Opera Adds Support for HTML5 Video Element

[Pallab]

  Quote

It seems that while we were busy celebrating, everyone at Opera Software were hard at work. Opera released a new Evenes (Opera 10.50) build earlier today. We featured the major changes in Opera 10.5 and benchmarked its JavaScript rendering speed, in earlier articles. Go through them if you want to catch up with what’s new in Opera 10.5.

The big new feature in the latest build is support for HTML5 video element. Opera had demonstrated the <video> element, as far back as 2007. Now, the feature has been integrated in a mainstream build. In the meantime Firefox, Safari and Chrome have also added support for native video playback.

Read More

Download Opera 10.5 for Windows, UNIXandMac

Opera Desktop Team

Opera Core Concerns: Reintroducing Video

Edited January 1, 2010 by Pallab

[fhpuqrgrpgvirzhpujbj]

The "Opera Button" is so ugly :x

[ArKeYa]

Is this a first for a browser to do?

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

  ArKeYa said:

Is this a first for a browser to do?

No, although it is strange it took them this long to do it (as the article says, they had shown work on this back in 2007)

[soldier1st]

  omnicoder said:

The "Opera Button" is so ugly :x

to you perhaps but the button is fine by me.

[Pallab]

  ArKeYa said:

Is this a first for a browser to do?

Nope. Opera was the first to demonstrate it (in a labs release).

But, Fx, Chrome and Safari have already added ?support for <video> element in their main builds.

  soldier1st said:

to you perhaps but the button is fine by me.

I wouldn't call it ugly, but there is definitely room for improvement. The FX button in the mockups look a lot prettier.

[Pc_Madness]

I presume its Ogg only? Hopefully people just start using Ogg instead of a variety of codecs. :\

[fhpuqrgrpgvirzhpujbj]

I think what bothers me (about the button) is that it's above the tabs, if it was in line with the tabs I think it would be nicer.

[bob21]

  Pc_Madness said:

I presume its Ogg only? Hopefully people just start using Ogg instead of a variety of codecs. :\

Going by the picture its h.264 , Hopefully people just start using h.264 instead of an obsolete codec from 0n2. :\

Otherwise talk about one giant leap backwards for streaming video :x

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

  bob21 said:

Going by the picture its h.264 , Hopefully people just start using h.264 instead of an obsolete codec from 0n2. :\

Otherwise talk about one giant leap backwards for streaming video :x

When the MPEG group release free access to the patents covering it, then I'm sure that will happen.

But until then there are legal reasons why people can't implement it.

[bob21]

Such as ? its a royalty free container and practically everything with a screen supports it already and they could always use directshow just like any other media player.

[Pallab]

  bob21 said:

Going by the picture its h.264 , Hopefully people just start using h.264 instead of an obsolete codec from 0n2. :\

Otherwise talk about one giant leap backwards for streaming video :x

Not. it is not H.264. From that article itself

  Quote

Opera will be supporting the open source Ogg formats: the Vorbis audio codec and the Theora video codec. Safari remains the only browser which is backing the proprietary H.264 codec. Additionally, Opera will be utilising the GStreamer media framework to ensure smooth playback.

[bob21]

Thats a shame, The outlook for HTML5 video just got a whole lot worse. I was hoping with the lack of definition of codecs in the standard the developers other browsers would use their brains and make the right choice leaving only firefox holding the web back.

Oh well back to flash and current gen codecs we go.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

  bob21 said:

Such as ? its a royalty free container and practically everything with a screen supports it already and they could always use directshow just like any other media player.

H.264 isn't royalty free, it costs money.

And there are more operating systems than Windows, what's Mozilla and Opera supposed to do on Linux systems or portable devices?

Edit: Google don't provide the H.264 decoder with the source code for Chrome, and 3rd party WebKit builds don't have it either.

[Pallab]

Is H.264 royalty free?

EDIT: Saw this just now

  The_Decryptor said:

H.264 isn't royalty free, it costs money.

And there are more operating systems than Windows, what's Mozilla and Opera supposed to do on Linux systems or portable devices?

Edit: Google don't provide the H.264 decoder with the source code for Chrome, and 3rd party WebKit builds don't have it either.

That's what I thought. Royalty considerations where what promoted Opera to originally vote against H.264.

[bob21]

  The_Decryptor said:

H.264 isn't royalty free, it costs money.

And there are more operating systems than Windows, what's Mozilla and Opera supposed to do on Linux systems or portable devices?

Edit: Google don't provide the H.264 decoder with the source code for Chrome, and 3rd party WebKit builds don't have it either.

The decoder most certainly is, And there are allready implementations for practically every operating system and device out there.

[Pc_Madness]

  bob21 said:

The decoder most certainly is, And there are allready implementations for practically every operating system and device out there.

But its not free to deliver content in H.264 I think? So for every view on Youtube Google will have to pay, or something. :\

[Syanide]

Running it on Linux. It looks like a bad Window port so far, but it's still so early and this is the first Linux build. I'm glad you can choose not to use the O button and have regular menus. As for speed, it's speedy alright, but it's too buggy for me to use.

[Lord Ba'al]

  The_Decryptor said:

H.264 isn't royalty free, it costs money.

Exactly, that's why Opera picked Ogg/Theora.

[Subject Delta]

I hope this build is a bit more stable than the current one.

[bob21]

  Lord Ba said:

Exactly, that's why Opera picked Ogg/Theora.

And as usual its the users that would suffer (if websites would swich) with a codec thats 7 years old with poorer compression/greater bandwidth use.

With Flash offering hardware acceleration in the next release (HTML will suffer from the exact same issues flash video suffered from before the release of the 10.2 player) , Codec confusion (Having to store two copies of the video) and now only Flash having access to current gen h.264 HTML5's Video tag is looking like a costly alternative to flash :pinch:

As someone whos been deploying both video and audio on the web IMO this is the last nail in the coffin for the HTML video tag, There simply is no reason to change and massive disadvantages for doing so.

Edited January 1, 2010 by bob21

[Cy-Kill]

  bob21 said:

And as usual its the users that would suffer (if websites would swich) with a codec thats 7 years old with poorer compression/greater bandwidth use.

With Flash offering hardware acceleration in the next release (HTML will suffer from the exact same issues flash video suffered from before the release of the 10.2 player) , Codec confusion (Having to store two copies of the video) and now only Flash having access to current gen h.264 HTML5's Video tag is looking like a costly alternative to flash :pinch:

As someone whos been deploying both video and audio on the web IMO this is the last nail in the coffin for the HTML video tag, There simply is no reason to change and massive disadvantages for doing so.

Theora is being actively worked on, there was a version released this past August, and also libtheora had a release in October, both are 2009 releases.

[bob21]

As are all codec's, Its not going to change the fact that its based off an ancient codec and Any website who wants to host video via the browser will have to have no less than three clones of the same video .

One encoded with On2 VP3, Another with ISO Standerd h.264/AAC And yet another in the flash player for IE

[Cy-Kill]

Here:

  Quote

History

Origin

VP3 was originally a proprietary and patented video codec developed by On2 Technologies. On2 TrueMotion VP3.1 was introduced in May 2000 followed three months later by the VP3.2 release.[10][11] Later that year, On2 announced VP3 plugins for QuickTime and RealPlayer.[12][13] In May 2001, On2 released the beta version of its new VP4 proprietary codec.[14][15] In June 2001, On2 also released a VP3 codec implementation for Microsoft Windows[16] where the encoder was priced at $39.95 for personal use, and $2,995 for limited commercial use.[17] In August 2001, On2 Technologies announced that they will be releasing an open source version of their VP3.2 video compression algorithm.[18][19] In September 2001 they published the source code and open source license for VP3.2 video compression algorithm at www.vp3.com.[20][21][22][23][24] The VP3.2 Public License 0.1 granted the right to modify the source code only if the resulting larger work continued to support playback of VP3.2 data.[20][21][25]

Move to free software

In March 2002, On2 altered licensing terms required to download the source code for VP3 to LGPL.[26] In June 2002 On2 donated VP3 to the Xiph.Org Foundation under a BSD-like open source license.[27][28][29] On2 also made an irrevocable, royalty-free license grant for any patent claims it might have over the software and any derivatives[2], allowing anyone to use any VP3-derived codec for any purpose.[8][30] In August 2002, On2 entered into an agreement with the Xiph.Org Foundation to make VP3 the basis of a new, free video codec, called Theora.[31] On2 declared Theora to be the successor in VP3's lineage. On October 3, 2002 On2 and Xiph announced the completion and availability of the initial Alpha code release of Theora (libtheora).[32] The libtheora reference implementation has reached its alpha 2 milestone on June 9, 2003[33] and alpha 3 on March 20, 2004.[34]

There is no formal specification for the VP3 bitstream format beyond the VP3 source code published by On2 Technologies. In 2003, Mike Melanson created an uncomplete description of the VP3 bitstream format and decoding process at a higher level than source code, with some help from On2 and Xiph.Org Foundation. The Theora specification adopted some portions of this VP3 description.[2][35]

Theora I Specification

Example of a Theora video used on Wikipedia, showing a Polikarpov I-15 biplane at an aerobatic display.The Theora I bitstream format was frozen in June 2004 after the libtheora 1.0alpha3 release.[1] Videos encoded with any version of the libtheora since the alpha3 will be compatible with any future player.[1][36] This is also true for videos encoded with any implementation of the Theora I specification since the format freeze. The Theora I Specification was completely published in 2004.[37] Any later changes in the specification are minor updates.

The Theora reference implementation libtheora spent several years in alpha and beta status.[36] The last alpha version was libtheora 1.0alpha7 released on June 20, 2006. It was followed by libtheora 1.0 beta1 on September 22, 2007. The last beta version was libtheora 1.0 beta3 released on April 16, 2008.[36] The first stable release of libtheora as version 1.0 was made in November 2008.[38][39] Work then focused on improving the codec performance in the "Thusnelda" branch, which was released as version 1.1 in September 2009 as the second stable libtheora release.[36][40] This release brought some technical improvements and new features, e.g. the new rate control module and the new two-pass rate control.

Theora is well established as a video format in open source applications, and as the format used for Wikipedia's video content. However, the proposed adoption of Theora as part of the baseline video support in HTML5 resulted in controversy.

[lucideer]

For anyone wondering about codec support in Opera (assuming it is limited to Ogg Theora only), Opera only implements the theora codec internally for licencing reasons, but they're using GStreamer which supports a whole host of codecs on *nix - so *nix users will get "native" support for a whatever codec they like, kind of.. "by accident".

As for Windows - GStreamer is *nix only currently but who knows what the future holds.

And as for following Apple down the h.264 route, the licencing issues there have already been enough to cause Google to be very actively looking at an alternative (3rd) option by buying out On2 - doesn't exactly bode well for the idea that h.264 is somehow a good idea.

Theora is in constant ongoing development - any current shortfalls are most likely due to the fact that there isn't much demand for an advanced, efficient Theora codec, and won't be until HTML5 video is widely implemented and in use.