, etc... But be careful to probe correctly, because not all backends support all the features the same way. And not all hardware supports all profiles the same way. But it's certainly not a problem of "access". I know what you're really thinking is a little pushbutton Javascript API where you can hand it an url and say "play". The real world doesn't work like that, sadly. Media handling is wildly complicated, and I didn't even need to invoke DRM here.

wmf 14y ago

This has been discussed extensively. Different systems have different codecs installed, so having the browser pass through to OS/hardware codecs leads to non-interoperability (the same problem as with EME). Also, Mozilla and Google were trying for a while to strong-arm the world into adopting VP8 by denying access to other codecs, but that didn't pan out.

anonymfus 14y ago
MP3 would be standard codec for audio if the only concern was interoperability. It was officially motivated by non-encouraging of usage of patented formats.

michael_miller 14y ago

We do, in some sense. The <video> tag is hardware accelerated on many platforms. It's not a direct "decode this frame using the hardware" API, but if you're trying to serve up a video, it does the job. Is there something specific you're looking to do with a lower-level API?

ajross 14y ago

You certainly do have access to those APIs. You can use DirectShow on windows, libva on linux, OpenMAX on android, whatever Apple picked on iOS, etc... But be careful to probe correctly, because not all backends support all the features the same way. And not all hardware supports all profiles the same way. But it's certainly not a problem of "access". I know what you're really thinking is a little pushbutton Javascript API where you can hand it an url and say "play". The real world doesn't work like that, sadly. Media handling is wildly complicated, and I didn't even need to invoke DRM here.