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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byRedK ( 112790 ) writes:
Let the market decide. Too bad we've already been down that road and it wasn't pretty at all...
byV!NCENT ( 1105021 ) writes:
People use Wikipedia. In order to see it, sysadmins in companies and schools will support it. Firefox will support it. Linux distro's will support it. So OGG video support will enter the Windows world. H.264 will not be available on all platforms.
Not all Linux distro's will support h.264. Firefox will not support it. So In order for Google to get the widest audience it either needs to continue flash (check Gnash progress; the future looks good) or go for OGG.
I think people should fight for OGG, but I am confident OGG will win if the specs remains undifined. Even if it doesn't then it will in the future.
YouTube will not offer both h.264, flash and OGG at the same time; too expensive.
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byMightyMartian ( 840721 ) writes:
All I can say is "Fuck Apple".
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byimamac ( 1083405 ) writes:
How dare they push people away from Flash...
byMightyMartian ( 840721 ) writes:
The key here is that pretty much everyone else is either going to be neutral on the codecs or is going to be seeking the least encumbered. If Apple wants to cripple its products, then I say "Fuck them". Apple is rapidly taking Microsoft's place as being the most pernicious abuser of vendor lock-in ploys. I could care less whether those poor little iPhone and Safari fanbois can't watch online videos because Steve Jobs and his pack of well-trained corporate trolls somehow think that trying to ignore open standards is a worthwhile pursuit. There is enough penetration by players like Google and Mozilla now that I think giving a bunch of worthless assholes like Steve Jobs and Co. the one-fingered salute can probably fly. It ain't 1985 any more, and those retards at Apple will either wake up to it, or find, once more, they're taking good hardware and marginalizing it.
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bypackman ( 156280 ) writes:
Ehm Theora is not an 'open standard' by any means. H.264 actually is, but it has some serious licensing issues for 'free software' which is not a problem for Apple since they are already paying for the licenses anyway. Implementing Theora is risky for Apple, and I'm pretty surprised that Google is willing to add it to Chrome. No-one can guarantee that Theora is patent-free, having a codebase in a larger project which isn't covered by any patents at all has become almost impossible, certainly if you speciali
bySuper_Z ( 756391 ) writes:
Why on earth did you get a 'troll' mod?
byTacvek ( 948259 ) writes:
First of all, It looks like your paragraph breaks may have been eaten. Therefore I will be reformatting your message:
Ehm Theora is not an 'open standard' by any means. H.264 actually is, but it has some serious licensing issues for 'free software' which is not a problem for Apple since they are already paying for the licenses anyway. Implementing Theora is risky for Apple, and I'm pretty surprised that Google is willing to add it to Chrome. No-one can guarantee that Theora is patent-free, having a codebase in a larger project which isn't covered by any patents at all has become almost impossible, certainly if you specialize in areas like video and audio codecs, where commercial labs such as Fraunhofer Institute operate, which live from patent royalties on technologies they researched.
I'm not exactly what you can call an Apple fanboy, I do have an iPhone however, but have no mac, typing this on a HP laptop with winxp, running 3 linux vm's, and developing on a bsd and a linux server remotely. I always get confused when people talk about Apple being "evil". Sure their focus is not on 'standards' - but on user experience. I absolutely don't get the 'lock in'. Apple pushed for DRM-free tunes in the iTunes store - because it's bad for the customers, not because it conflicts with some idealistic bullshit. I don't really get how behavior like this is lock-in? This means anything that can play AAC files - which is quite a lot (AAC is standardized after all and not an Apple propriatry format). This opens the market for competition for their iPod, so explain me exactly where the lock-in is? And that's only one part. Apple clearly supports opensource software. Yes they struggled somewhat with giving back to webkit in the beginning, but now, things are looking fine on that level. They get it that they can benefit from OSS, and they do include a lot of OOS with OS/X ( like Apache etc). Some people say they are exploiting OSS projects, but in the end, Red Hat, Novell & co. are also doing that right?
Now - can someone please explain me how Apple would "lock me in" by refusing to implement a non-standardized video-codec of which the creators claim it is patent-free. They do want to implement a codec that most video-capable devices out-there can already play, and is still the standard to which Theora is being compared.
Please shut up about 'crippling' products, 'vendor lock-in', 'ignoring open standards'. It may look like I'm "pro" H.264 - but I'm actually not really. I don't care what codec will be used to be honest. Just have the video tag support all codecs supported by the main OS. I think the Mozilla foundation is acting like a bunch of morons refusing to go that way. There's no such thing as "forcing freedom" on people, which is exactly what they're trying to do.
Now my reply.
Ehm Theora is not an 'open standard' by any means.
I'm trying to figure out why you claim this.
I suppose it depends on what definition of Open Standard you use.
If you require a sufficiently complete specification that is available to anybody who desires it at no fee, and without an NDA, with all patents available under RAND terms, then both H.264 and Theora are Open Standards.
If you require that there be no fee on implementations
● current threshold.
byyabos ( 719499 ) writes:
Get your head out of your ass. Mozilla is not neutral. They're sticking with Theora as hard as Apple is sticking with H.264. At least Apple has a good reason which is 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches with an H.264 decoder chip which can't decode Theora. The only reason Mozilla doesn't want to use H.264 is because they don't want to have to pay licensing fees.
byRedK ( 112790 ) writes:
This same argument has been made for more than 15 years about every piece of opensource software. In the end, Microsoft gets to decide, if they even implement <video> at all. That's what I've been referring to by saying we've been down that road before. And guess what, Microsoft will probably go over to h.264, not Ogg Theora. And guess what, Firefox will have h.264 support when all is said and done.
bysadler121 ( 735320 ) writes:
Unless there is a miracle and Software Patents are deemed illegal, Firefox will never support H.264. Being tri-licensed at least the GPL/LGPL would prevent Mozilla from licensing H.264.
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byRedK ( 112790 ) writes:
Or they could you know, ship 2 versions, one for the United States without h.264 and one for the rest of the world where the patent isn't valid. It's been done before with strong encryption browsers, I don't see why it wouldn't be feasible to do it again. In the end, that's the Mozilla Foundation's problem and they'll have to find a solution, because I don't see Ogg Theora getting much traction vs h.264 if market forces will dictate the chosen codec.
byGizzmonic ( 412910 ) writes:
Not all Linux distro's will support h.264. Firefox will not support it. So In order for Google to get the widest audience it either needs to continue flash (check Gnash progress; the future looks good) or go for OGG.
Do you honestly think Google cares about Linux users enough to switch its entire video infrastructure? Did you not read the summary? Google is already committed to H.264.
I think people should fight for OGG, but I am confident OGG will win if the specs remains undifined. Even if it doesn't then
byV!NCENT ( 1105021 ) writes:
Do you honestly think Google cares about Linux users enough to switch its entire video infrastructure?
They totally do not care about their own Android Linux users. You are absolutely right. They don't spend millions on the floss Google Summer of Code. How could I be so stupid?
Why?
I don't remember. Maybe it has something to do with an open web, freedom and culture. Oh well..
Why?
I don't know... Maybe if they have two different quality versions of the same videos already then Google has to store 3*2 videos (3x times the storage) and has to convert uploaded vids 6 times instead of 2?
See me after class.
Go 'F' yourself
bypackman ( 156280 ) writes:
For android it's simple, they can pay for the royalties and include a H.264 codec. Would cost them a lot less than recoding all their video to OGG, not to mention bandwidth costs.
And you're confusing the Google freedom for idealistic bullshit you see on /. all the time. People at google are actually able to think for themselfs, unlike most of the /. audience which just blindly believes in "everything has to be free or it's evil".
bydhasenan ( 758719 ) writes:
Google has computing power to spare. The developer time to convert their h.264 video to Theora would be minuscule. So it doesn't much matter if they have to convert all of Youtube to Theora as a one-time cost.
If, however, a Theora video of reasonable quality requires significantly more space, that's going to be a concern. Bandwidth more than disk space, and client-side bandwidth as much as server-side. Likewise, if Google could realize significant bandwidth reduction by switching to Theora, they probably wo
byGizzmonic ( 412910 ) writes:
They totally do not care about their own Android Linux users. You are absolutely right. They don't spend millions on the floss Google Summer of Code. How could I be so stupid?
They've already thrown their support behind H.264 for mobile device. A tiny fraction of idealistic Linux users aren't really on Google's radar.
I don't remember. Maybe it has something to do with an open web, freedom and culture. Oh well..
I'm sure they care a lot more about that than having to waste server and engineering resources to
byGoaway ( 82658 ) writes:
Firefox will support h.264 sooner or later, by using the OS-provided media playing frameworks. If they don't, they'll get left behind.
Also, Youtube's HQ and HD videos for flash are already h.264, so there's very little cost for them to support h.264-in-video.
byPhilip_the_physicist ( 1536015 ) writes:
Alternatively, someone free from patent concerns will produce a H264 plugin for Firefox, and those in the US will just use it illegally (like DVD players and so on).
bylfaraone ( 1463473 ) writes:
YouTube will not offer both h.264, flash and OGG at the same time; too expensive.
They can offer h.264 and Flash-processing-h.264 at the same time, however. They currently have no problem with a dep. on Flash.
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