33 replies to this topic

[rawr_boy81]

hdood, on 28 August 2010 - 16:23, said:

A decoder is already available in beta for Vista, but you're still not really getting it. Mozilla likely opposes it because they want the web and their product to be open and free and accessible to as many people as possible. H.264 is covered by patents in many parts of the world (meaning gstreamer could be illegal regardless of whether you are in the US or Norway.) It's okay to disagree with this position, but it's pretty obvious that it's what they care about. It's not that there is any technical obstacle.

Who said anything about bundling a h264 decoder? the decoder they would be using is the one included with the operating system - they're no less open or free by using a decoder bundled with the operating system than they are when they take advantage of the many proprietary API's that are included with Windows. Are you going to kick up a fuss because they take advantage of Direct2D/DirectWrite/DirectX? of course not, that would be ridiculous to do so. The issue at stake is a group of dogmatic programmers who would sooner screw over end users than swallow their dogmatic pride and provide what the end user requires. Btw, the issue of h264 should be the least of their worries when compared to CSS bugs that are over 10 years old and still not fixed.

[hdood]

rawr_boy81, on 29 August 2010 - 02:36, said:

Who said anything about bundling a h264 decoder? the decoder they would be using is the one included with the operating system - they're no less open or free by using a decoder bundled with the operating system than they are when they take advantage of the many proprietary API's that are included with Windows. Are you going to kick up a fuss because they take advantage of Direct2D/DirectWrite/DirectX? of course not, that would be ridiculous to do so.

The difference is that Windows APIs are not exposed to the internet (although Microsoft has tried.) HTML 5 is.

rawr_boy81, on 29 August 2010 - 02:36, said:

The issue at stake is a group of dogmatic programmers who would sooner screw over end users than swallow their dogmatic pride and provide what the end user requires.

Adopting H.264 and accepting it as the de facto standard for something that is supposed to be open and usable by all would also be screwing users, since only the big commercial players would be able to legally support it. Others would have to rely on illegal solutions that can't ship with the actual product. This seems to be what Mozilla cares about. It has nothing to do with the technical side of things, which seems to be the only thing you are capable of seeing.

[+M2Ys4U]

Still not enough. It's still patent encumbered, it's only the very last link in the chain (actually displaying the content on the end-users' devices) that's now gratis. Building decoders still costs.

This article explains it better than I can: http://blogs.compute...tions/index.htm

[PreKe]

Mephistopheles, on 26 August 2010 - 20:51, said:

MPEG LA Declares H.264 Standard Permanently Royalty-Free

It does not. This really changes nothing. You still have to pay in most cases.