Mozilla reconsiders its stance on h.264 video codec


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Mozilla reconsiders its stance on h.264 video codec

Mozilla may be acquiescing when it comes to only supporting open and free standards, as it seems the popular h.264 video codec will soon be accessible on Mozilla'sBoot2Gecko project and Firefox for Android. Andreas Gal, Mozilla's director of research,outlined the plan that would allow mobile versions of it's open-source browsers to use h.264 when it's available via a device's operating system. Using the codec this way would allow the organization to avoid the $5 million in licensing fees that it would have to pay to include the h.264 within its browser.

Part of Mozilla's commitment to producing browsers is to use free, open, and unencumbered standards. As such, it had previously shirked h.264 for HTML5 video playback, instead putting its support behind Ogg Theora and later Google's WebM, hoping Google's industry clout would help drive the adoption of the new codec. However, Google has not followed through with its promise to take out h.264 support from Chrome in favor of WebM exclusively. Partially as a result of having support in Chrome (along with every other major web browser), h.264 has risen in popularity as the de facto encoding standard for web video.

This isn't the first time that Mozilla has had to examine whether gaining more compatibility is worth compromising its core values. The organization considered adopting CSS page rendering rules from WebKit for its mobile offerings, despite the fact that those rules are technically not part of the W3C standards.

With the rise in popularity of WebKit-specific CSS and h.264 ? technologies that don't necessarily jive with Mozilla's core values ? the organization is left with a difficult choice: adopt standards that it doesn't believe are conducive to supporting its vision for a free and open internet, or possibly be left behind.

Source: The Verge

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About time. The idea behind webm is nice, but I knew it wouldn't end up taking off. Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari support h.264 (chrome said they'd remove it, but that was just hogwash)

h.264 is a better codec, with better quality to filesize ratio,.

h.264 has broader hardware support.

h.264 is already commonly used.

Mozilla should just utilize the system decoders in win7/osx/linux (if appropriate gstreamer plugin is installed)

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It's a shame really, Google didn't follow through on their promise, and none of the hardware partners have either (At least I think none of them have).

WebM is still the most reliable format in this situation, but on some platforms Firefox would be able to decode H.264 as well (And Mozilla don't have to pay for it, or suffer from the patents, so it's a "win" for them).

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Now I see how this piece s*it (version 11) was fooling me. To make the hardware acceleration works "properly" it uses the NVIDIA Stereoscopic 3D driver. Piece of CRAP. The funny thing is that process nvSCPAPISvr.exe is wellknow as a fuc*kin trojan, which, replaces the original file with its own code. This is WHY I dont use ANY NVidia or any other STUPID service.

Now back to 3.x or OPERA, which WORKS better, startup FASTER and DONT use ANY stupid service.

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Now I see how this piece s*it (version 11) was fooling me. To make the hardware acceleration works "properly" it uses the NVIDIA Stereoscopic 3D driver. Piece of CRAP. The funny thing is that process nvSCPAPISvr.exe is wellknow as a fuc*kin trojan, which, replaces the original file with its own code. This is WHY I dont use ANY NVidia or any other STUPID service.

Now back to 3.x or OPERA, which WORKS better, startup FASTER and DONT use ANY stupid service.

Drugs are bad... Mm'kay ?

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Now I see how this piece s*it (version 11) was fooling me. To make the hardware acceleration works "properly" it uses the NVIDIA Stereoscopic 3D driver. Piece of CRAP. The funny thing is that process nvSCPAPISvr.exe is wellknow as a fuc*kin trojan, which, replaces the original file with its own code. This is WHY I dont use ANY NVidia or any other STUPID service.

Now back to 3.x or OPERA, which WORKS better, startup FASTER and DONT use ANY stupid service.

Step away from the internet. :|

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The interesting thing here is it's possible Mozilla are doing this as a test as such, with the potential to do the same thing later on the desktop. With Windows 7+ and Mac OS X including H.264 and AAC codecs, it's possible to develop Firefox so that it uses the built in system decoders in the same way they are planning for mobile. The only major issue with the desktop which I imagine is what is putting them off so far is that on the Windows side of things it requires at least 7, which isn't ideal as Firefox of course supports older versions.

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The only major issue with the desktop which I imagine is what is putting them off so far is that on the Windows side of things it requires at least 7, which isn't ideal as Firefox of course supports older versions.

Can't they just detect what OS version they are on, and only provide support for it on Windows 7+? Shouldn't be too difficult.

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Can't they just detect what OS version they are on, and only provide support for it on Windows 7+? Shouldn't be too difficult.

Of course they could, but the issue is I imagine they want to provide a consistant experience on all versions of Windows, for both users and developers.

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Of course they could, but the issue is I imagine they want to provide a consistant experience on all versions of Windows, for both users and developers.

This.

It's their philosophy not to customize too much for OS [or versions of it].

Glassed Silver:mac

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Proprietary video codecs FTW but Flash needs to go. It's funny how that hypocrisy works. Not to mention that H.264 group will start charging in a few years so it's not even going to be free.

Here's to the "open" web.

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  • 1 year later...

Proprietary video codecs FTW but Flash needs to go. It's funny how that hypocrisy works. Not to mention that H.264 group will start charging in a few years so it's not even going to be free.

Here's to the "open" web.

No quality standards FTW. WebM is late to the party, everything already uses h.264, every tv and decode and BD player and so on supports it, every video website uses it already and so on it's already there, it's to late for WebM. ad in that WebM is worse quality, worse file size and slower to encode/decode.

As for paying, no, the license runs out, that doesn't mean it won't be renewed, and it won't affect computer users as such. the people it affects are already affected today.

so there is no hypocrisy.

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No quality standards FTW. WebM is late to the party, everything already uses h.264, every tv and decode and BD player and so on supports it, every video website uses it already and so on it's already there, it's to late for WebM. ad in that WebM is worse quality, worse file size and slower to encode/decode.

As for paying, no, the license runs out, that doesn't mean it won't be renewed, and it won't affect computer users as such. the people it affects are already affected today.

so there is no hypocrisy.

Why did you res a 13 month old topic just to say that?

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As for paying, no, the license runs out, that doesn't mean it won't be renewed, and it won't affect computer users as such. the people it affects are already affected today.

Of course it affects users and people using it.. when h.264 licensing kicks in (they extended free use until 2016) everyone who encodes anything with it after that will have to pay a license based on the number of views and some other metrics.. and it will cost an arm and a leg when put into context.

How do you think this will affect everyone (users).. Content will be either unavailable and will not be free anymore. and yeah, with BDs, you have been ripped off and been paying this license for a quite a while now as a user.

Mozilla went with h.264 at their own peril. They said this exact thing I noted here. But they've decided to risk it because you couldn't view h.264 content in their browser.

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With h265 right around the corner, and having the same quality has h264 at half the bandwidth (twice the compression) requirement, I can see a push for it.

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Why did you res a 13 month old topic just to say that?

I'm guessing there was another post in between there when I replied that has since been removed, since I exclusively browse the forum using new content.

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