Last week, OSNews reported on a letter I had wrote to Mozilla complaining of a JavaScript dependant HTML5 video example they had published. The letter caused a great deal of stir and Mozilla have replied by publishing a new example that does not rely upon JavaScript to see the video. Secondly, Mozilla have actually used Video for Everybody for their “What’s new in Firefox 3.5” page! A big win for HTML5 video across the web!
I’m very much looking forward to seeing “Video for Everybody” in Firefox 3.5! Well done, Mozilla!
VfE is not a part of FF 3.5, but may be a part of web sites for unsupported browsers. I would love to see that browsers will not go late as IE told in “Get the facts” about “emerging standards”.
Well done, Kroc. Well done, Mozilla.
There fixed that for you
We have to keep things in order.
Yeah, awesome for both Mozilla and Kroc!
I’m SO happy for both Croc and what all of this could mean to the web and to me as a resources-starving netbook user who totally HATES flash video.
Mozilla & Kroc! The dinosaur and the crocodile.
See that’s why Mozilla listened to Kroc. He is their little brother.
I second that. Well done, Kroc Carmen and Mozilla.
That’s how the open web should be.
nda
What I’d love to see is Apple to release into the open source world a subset of the Quicktime framework which would allow the playback of h264/mp4/aac/mp3 codecs – so that the framework can be freely integrated into the browser. It would be a very basic playback framework but if it enabled the de-coupling of flash and Silverlight when it came to video playback, it would benefit Apple in the long run (as well as non-Microsoft platforms).
It would indeed be nice, but I’m not sure it’s possible. H.264 has patent issues in countries that acknowledge the idea of software patents, and naturally the US is probably the largest proponent of that stupid idea. Apple being a US company, and not holding all the patents on the various technologies involved, probably would not legally be allowed to do this on their own even if they wanted to. All the patent-holders would have to allow this… and good luck getting those short-sighted fools to understand the logic of such an idea.
Patent holders don’t control the source code; Apple could provide the source code, they compile it on behalf of users and then distribution it themselves considering they hold the patent licence. As long as they’re the only ones distributing it – the patent holders don’t care who developed it. Its the distribution that’ll cause the problems. So I guess ‘redistribution’ wouldn’t work – although if Apple compiled Firefox themselves with Quicktime LE (I called it Light Edition due to the fact it is a subset) integrated – it would be a matter of Apple redistributing software rather than an unlicensed organisation. I doubt, however, that Apple will be so willing to aid competitor browsers though.
You have a very poor understanding of patent law. And no, Apple does not hold the patent for any of these. (Except maybe for part of the MP4 container format, which is very close to the MOV container format)
Furthermore, there’s no need for source code. It would do very little good. All that is needed is published standards, and those already exist. There are already opensource implementations of everything you listed, but getting the source is not the issue. What is at issues is that if you distribute them you have to pay a big chunk of change for the licensing. Apple has nothing to gain by doing that. (Hell, WE have nothing to gain by Apple doing that)
Edited 2009-06-23 19:15 UTC
What do you call AAC/h264/mp3/mp4 support in Quicktime then? obviously Apple bought a licence as to allow them to distribute it – or are you another donk who believes that AAC stands for “Apple Audio Codec”?
QuickTime patents that are shared between Apple and the inventors will not be released. Get over it.
I give up – obviously you don’t know the difference between copyright and patents because in that brief reply you’ve interpolated two very different ideas and claiming them as one.
Apple is a licencee, they have got a licence to distribute; if they distribute Quicktime LE themselves, they are not violating their licence. If they create a Apple version of Firefox and bundle Quicktime LE with it, as long as they are the only ones who distribute that – they are not in violation of their licence.
But hey, you keep ignoring reality – its serves you well on a forum with people ignorant of these issues.
Edited 2009-06-24 02:12 UTC
How do you know they wouldn’t be in violation of their license? A license isn’t just a generic “hey you can do whatever the hell you want to with this technology”.
A license sets limits on what you are allowed to do with the technology, as well as what the end uses are and how you are able to distribute it. The also set how much you have to pay in royalties.
I have no idea what type of arrangement Apple has with the other patent holders within the MPEG Licensing Authority. But even if they could do whatever the hell they wanted, I can tell you right now that the only browser they hold any interest from investing is Safari.
Furthermore (since you behave like such an expert on licensing) if they for some crazy reason they tried to incorporate quicktime code directly into the mozilla base, they would be in violation of the license under which the firefox code is distributed. Unless they open-sourced quicktime. (Which they are not going to do)
Edited 2009-06-24 04:50 UTC
Interesting development.
However, I’ve been looking around and haven’t found a way to transcode my AVI movies (recorded by my photo camera) into OGG movies.
Would anyone be so kind as to point me towards a good (preferably open source) program that can do this (and more)?
Thanks
ffmpeg does that. just a link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1070973
there are many sources you can find on the web. just use google.
http://handbrake.fr/
http://handbrake.fr/?article=details
Should do the trick.
PS: Handbrake has a GUI:
http://handbrake.fr/?article=screenshots
… even under Linux:
http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/LinGuiScreenshots
Edited 2009-06-23 10:47 UTC
Thanks guys.
I also noticed that I can do it with VLC (no sound in 0.9.9 but sound is working in 1.0.0 rc1).
In most Linux distros there is also a program (or script) called ffmpeg2theora which does just that. It has very basic command line options, so makes it very easy to use for novice users.
Dunno who should I blame, but this “one for all” implementation doesn’t actually work at all with Midori and results in two simultaneous playbacks with Konqueror (simultaneous but not synchronous -> horrible “echoing” of sound).
Could you e-mail me ([email protected]) with more specific details of your browser / plugin setup and I’ll be glad to look into this. Hopefully it can be solved, but unfortunately, doing this without JavaScript means that if a browser doesn’t play fair, there’s possibly no solution. VfE will definitely target 99% of people, and for open source browsers, bugs may be able to be filed.
Kroc,
did you change anything on the VFE page?
I’m using Flashblock and NoScript, and when you first published your letter, the Firefox 3.5 video tag worked perfectly, whereas now I get only a blocked javascript pointing to a blocked flash object
On a more or less related note, scrolling your site is really slow in my browser. Nearly as if something is continually re-calculated, like on flash-heavy sites.
I can give info about my system if you like.
<EDIT: just to clarify that Firefox 3.5 still displays video’s, just not on Kroc’s site>
Edited 2009-06-23 11:49 UTC
If you’ve got NoScript and FlashBlock they kind of conflict with each other and you have to click the blocked video three times to unblock it, it should play then. Try disabling NoScript/FlashBlock or allowing the domain and double check that the HTML5 video plays when no extensions are messing about with it.
If it’s still not working, then that would be most odd and we can try work that out.
My website is pretty heavy on the CSS and sometimes freaks out some browsers / platforms, it doesn’t seem to happen to everybody though. It would help to know what OS you’re on and what extensions you have installed, as well as if you have ‘smooth scrolling’ enabled.
Regards,
Kroc.
Sorry, it turns out that it was ogg after all; however you probably changed hosting.
When I allowed NoScript to display all of your page, the video loaded without any flash (as it should be).
I had ‘smooth scrolling’ enabled, but even without it, scrolling your site is quite choppy. I don’t have that many add-ons (the main ones being noscript and flashblock, and noscript was already allowing everything when I tried again).
<edit> i’m on Windows XP Pro, a Core2Duo laptop with 2GB RAM, and the latest Firefox 3.5 RC
Edited 2009-06-23 12:58 UTC
This is really quite exciting. When I first read about the “Video for Everybody,” I instantly liked it, and I hope it takes off. I’m happy to say that it seems to work well enough in Google Chrome as well as Firefox.
It freezes up Chromium on Linux, though (I’m using Linux Mint 7 currently on my netbook), but since that’s not even finished just yet, who can blame them?
Funny, it works fine on Chrome 3 on Windows :/.
Yeah, I’m hoping it’ll work on Chromium soon as well. It doesn’t support Flash either, but I’m assuming that’ll change eventually, and I’m sure HTML5 will soon work well, too. The site linked on Kroc’s page (“incredible examples–” http://www.zachstronaut.com/lab/isocube.html) is functional for about ten seconds on Chromium, but then it, too, causes the entire browser to freeze. Works great in Chrome, though (even Chrome 2– I just looked and I’m using Chrome 2.0.172.33 on my Windows partition of my netbook). Most other websites seem to load perfectly in Chromium, though.
nice to see someone pushing ones corp agenda when a non javascript implementation is part of the spec and was a fallback prior to Krocs ramblings.
How many people in the world can say that they have influenced the future of the whole web in a few days?? I’m not seeing enough cheering for Kroc here!!
If something like this hits the mainstream news, YouTube will be undergoing some serious surgery very soon and MILLIONS of users will benefit from being able to watch their favorite videos on their netbooks without having their systems on the brink of total freezing every time because of the Adobe Flash crap.
I’m sharing all of this on Facebook, hoping to spread the word.