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lundi, février 1 2010

<video>, H.264, Theora, Firefox and patents

Par Laurent Desgrange le lundi, février 1 2010, 22:00

Some quick thoughts…

In HTML5 there is is new video tag allowing to embed a video in a web page as we do for a picture. As for the img tag (for pictures), the W3C (who defines HTML) does not say which format should be used for the content itself. So in a img tag you can put PNG, BMP, JPEG, GIF… whatever you want, as soon as it is recognized by web browsers.

Internet Explorer does not support video, Firefox supports it but reads only videos encoded in the Theora format, Chrome and Safari support the tag but read only H.264 encoded videos.

Technically, for the moment H.264 seems to be better than Theora. But Theora is an open format while H.264 is crippled with patents and using it requires paying huge royalties (depends of what kind of license but some people are talking about 5 million dollars).

I don’t remember seeing any “official” position from Mozilla why they do not support H.264 in Firefox, but from people working at Mozilla, they usually provide good arguments like:

  • the web is based on open, free and patent-free standards (this is very important, changing that will fragment the web)
  • they would prefer doing more useful stuff with 5 M$ than paying for a codec
  • supporting H.264 is not a good idea since it will be valid only for the version distributed by Mozilla, not the one embedded in your Linux distribution for example

I completely agree with that.

I wonder why lots of people on the internet would like Mozilla to support H.264 while they don’t ask Google and Apple to support Theora. For images, they are all able to read different formats, while should they be limited to only one video format? Google and Apple have nothing to pay in order to support Theora (except their developers to include it).

The other thing, why MPEG LA (licensing H.264) does not make H.264 a patent/royalty-free codec? OK, because MPEG LA was created to collect fees for patents covering MPEG technologies.

And the nasty idea, why Mozilla does not make a Firefox Europe Edition? In Europe, software patents are not allowed (kind of, it’s not really clear, it looks like quite often software patents are granted while they are not respecting european legislation). Doing a Firefox version including H.264 but distributed only in countries that do not allow software patents could be interesting. First in Europe, it may clarify what the status of software patents is, then it will hassle the MPEG LA and finally it may show to the US and US companies that they are not dominating the world and imposing their rules everywhere (and maybe make them change their patents laws (yes, sometimes I’m overly optimistic ;-))).

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lundi, juin 15 2009

Killing Flash

Par Laurent Desgrange le lundi, juin 15 2009, 22:00

No, not that one:

flash_character.jpg (Photo from Cryptonaut used under CC license)

I'm talking about Adobe's Flash.

Like a lot of people, I don't like that technology at all (for building internet websites). It's a proprietary software with all the usual drawbacks (you don't know what the software does, you are not allowed to find out what it does, you can't use an alternative software for playing Flash content, you are tight to Adobe's fate…). You should know that Flash is installed on something like 99% of computers, much more than Microsoft Windows, so it's a very interesting target for pirates, a security flaw in Flash player (and it already happens) is a very good opportunity for a cross-platform virus/malware.

So it has nothing to do on an open web. Read more about this in this article: When you see Flash, duck and cover.

But unfortunately, Flash is used a lot, especially for playing audio and video on a website. Have a look at Youtube or Dailymotion.

Even on my blog I have used it for playing videos and songs (for instance in my Roomba and OpenBSD posts).

For a long time I was hearing about new "audio" and "video" tags in HTML 5 specifications. Sounds interesting for building websites using open standards and not depending on Adobe's Flash anymore for this usage.

Those of you knowing a bit the world of video/audio codecs may wonder how we can have an "open standard" about audio and video. In fact codecs are crippled with patents (a lot of them). Even on HTML 5 specs it's written that the codecs situation is problematic.

So replacing a closed proprietary technology with patented codecs is not really an improvement.

You might be interesting reading why we need open video.

Fortunately, there are some good open source, patent free codecs. On xiph.org you can find ogg multimedia container, the vorbis audio codec and the theora video codec. Vorbis and theora are high quality codecs, but yes, you can find better video codecs than theora, but they all use some patented algorithms.

Few weeks ago mozilla released a beta version of Firefox handling those new tags for vorbis and theora content. One of the most used web browser will now be able to play videos that way. The question is "Will people (webmasters) use this technology?". The answer seems to be "YES".

Dailymotion is trying a version of its website using the new HTML5 tags and vorbis and theora codecs. If you have installed Firefox 3.5, you can try it on Dailymotion demo video or even using Dailymotion openvideo website.

This is very good news for web's future.

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jeudi, mars 12 2009

Stop IE6

Par Laurent Desgrange le jeudi, mars 12 2009, 23:00

As you know, the web is based on standards, those standards give us the ability to access all the data on the web whatever our browser and/or operating system are.

But Microsoft didn't care much about web standards when they were building their own web browser: internet explorer. IE had more than 90 % market shares for a long time but nowadays it's less than 70 %, because of new browsers (more secure, faster, more standard compliant, etc.).

So Microsoft updated it's web browser with IE 7, which is a bit more standard compliant but far away compared to other browsers like Chrome, Konqueror, Firefox, Opera or Safari.

Unfortunately, lots of web sites were developed to be usable with IE 6 (which still have nearly 18 % market share), and IE 6 is so buggy that's a real pain to have a good website being usable with IE 6.

Web standards give us the power to create wonderful websites, web applications, but we usually can't because we have to take IE 6 users in account.

The content of my blog should not attract IE users ;-) but here are the usage:

  • Firefox: 52 %
  • IE: 21 % (IE 6: 45 %, IE 7: 50 %)
  • Safari: 10%

Somebody had the great idea to start a campaign against IE 6 (I hope, if the goal is met, he is going to create a new campaign for IE 7 which is not a lot better):

stopie6.jpg

The goal is obviously to wipe out IE 6 by telling people still using IE 6 (or older!) to switch to a newer browser (you can add a little script on your website warning IE 6 users that they should update their browser).

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