"- But I could just download gst-plugins-ugly and I'd be OK. - That's a selfish attitude. Everyone should be able to browse the Web with a free software stack without having to jump through arcane hoops to download and install software (whose use is legally questionable)."<p>I'll tell you what's selfish: going out of your way to cripple the experience of your users just so your extremist ideological views can prevail (and they won't anyway).<p>I don't think the deliberate weakening of the #1 open-source browser over such trivial matters is a win either, ideological or otherwise.<p>I love Firefox and I hope this sorry state of affairs will be quickly resolved sensibly before irrecoverable damage has been done.<p></opiniated>
Mozilla's decision to push for Ogg seems like a classic programmer's response. They're attempting to solve the problem with an <i>engineering</i> solution.<p>Unfortunately, this won't be enough. If Mozilla want to usurp H.264, they'll either need a huge market share or budget (which they don't have) or technological superiority over H.264 (I don't think this is the case either). They're also fighting against Apple, who want H.264 to succeed.
There was a recent HN post on this topic that garnered a lot of discussion:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070780" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070780</a><p>This new blog-post from Robert O'Callahan (one of the Mozilla developers who worked on the <video> element) explains Mozilla's position much better than anyone in the HN thread did, touching on things like patent licensing, using GStreamer, and idealism.
Since 2004, Mozilla has had baked-in support for automatically installing Flash on the first encounter if the plugin is not found. A nice little yellow infobar pops down (a brilliant UI innovation), prompting you to install it with a few clicks, even without root access on both Windows and Linux.<p>They've also recently implemented automatic update checking for Flash. Since it's their biggest security hole, they throw up a big nasty "update now" warning on launch if you're using a known-vulnerable version.<p>Mozilla initially distributed the Flash binaries under license themselves via addons.mozilla.org -- I'm not sure if they still do so.<p>Flash is shitty, nonredistributable, closed-source, restricted-platform, proprietary, and patented but they're willing to go to great lengths to help their users use it. Why not do the same thing for ffmpeg, which is merely patented?
Other issues aside, I don’t understand why supporting a proprietary Flash plugin from a single vendor is better than opening support for a standardized (albeit similarly patent-encumbered) video format with open-source implementations.
From the article: <i>It pushes the software freedom issues from the browser (where we have leverage to possibly change the codec situation)</i><p>This is what it's all really about: trying to use Mozilla's leverage to foist an unpopular and inferior technology on an unwilling web. Remind you of the antics of any other company with a popular browser?<p>Power corrupts. Thank god Firefox doesn't have the same market share as IE did. Webkit ftw, here.
The discussion I've seen surrounding the issue is mostly centered around the user (browser) and video quality. The thing that most stuck out to me from the post, buried in the end, was the (potential) restrictions that could be placed on creating h.264 content and publishing it on the web. I think that this is the biggest relevant issue I've seen yet with h.264. Apparently these issues are still potential and still under wraps, but I would not be in favor of effective restrictions on including the <video> tag in a website.
Sorry for being very off-topic, but that three-column layout (or more in higher res?) of the text makes it hard for me to read. Resizing also makes me lose where I was reading.<p>Sorry, again.
Once google completes its merger with On2 (February), we'll get free and open video codec for free on youtube. Firefox and chrome will include it. This is why I think we'll never get Theora on youtube, but all hope is not lost thanks to vp7 or whatever they end up calling it.
With all the discussion going on, I was looking for a comparison of the codecs and found this website: <a href="http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html" rel="nofollow">http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html</a><p>If you ask me, the h264 vs ogv versions were not that different at the same bit-rates (sure, maybe a little). My point is, I'd really like to see more actual data before we enter endless discussions and most of us don't know what's actually talked about.
He touched a very important point. Many people do not realize that GPL and LPGL are fundamentally incompatible with patents (intentionally) and that in many cases it is a ticking bomb.<p>When he writes "The software license permits you to redistribute and use the code, but the MPEG-LA can still stop you", he means section 7 of the GPL (2.0). I think many people who use the GPL for their software do not realize that later on a single company (patent holder) can stop the redistribution of that software.
This is idotic. By <i>not</i> supporting h.264 and <i>not</i> getting in trouble if and when MPEG-LA decides to cease and desist, they are making it much easier for h.264 to become completely ingrained because h.264 is what works NOW and it is what is widely supported NOW. Why? Who among the vast majority of blithering idiots in the world knows or cares about the patent issues with h.264? Outside of Hacker News and the Mozilla corporation, I'd put that number at just about nil.<p>Yo, has anyone started work on a Mozilla fork that <i>does</i> support h.264 either through native support or plugins?<p>edit: Also, if no one <i>does</i> sue, then the whole thing will have been simply an exercise in idiocy.
If one were to create an open-source "proxy extension" for Firefox to shim H264 support via proprietary binary blobs dynamically loaded into the proxy, how do you think that would go?
Well, if Bilski goes our way, then this whole issue is mute, right? Or are there some other restrictions on the codec?<p>I agree that OGV is pretty much Mozilla's only option for now.