Windows Firefox stiffs Adobe Flash, plays H.264 YouTube vids Users of the Firefox web browser on Windows can now dump Adobe Flash and still watch H.264-encoded videos online. Fresh overnight builds of Firefox 20 will now play footage found on HTML5 websites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, that use the patent-encumbered video codec - without the need for Adobe's oft-criticised plugin, which …
H.264 is the work of Microsoft, Apple and others, and is licensed through the MPEG-LA patent pool; Google bought VP8 in 2009 as WebM from On2 Technologies for $124.6m and released it under a royalty-free licence in May 2010.
So how does this work?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/21/motorola_microsoft_trial_google_demand/
No, Apples involvement is that Quicktime 4 was used as a study example to form MPEG4.
That might make Apple free from royalties to use MPEG4, but It's not their work. I guess they also lended some of their patents to the pool.
But still not their work. Apple has just supported real standards very well, not only MPEG.
I'm glad to see that the firefox team get their act together and start using system components instead of always have a political agenda.
MPEG4 is a standard that ISO/IEC govern with their Moving Picture Experts Group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpeg
Until any other standard arrives following MPEG is the only correct way to go.
One thing I don't understand, why pirates continue to convert the material they want to share to something else than mpeg4. As that is the format/containers the original source had from the very beginning. Kind of stupid but what would you expect.
"One thing I don't understand, why pirates continue to convert the material they want to share to something else than mpeg4. As that is the format/containers the original source had from the very beginning. Kind of stupid but what would you expect."
there are **lots** of other codecs that devs love much more, that compile better, cheaper, etc, etc... NO that means **in their mind**, mostly.. :/ if you d/l a lot of *non-youtube* vid, go check how many are the above...
I find FLV (using AVC / AAC) is the most prevalent, followed by WMV and AVI.. but some are just renamed!!! get 'mediainfo' for the real story!! :)
this link also shows FLV uses most of the codecs talked about here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video#Encoding
see this for the problem about 'to many standards' ... :/
http://xkcd.com/927/
a list of the 26 companies that have added their patents to the pool, with a number that represents how many patents have been contributed by each one:
Panasonic Corporation (377)
LG Electronics Inc. (198)
Toshiba Corporation (137)
Fraunhofer‐Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. (82)
Microsoft Corporation (65)
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (57)
Sharp Corporation (54)
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (42)
Sony Corporation (29)
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (18)
Fujitsu Limited (16)
The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York (9)
NTT DOCOMO, INC. (9)
Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation (7)
France Télécom, société anonyme (7)
Robert Bosch GmbH (5)
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (4)
Scientific‐Atlanta Vancouver Company† (4)
Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (3)
Hitachi, Ltd (2)
Victor Company of Japan, Limited (2)
DAEWOO Electronics Corporation (2)
Siemens AG (2)
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (2)
Apple Inc. (1)
Sedna Patent Services, LLC (1)
That is a veritable who's who of the consumer electronics industry, with Microsoft prominently represented.
Agreed, the hardware needs to catch up. But Google seem to have missed a trick, they control Android, so why didn't they build the video RECORDING, as well as playback, on Android around WebM? That would have sent a strong message and maybe have given WebM the kickstart it needed...
VP8 is going nowhere — that was true in 2010 and its true now. There's no real incentive for hardware acceleration so there mostly isn't any hardware acceleration. You can't wrap VP8 in Flash (other than with an in-Flash software decoder) so there's no easy transitional compatibility. 99% of computer users already have a paid licence for H.264 that came with the OS (Wimdows, Mac, iOS) or the hardware (Android). Even if they didn't, it's currently free to implement for browsers and if VP8 were to make any headway then the MPEG-LA could just make it free for that use permanently. Given that its also the Bluray, etc, standard, it'll probably always have better tools.
From the dirtier side of the business, the MPEG-LA has 18 companies that claim to have patents covering VP8, also available as insurance. That's probably just sabre rattling but you shouldn't bet your company on it.
If Google switched off H.264 on YouTube it'd just cut off most of the audience — such as anyone using Flash — and therefore most of Google's money.
"From the dirtier side of the business, the MPEG-LA has 18 companies that claim to have patents covering VP8, also available as insurance. That's probably just sabre rattling but you shouldn't bet your company on it."
But they haven't pushed Google itself on it. Maybe that's because there are potentially a number of On2 patents that MPEG-LA is breaching, and Google has both provided legal coverage for potential patent violations involving WebM and told MPEG-LA it has ammunition, too. IOW, MPEG-LA may be smart enough not to push Google into starting a patent war.
@Charles9
MPEG-LA doesn't infringe anyone's patents because they don't make or sell anything except licenses. I believe that they don't even sue people for infringement as that is left to the patent owners. Of course Google may have patents from On2 on H.264 in addition to those from Motorola (already being asserted against MS) but it may be there are limits on what they can demand as H.264 licensees (see ongoing lawsuit coverage).
There is then the question whether Google has a strong enough patent range OR other commercial incentives (such as "you can make the next Nexus and have early access to the next Android version" or just here is some cash) to prevent lawsuits from anyone with sufficiently strong patents.
I'm also not sure if an H.264 licensee gets the rights to implement the technology in non-H.264 codecs. It might be that many of the tempting targets are already licensed through the H.264 license although I haven't looked into it.
I have yet to see tests showing that VP8 is more efficient than H.264. Would you rather pay your regional telco monopoly more money for more bandwidth?
Efficient codecs that play at 60 fps are REALLY hard. That kind of research is not within the realm of your average open source developer.
Google appears to be intentionally borking html video on YouTube, playback is worse on the desktop, they don't full screen properly on mobile unless it's embedded somewhere else, videos that play h264 on mobile require flash on the desktop etc. while Vimeo, who seem small fry in terms of engineering talent compared with Google manage just fine.
Shunning h264 was stupid and flew in the face of reality. Proper native support for h264 negates the need to use Flash in a lot of cases, and hopefully might be the final nail in its coffin for regular web use.
That said, whatever replaces Flash be it standards based or not is extremely unlikely to have better performance than Flash. E.g. html+JS+canvase would run in the context of the web page, competing with the rest of the content in a single thread and would therefore drag down rendering far more than Flash ever did.
Both Silverlight and WinRT HTML5 + JS perform better than Flash.
(I still get a line across both monitors when I start anything flash).
Flash streaming is awful.
(I can stream from Usenet at 1080p extracting on the fly better than I can with flash).
It isn't my connection (Flash was tested using Youtube - Google has the bandwidth).
What makes you say that? Used it since the beta, and while admittedly the first few versions were a bit slow, these days it's a great browser. Flash got added in, the browser sped up, they redesigned the UI (though personally I liked the old one) and sorted out a number of other issues. It's a luvverly piece of kit.
I have never had a problem with flash on any of my many devices, and i dont know anyone who has on any of theirs either. Video streaming,games etc always run fine.
Is it just the Apple users that see flash as the great satan and slag it off, or have i, and everyone i know just been very lucky in our device choices?
The html 5 alternative sounds like an awkward hodgepodge of different elements and scripts rather than a single unified player that looks the same across all devices.
Dont get me wrong, native h264 playing is a good development, and i applaud mozilla for doing this, but i fear that replacing flash with html 5 on the web in general will be a downgrade in many cases (can you do complex games in html 5?).
This is so damned depressing. We were very close to releasing ourselves from the damned proprietary lock-in propagated by the payware operating system vendors - Microsoft and Apple and backed up by the patent troll MPEG-LA - but now Firefox capitulates and backs proprietary lock in as a WEB STANDARD! That means we bake the need to pay these leeches into the very fabric of the web. A horrid Christmas present if there ever was one.
Google was too late to the party. Too many mobiles on the market only have hardware H.264 support and aren't going anywhere. And that's where a growing amount of Internet traffic is coming from. And while newer devices can do WebM in software, the older phones will be SOL. IOW, Google would be ticking off a lot of people by going WebM only. They're bending the rules because they have no choice: they've discovered the format wars were decided before they ever entered the game.
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