I think by “Matroksa” you mean Matroska. Which is still a strange transcription of the Russian word but that’s how the format is called…

Anyway, great news!

1. Christopher Blizzard

   Yeah, sorry, just a late-night typo. Fixed!

   May 19th, 2010 at 10:07

in the IE9 catchup announcement, I’m wandering about the main sentence:

“IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows. ”

What does that really mean? They won’t ship IE with an open licensed codec? Why is that? What’s the stake? Why the bias?

Headline should read: Google Saves Firefox Video

Now we can all admit that Theora wasn’t going anywhere?

The open question is still whether IE will support this new format…

1. gunn

   who cares? if IE or safari cannot/will not support it, they will be left to rot and die and then rot some more. It’s only matter of time before Firefox and Chrome, with help from Opera completely cannibalize the browser market.

   May 19th, 2010 at 12:11

Don’t expect Safari until Apple can fully test what ramifications this will have on its platforms. They have something that works so they are in no hurry to switch it out with something that hasn’t been fully tested and fleshed out. I’d say give them a year, once everyone else irons out whatever kinks it might have.

Is Google indemnifying everyone using VP8 in case it is actually patent-encumbered?

Open Source != Unencumbered

IIRC Matroska is LGPL license and Mozilla can’t use MPL-incompatible licenses in official binaries. I remembered about Mozilla and libart problem.
How do you solve it?

I’d like to echo Ms2ger, where is the source?

And why no 64-bit version? Is it because libvpx does not compile on 64-bit?

best I found is this bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=566243

@Asa Dotzle

I agree this is a good thing. I don’t mean to rag on Mozilla so much. I do think that not finding some way to include h.264 was a pretty risky decision though, as the quality and popularity of Theora is something outside of Mozilla’s control.

In the end it looks like it might work out for the best; however, if Google hadn’t swooped in, they would have been in a position where *from the users perspective* IE9 would have had better quality, higher performance built in video than Firefox.

Keeping in mind that Firefox doesn’t come with Windows, it always has to fight an uphill battle by providing better features/speed/security to justify users going out and downloading it. IE can slip up, and fall behind for years and still maintain market share just because people who don’t know better will always use it, but a small gap on Firefox’s side in feature parity could be deadly.

“How Christopher flaps in the breezes”….

Something can be a “vast improvement” over something which is not noticeable to most people.

I’m one of the people who found Theora just fine, though I’m willing to admit it could be improved vastly–kind of like HDTV was over regular TV. Or maybe more analogously, an audio amplifier which went from supporting 19,000 Mhz frequencies to 25,000. Most won’t notice the difference, but it settles the concerns, even if they were considered of less importance by open video advocates.

I admire the people sticking up for principle here because if it had been a choice between HDTV controlled by a monopoly and regular TV under competition, I’d choose the latter. And having open video on the web where you get a greater choice of what to watch is even more important than for television.

So hats off to those bumping up the technical quality beyond an already quite workable format, and hats off to those ensuring it was going to be an open format.

Amazing how much struggle there has to be for something so obviously necessary as this…

1. David Oliver

   Spot on Brett.

   I see this as first and foremost a big step to securing an open base for video on the web. Quality is secondary to freedom.

   Hopefully with Google’s weight behind it, it will be defended from patent litigation and we’ll be able to build on open and available-to-anyone video from here. But I’m not sure how it works – would Google be the target or would MPEG-LA pick its targets from users of VP8 who publish content using the codec?

   May 20th, 2010 at 00:45

2. voracity

   Spot on, Brett.

   An immense amount of thanks to Mozilla for having the courage to act as the web’s conscience. And an equally immense amount of thanks to Google for doing something that most big companies would never have the principles or conviction to do.

   May 20th, 2010 at 05:16

3. papyromancer

   “Codecs don’t matter anymore, they’re so 2010”

   #openvideo FTW

   May 20th, 2010 at 17:22

here is one that works(on chrome)the other browser arent ready yet but they ll soon be!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ERrvGIpffk&webm=1

Very good news.

I’m a long-time Firefox user, but I’m abused by the fact Mozilla won’t admit problems until they’re solved. It was the same with memory issues with Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, for example: memory leak complaints were all denied until Firefox 3.0 fixed most of them. It starts like “There are no problems, it’s all in your head”, then “Hey, we fixed the bugs!!!”. Haha… It’s basically the same regarding Theora here: “It wasn’t so great after all”. That’s what it sounds like to me, at least.
Still, I can understand. It’s never good publicity to disparage your own product(s). I just thought this was kind of funny. But hey, it’s the same with Microsoft and IE, now they’re like “Hey, we love web standards!”, while you didn’t see them say “Fuck web standards, we ARE the web!” before (at least not that openly).

1. Ken Saunders

   Stifu, your last paragraph was hilarious. Truthful too.

   May 20th, 2010 at 23:32

ciao buon giornata e vi auguro tante cose vorreai avere contatti con i miei ex colleghi universitarie architetti antonino modica e massimigliano fardella magari potrete aiutarmi,vi ringrazio tanto e grazie. ciao a dopo.

Nothing is more frustrating then waiting to view a 2 min video that takes 5 mins to load up. keep up the good work guys.

YouTube’s WebM player is still buggy and switching from 360p quality to 720p sometimes doesn’t resume playback and I have to refresh the page several times. This has to be fixed. Works fine in Google Chrome.
Don’t know if this is a bug with the video support in Firefox or if Google needs to add code that deals with Firefox differently. Best case would be if the same code worked the same in all browsers. but even with HTML5 this isn’t the case.

When will the web be truly unified and universal?

WebM is a giant step *backwards*. Vorbis is a lossy audio format, so guess what, folks? All of you who worked your ass off to set the mics, amps, monitors, cables, boards, software and hardware just right to achieve the best *lossless* sound for your YouTube video, are about to have your work transcoded to this crappy “WebM” thing. I offer my most sincere condolences.

1. Aaron

   You have no idea how lossy works do you.

   Yes, a little data is lost. But what is lost is generally beyond human perception.

   And might I add, the other competing formats, H.264 and ogg are also lossy formats.
   Also, I might add that only on still images have a noticeable data loss. But as I said, it is not noticeable on ogg, webm, and h.264.

   January 24th, 2011 at 15:02