Question about HTML5's <video> / <audio>

[kepardue]

I'm not entirely sure that this is the appropriate place to ask this questions since it is more generally related to browsers, but....

As a web developer, I'm concerned about how vague the <video> <audio> spec is on codecs. It seems as though we're approaching a polarized world where the biggest alternative browser, Firefox, is pushing Theora where everyone else is pushing H.264 (as indicated by Chrome and Safari). My company has a significant number of videos that I'd like to offer, but not so much with the wait-and-see and apparently political/philosophical approach that Mozilla is taking with the lower-quality Theora.

Mozilla has stated that they will not natively support H.264 since it is proprietary and not patent free, and yet Google Chrome is offering H.264 support out of the box for their own free browser. How can Chrome do this without incurring licensing fees for an H.264 decoder? Will they just subsidize the cost come 2011?

More importantly, is there any kind of licensing loophole that would eventually also allow Mozilla to support H.264 out of the box, without having to depend on platform frameworks? It sure would be nice if sometime between now and 2011 the patent holders would decide to allow software makers to implement the H.264 decoder only without licensing cost.

[JAB Creations]

Mozilla is not entirely technically "freeware" in the purest sense...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_con ... nd_Mozilla

As far as Mozilla and mpeg h.264 support, well as one web designer said about fancy fonts; they're great but we can't use them! If something can't effectively be used various alternative will inevitably arise. As far as patents are concerned it's a horridly abused system.

Since you're asking about a clientside related topic you are technically a web designer. Web developers work on serverside code. If you do both then you're technically both. I blame Microsoft for graying the lines between the terms.

Personally I'm sticking with XHTML 1.1 served as application/xhtml+xml and falling back to XHTML 1.0 Strict as text/html for non-XHTML browsers and using the object element. Unless you're designing a site that requires LAN-only access it's best to stick with an implementation that is backwards compatible.

[zcorpan]

I'm not entirely sure that this is the appropriate place to ask this questions since it is more generally related to browsers, but....

As a web developer, I'm concerned about how vague the <video> <audio> spec is on codecs.

The problem would not go away if the spec was less vague.

It seems as though we're approaching a polarized world where the biggest alternative browser, Firefox, is pushing Theora where everyone else is pushing H.264 (as indicated by Chrome and Safari).

Chrome supports both Theora and H.264.

My company has a significant number of videos that I'd like to offer, but not so much with the wait-and-see and apparently political/philosophical approach that Mozilla is taking with the lower-quality Theora.

I think Theora is getting better with regards to quality.

Mozilla has stated that they will not natively support H.264 since it is proprietary and not patent free, and yet Google Chrome is offering H.264 support out of the box for their own free browser. How can Chrome do this without incurring licensing fees for an H.264 decoder?

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatw ... 20035.html

[kepardue]

Chrome supports both Theora and H.264.

But it is quite apparent that youtube videos will be h.264. And, let's be honest, Youtube pretty much carries the Internet as far as video is concerned.

I think Theora is getting better with regards to quality.

But it will never and was never intended to match h.264.

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020035.html

Very interesting.

[zcorpan]

But it will never and was never intended to match h.264.

I don't think that is accurate.

I think you may be underestimating the potential that is still in Theora. As Monty described in this May update http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html, there are still many improvements to be made on the encoder, but Thusnelda has already improved heaps without using h264 techniques. I wouldn't give up on Theora and quality video yet.

-- http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatw ... 20259.html

Also, compare with gzip, which was originally intended to just be a free alternative to the patented 'compress'. But it ended up being better.

[ahagen]

Why not just offer the H.264 video in an object element, and then for fallback content have the same video in Theora format in another object element? That way users get the better video if they have support for it, but still get a video if they only have Theora support. You could have additional levels of fallback, too, such as for WMV or anything.

Windows 7 will have built-in support for H.264. I have tested Windows 7 beta. I believe it will be very popular. That would mean that a lot of your Firefox users will have access to H.264 in that way.

On the topic of XHTML 1.1, I seriously do not understand why people are so very intensely against serving it as text/html. First, it works. It just works. It validates at the W3C validator. The doctype has "html" in it:

Code: Select all

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">


I have never run into any problem serving XHTML 1.1 as text/html. Never a single problem. The only problem I've heard about is theoretical only. People, including very very smart people, say that "it's wrong." Yet, it does actually work. That's what matters to me. I only became interested in XHTML 1.1 because it seemed to be a more advanced form of HTML. I am not running XQuery against my XHTML pages or anything.

I don't understand the recent fuss about Chrome/Chromium possibly including code from ffmpeg. It's just LGPL code. Anything that broadens support for a variety of choices is going to be healthy for the web. Who cares if one browser gets an advantage that way? It's a free market. Competition is good.

[zcorpan]

Why not just offer the H.264 video in an object element, and then for fallback content have the same video in Theora format in another object element? That way users get the better video if they have support for it, but still get a video if they only have Theora support.

You can do this with <video> like so:

Code: Select all

<video>
<source src='foo.mp4'>
<source src='foo.ogv'>
<!-- fallback for legacy browsers here -->
</video>

You could have additional levels of fallback, too, such as for WMV or anything.

You can do that with <video>, too.

Windows 7 will have built-in support for H.264. I have tested Windows 7 beta. I believe it will be very popular. That would mean that a lot of your Firefox users will have access to H.264 in that way.

Firefox could integrate with directshow to make H.264 in Windows 7 work with <video> if they wanted to.

[kepardue]

I thought I read somewhere that the intent for the next version of Mozilla was support native platform backends so that it could play video using Quicktime, DirectShow, Gstreamer, etc. But that still puts us right where we were in the 1990's not being sure about what codecs people can view.

I'm quite a big open source/open standards advocate, but sometimes open standards aren't free. I don't care how much Theora is improved, if it doesn't have hardware acceleration support to help with encoding/decoding, it's not as likely to be seriously embraced in next generation devices. And since said next-generation devices already have hardware acceleration for H.264, it's unlikely that they're going to add *another* chip for decoding a non-modern video codec that has questionable quality. I don't care how free Theora is.

I actually think it's great that Google is bundling FFMPEG backend with Chrome, at least if that's their intention in the end. I just wonder if they're also paying the licensing fees for an H.264 decoder.

What will happen to FFMPEG and, more specifically, x264 come 2011 when the MPEG group starts demanding licensing fees? Will it just not be distributed into the United States?

Boy do we ever need patent reform.

[lyosha]

On the topic of XHTML 1.1, I seriously do not understand why people are so very intensely against serving it as text/html. First, it works. It just works. It validates at the W3C validator. The doctype has "html" in it:

Code: Select all

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">


This is totally off topic, but I'll bite. If you don't understand why it's discouraged to serve XHTML as HTML, it means you don't understand what XHTML is all about, not that your misunderstanding makes something automatically true or false.

It doesn't work to serve XHTML with a text/html mime type, it only works to serve HTML with a text/html mime type; that HTML can include a XHTML doctype and /> tag endings, but the agent does NOT treat it as XHTML, but as HTML. XHTML can do more than HTML (in a way); the only part that "works" is the part that is similar in HTML. Whatever is XHTML specific does NOT work with a text/html doctype.

I have never run into any problem serving XHTML 1.1 as text/html. Never a single problem. The only problem I've heard about is theoretical only. People, including very very smart people, say that "it's wrong." Yet, it does actually work. That's what matters to me. I only became interested in XHTML 1.1 because it seemed to be a more advanced form of HTML. I am not running XQuery against my XHTML pages or anything.

The problem isn't theoretical; XHTML's additional features are not HTML, and will not work when served as such.

True, XHTML does some things that HTML doesn't, but it is not a more advanced form of HTML; technically, it's not HTML at all. Also, "seemed to be" would suggest uncertainty. Serving HTML documents to a browser with an XHTML 1.1 doctype will make absolutely zero difference.

We could make a new topic if you want to discuss it further.

[JAB Creations]

One guy on one of my other favorite forums (:wink:) spent an entire day trying to figure out why Safari wasn't displaying a page "correctly" when all other browsers did. If he had served his page as application/xhtml+xml then he would have known to add a double quote and had his problem fixed in thirty seconds instead of 10 hours. Ah the power of standards!

[mskinner]

Enter a new contender...

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-supports-webm-video/
http://blog.chromium.org/2010/05/webm-and-vp8-land-in-chromium.html
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/19/open-web-open-video-and-webm/

[onlineconnect]

I thought this might help, the current H.264 codec license has been extended until the start of 2016.

source : http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000040-264.html

Mozilla CEO John Lilly still remains unconvinced tweeting "Regarding that MPEG LA announce: it's good they did it, but they sort of had to. But it's like 5 more years of free to lock you in 4ever"

Anyway thought this might be useful to the discussion.