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Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (arstechnica)Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (arstechnica)Posted Mar 14, 2012 23:16 UTC (Wed) by etiennez (guest, #53056)Parent article: Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (ars technica)
"We will support decoding any video/audio format that is supported by existing decoders present on the system, including H.264 and MP3. There is really no justification to stop our users from using system decoders already on the device, so _we will not filter any formats_,"
What about poor security of random codecs installed in the system?
White list system decoding for h264/mp3 if you really should (h264 in <video> is still better than h264 in a flash blob), and continue to push vp8/vorbis as the supported formats by Mozilla.
For windows XP (and linux distro), just let websites interested in using h264 give instructions to theirs users to install a system decoder, I fail to see why Mozilla, who in principle oppose h264 for the web, should care.
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Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (arstechnica) Posted Mar 14, 2012 23:41 UTC (Wed) by rillian (subscriber, #11344) [Link]
This is addressed later in the Mozilla dev-platform thread. A number of people are in favour of strictly limiting the exposed decoders, for pretty much those reasons.
Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (arstechnica) Posted Mar 15, 2012 0:21 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
> For windows XP (and linux distro), just let websites interested in using h264 give instructions to theirs users to install a system decoder, I fail to see why Mozilla, who in principle oppose h264 for the web, should care.
Websites won't bother doing that; they'll just continue using Flash fallbacks like they do now, and people using Firefox won't get native HTML5 video. This represents one of the major reasons Mozilla now considers adding H.264: given a choice between <video> with a suboptimal codec and Flash with a suboptimal everything, adding H.264 would at least let people transition fully to <video>.
Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (arstechnica) Posted Mar 15, 2012 1:16 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
> Websites won't bother doing that; they'll just continue using Flash fallbacks like they do now, and people using Firefox won't get native HTML5 video.
No, they won't bother doing that, just like they don't bother supporting Linux now. They will just encode it in h264 and tell us Linux users (and the ever-diminishing XP users) to install Windows 8, 9, 2018, XLP, fhqwhgads, or whatever it's called. I mean, they don't care about us now, why would they buy Flash to start?
Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (arstechnica) Posted Mar 15, 2012 1:18 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
At least until the 4 or 9 or however many years the MPEG-LA said noncommerial streaming will remain free....
Ah, our sight. It is so darned short.
Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (arstechnica) Posted Mar 15, 2012 5:08 UTC (Thu) by keeperofdakeys (subscriber, #82635) [Link]
It wouldn't really benefit MPEG-LA to do this. If use of the codec is free (check), and use of the codec is wide spread (check), then it means makers of encoders/decoders have no choice but to pay the licensing fee, even if it is ridiculous. Being non-committal keeps their options open as well.
Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (arstechnica) Posted Mar 15, 2012 10:17 UTC (Thu) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] At least until the 4 or 9 or however many years the MPEG-LA said noncommerial streaming will remain free....I don't see how they can even charge for that. As long as the encoder that created the material is properly licensed they have no right on the content itself. Some jurisdictions seem to be completely off base.
Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (arstechnica) Posted Mar 15, 2012 20:27 UTC (Thu) by bawjaws (guest, #56952) [Link]
MPEG-LA committed to keep free-to-consumer web use free indefinitely after initially trying to keep their rent-seeking options open. It's one of the concessions Mozilla and Google won by taking their stance. Of course it just made it harder for them (just like linux on netbooks extended the life, and reduced the price, of XP) It doesn't really feel like a victory, but it is
See para 2 for details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_lice...
Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (arstechnica) Posted Mar 15, 2012 20:42 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
That "concession" just makes it easier for MPEG-LA to extort money from the developers of the software that supports H.264 for those end users. Because the end users don't see a cost (and because no sane system would allow such a cost to exist), the end users can adopt H.264 more widely, oblivious to the costs they impose on developers.
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