Video, Mobile, and the Open Web

[Also posted at brendaneich.com.]

I wrote The Open Web and Its Adversaries just over five years ago, based on the first SXSW Browser Wars panel (we just had our fifth, it was great — thanks to all who came).

Some history

The little slideshow I presented is in part quaint. WPF/E and Adobe Apollo, remember those? (Either the code names, or the extant renamed products?) The Web has come a long way since 2007.

But other parts of my slideshow are still relevant, in particular the part where Mozilla and Opera committed to an unencumbered <video> element for HTML5:

Working with Opera via WHATWG on <video>
- Unencumbered Ogg Theora decoder in all browsers
- Ogg Vorbis for <audio>
- Other formats possible
- DHTML player controls

We did what we said we would. We fought against the odds. We carried the unencumbered HTML5 <video> torch even when it burned our hands.

We were called naive (no) idealists (yes). We were told that we were rolling a large stone up a tall hill (and how!). We were told that we could never overcome the momentum behind H.264 (possibly true, but Mozilla was not about to give up and pay off the patent rentiers).

Then in 2009 Google announced that it would acquire On2 (completed in 2010), and Opera and Mozilla had a White Knight.

At Google I/O in May 2010, Adobe announced that it would include VP8 (but not all of WebM?) support in an upcoming Flash release.

On January 11, 2011, Mike Jazayeri of Google blogged:

… we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

These changes will occur in the next couple months….

A followup post three days later confirmed that Chrome would rely on Flash fallback to play H.264 video.

Where we are today

It is now March 2012 and the changes promised by Google and Adobe have not been made.

What’s more, any such changes are irrelevant if made only on desktop Chrome — not on Google’s mobile browsers for Android — because authors typically do not encode twice (once in H.264, once in WebM), they instead write Flash fallback in an <object> tag nested inside the <video> tag. Here’s an example adapted from an Opera developer document:

<video controls poster="video.jpg" width="854" height="480">
 <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4">
 <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="player.swf"
         width="854" height="504">
  <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true">
  <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always">
  <param name="flashvars" value="file=video.mp4">
  <!--[if IE]><param name="movie" value="player.swf"><![endif]-->
  <img src="video.jpg" width="854" height="480" alt="Video">
  <p>Your browser can't play HTML5 video.
 </object>
</video>

The Opera doc nicely carried the unencumbered video torch by including

 <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm">

after the first <source> child in the <video> container (after the first, because of an iOS WebKit bug, the Opera doc said), but most authors do not encode twice and host two versions of their video (yes, you who do are to be commended; please don’t spam my blog with comments, you’re not typical — and YouTube is neither typical nor yet completely transcoded [1]).

Of course the ultimate fallback content could be a link to a video to download and view in a helper app, but that’s not “HTML5 video” and it is user-hostile (profoundly so on mobile). Flash fallback does manage to blend in with HTML5, modulo the loss of expressiveness afforded by DHTML playback controls.

Now, consider carefully where we are today.

Firefox supports only unencumbered formats from Gecko’s <video> implementation. We rely on Flash fallback that authors invariably write, as shown above. Let that sink in: we, Mozilla, rely on Flash to implement H.264 for Firefox users.

Adobe has announced that it will not develop Flash on mobile devices.

In spite of the early 2011 Google blog post, desktop Chrome still supports H.264 from <video>. Even if it were to drop that support, desktop Chrome has a custom patched Flash embedding, so the fallback shown above will work well for almost all users.

Mobile matters most

Android stock browsers (all Android versions), and Chrome on Android 4, all support H.264 from <video>. Given the devices that Android has targeted over its existence, where H.264 hardware decoding is by far the most power-efficient way to decode, how could this be otherwise? Google has to compete with Apple on mobile.

Steve Jobs may have dealt the death-blow to Flash on mobile, but he also championed and invested in H.264, and asserted that “[a]ll video codecs are covered by patents”. Apple sells a lot of H.264-supporting hardware. That hardware in general, and specifically in video playback quality, is the gold standard.

Google is in my opinion not going to ship mobile browsers this year or next that fail to play H.264 content that Apple plays perfectly. Whatever happens in the very long run, Mozilla can’t wait for such an event. Don’t ask Google why they bought On2 but failed to push WebM to the exclusion of H.264 on Android. The question answers itself.

So even if desktop Chrome drops H.264 support, Chrome users almost to a person won’t notice, thanks to Flash fallback. And Apple and Google, along with Microsoft and whomever else might try to gain mobile market share, will continue to ship H.264 support on all their mobile OSes and devices — hardware-implemented H.264, because that uses far less battery than alternative decoders.

Here is a chart of H.264 video in HTML5 content on the Web from MeFeedia:

And here are some charts showing the rise of mobile over desktop from The Economist:

These charts show Bell’s Law of Computer Classes in action. Bell’s Law predicts that the new class of computing devices will replace older ones.

In the face of this shift, Mozilla must advance its mission to serve users above all other agendas, and to keep the Web — including the “Mobile Web” — open, interoperable, and evolving.

What Mozilla is doing

We have successfully launched Boot to Gecko (B2G) and we’re preparing to release a new and improved Firefox for Android, to carry our mission to mobile users.

What should we do about H.264?

Andreas Gal proposes to use OS- and hardware-based H.264 decoding capabilities on Android and B2G. That thread has run to over 240 messages, and spawned some online media coverage.

Some say we should hold out longer for someone (Google? Adobe?) to change something to advance WebM over H.264.

Remember, dropping H.264 from <video> only on desktop and not on mobile doesn’t matter, because of Flash fallback.

Others say we should hold out indefinitely and by ourselves, rather than integrate OS decoders for encumbered video.

I’ve heard people blame software patents. I hate software patents too, but software isn’t even the issue on mobile. Fairly dedicated DSP hardware takes in bits and puts out pixels. H.264 decoding lives completely in hardware now.

Yes, some hardware also supports WebM decoding, or will soon. Too little, too late for HTML5 <video> as deployed and consumed this year or (for shipping devices) next.

As I wrote in the newsgroup thread, Mozilla has never ignored users or market share. We do not care only about market share, but ignoring usability and market share can easily lead to extinction. Without users our mission is meaningless and our ability to affect the evolution of open standards goes to zero.

Clearly we have principles that prohibit us from abusing users for any end (e.g., by putting ads in Firefox’s user interface to make money to sustain ourselves). But we have never rejected encumbered formats handled by plugins, and OS-dependent H.264 decoding is not different in kind from Flash-dependent H.264 decoding in my view.

We will not require anyone to pay for Firefox. We will not burden our downstream source redistributors with royalty fees. We may have to continue to fall back on Flash on some desktop OSes. I’ll write more when I know more about desktop H.264, specifically on Windows XP.

What I do know for certain is this: H.264 is absolutely required right now to compete on mobile. I do not believe that we can reject H.264 content in Firefox on Android or in B2G and survive the shift to mobile.

Losing a battle is a bitter experience. I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives. Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance. So I am fully in favor of Andreas’s proposal.

Our mission continues

Our mission, to promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Web, matters more than ever. As I said at SXSW in 2007, it obligates us to develop and promote unencumbered video. We lost one battle, but the war goes on. We will always push for open, unencumbered standards first and foremost.

In particular we must fight to keep WebRTC unencumbered. Mozilla and Opera also lost the earlier skirmish to mandate an unencumbered default format for HTML5 <video>, but WebRTC is a new front in the long war for an open and unencumbered Web.

We are researching downloadable JS decoders via Broadway.js, but fully utilizing parallel and dedicated hardware from JS for battery-friendly decoding is a ways off.

Can we win the long war? I don’t know if we’ll see a final victory, but we must fight on. Patents expire (remember the LZW patent?). They can be invalidated. (Netscape paid to do this to certain obnoxious patents, based on prior art.) They can be worked around. And patent law can be reformed.

Mozilla is here for the long haul. We will never give up, never surrender.

/be

[1] Some points about WebM on YouTube vs. H.264:

Google has at best transcoded only about half the videos into WebM. E.g., this YouTube search for “cat” gives ~1.8M results, while the same one for WebM videos gives 704K results.
WebM on YouTube is presented only for videos that lack ads, which is a shrinking number on YouTube. Anything monetizable (i.e., popular) has ads and therefore is served as H.264.
All this is moot when you consider mobile, since there is no Flash on mobile, and as of yet no WebM hardware, and Apple’s market-leading position.

144 comments

Matthew Case

I always favor pragmatism over dogma. The statements “We do not care only about market share, but ignoring usability and market share can easily lead to extinction. Without users our mission is meaningless and our ability to affect the evolution of open standards goes to zero.” is very poignant and true. You have to pick and choose your battles in order to win the war. Zealotry will just lead to being ignored and then all of your hopes, dreams and planning will be for nothing.

March 19th, 2012 at 07:49
Nanashi

Mozilla, I’ve always supported you over competitors because I thought you took a principled stance for the web.

You’re dead to me.

March 19th, 2012 at 08:04
1. Ferdinand
  
  May I ask who you will be supporting from now on? I know you are just a troll but you might have an interesting answer.
  
  March 19th, 2012 at 13:48
Zizzle

I stuck with Mozilla even as Chrome became the better browser, because it was fighting the good fight for an open web. I struggle daily with massive UI pauses in FF.

Now it sounds like Mozilla is changing strategy to “just shipping good product”.

Too late. You’ve already lost. Google will resume it’s Chrome ads and FF share will continue to shrink.

Not caring as much about an open web is a slippery slope.

How long before Mozilla implements hollywood’s DRM schemes? I mean they say they won’t now, but they said that about H264 too.

It shows the other browser vendors that all they need to do it get together on proprietary web extensions and Mozilla will eventually capitulate.

Today the open web died.

March 19th, 2012 at 08:45
1. Matthew Case
  
  This is all very dramatic but the open web hasn’t died because of one video codec. As I stated in my first post, adhering to dogma when the rest of the world has chosen something else will lead to you becoming irrelevant and ignored. At that point you can’t get anything done. So what’s it going to be? Dogma till the bitter end or pragmatism and living to fight another day?
  
  March 19th, 2012 at 10:36
Neil

Kudos.

The world moves on and Mozilla must move with it.

March 19th, 2012 at 09:01
Test

Please don’t treat us like we’re stupid with this kind of arguments and advertisement for H.264. We couldn’t care less.

Do what you have to do if you think this is the only way to go but don’t excuse something you will do with treating us like we’re stupid!

March 19th, 2012 at 09:11
Brendan Eich

@Nanashi: assuming you’re not a troll, I urge you to re-read my post, and Mitchell’s. You seem to think our relying on desktop Flash is “principled” while relying on OS H.264 decoders is not. That is not self-consistent and it does not match Mozilla’s principles in reality.

We are trying to avoid being dead to everyone. See that skeleton on the park bench? What good is a mission with no users?

@Zizzle: UI pauses are getting fixed, see Taras’s blog (https://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/). I use Firefox and Chrome daily, Flash off in Firefox currently. Chrome is no better (I have to kill CPU hogging “Google Chrome” processes daily — all Flash in a shared content renderer) on average, and the AwesomeBar beats the OmniBox hands down for usability (and privacy to boot).

With Firefox’s desktop users, a better Firefox for Android, and especially B2G on phones this year, we have a shot at surviving and even thriving. That shot won’t happen if we renounce H.264 on mobile. No B2G phones, not enough Firefox on Android adoption.

Blaming Mozilla for capitulating when Google already capitulated silently by failing to do what they promised, and to be fair, when Google had to bow to the reality of H.264 dominance on mobile initiated by Apple, is not going to help the Open Web.

Mozilla can take all the blame you care to heap on us, but we’re still the only outfit pushing the Open Web above all other agendas (device, search, social, OS). If this isn’t good enough, I don’t know what realistic alternative there is.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 09:15
Ryan Parman

I’ve been a Mozilla user since Mozilla 0.9.6, and have been evangelizing Mozilla (and later, Firefox) for most of my adult life.

I’ve always been skeptical of VP8 and Theora because their use is limited to the web, and Google has been less than forthcoming with statements on patent unencumbrance. They’ve always been careful about how they phrase answers to the patent/royalty questions, which has left me worried about it. My guess is that this is why Google and Adobe haven’t pushed forward as quickly as promised.

The H.264/AVC experience on mobile is substantially better than anything else because of hardware decoding. H.264 is a broadly adopted standard in lots of non-web uses (Blu-ray, for example). That, and the quality-for-filesize ratio is just plain better.

On a technical level, H.264 is superior to VP8. On a legal level, H.264’s patent encumbrance status is transparent. You know what you’re looking at. VP8 is a inferior codec with murky patent status. As far as I’m concerned, H.264 has always been the way to go.

As an end user, I’ve been long-frustrated by Mozilla’s insistence on rejecting H.264 on “religious” grounds. Supporting an open *source* codec to the exclusion of a far more popular (and technically/legally superior) closed source codec doesn’t matter if you’re only excluding it because of Mozilla’s own brand of religious dogma. Standing for principles at the cost of user experience is a bad path to follow, and I’ve been saddened to see Mozilla take this road over the past few years.

I’m very excited to see Mozilla at least acquiesce to supporting H.264 in one way or another. Not only will it simplify life for those of us who actually do multi-transcode video, but the experience for end-users around the world will be vastly improved.

March 19th, 2012 at 09:22
1. Shmerl
  
  > On a legal level, H.264′s patent encumbrance status is transparent.
  > You know what you’re looking at.
  
  This is very wrong. There is nothing transparent in software patents. They are prone to heavy abuse and trolling. If some obscure patent troll surfaces with some weird patent which can affect H.264 – no one in MPEG LA will be protected against it despite their strongest statement that they are protected from any attacks, because patent trolls have nothing to loose (except their patents). Patent wise H.264 is as slippery as anything else. So this argument is worthless.
  
  March 19th, 2012 at 10:31
  1. Chris Adams
    
    Patent trolls can strike anywhere but there are two huge differences here. One is simply that H.264 users generally are reusing native support, so they’re not actually involved at all – the troll has to sue Apple, Microsoft, etc. – and the second is that the H.264 license pool means that members won’t sue licensed users, whereas a member is always free to sue users of a different codec.
    
    As was repeatedly pointed out to the Mozilla people when the WebM pipedream was announced, the real long-term strategy has to be patent reform. The codec of the week was pure distraction and lost marketshare for Mozilla.
    
    March 20th, 2012 at 06:35
    1. Shmerl
      
      Yep, I agree that patent reform is a must. I just pointed out that the claim that H.264 is legally superior or risk free patent wise is false. If some troll will mess H.264, it will affect the whole chain up to the users (with higher prices on hardware and other side effects). Obviously such trolls won’t be coming from the members of the MPEG-LA. The fact that MPEG-LA includes a big amount of potential patent abusers doesn’t mean there are no others outside their pool, who can attack both WebM or H.264. I was trying to disprove the FUD that placates H.264 as safe, and WebM as unsafe.
      
      March 20th, 2012 at 10:43
2. Kenneth
  
  I was going to write something here, but Mr. Parman summed up my same position exactly. I’ve always supported Mozilla and the open source philosophy, but the fight over H.264 seemed like Mozilla taking away user choice and refusing to give the user a way around it for the sake of ideology.
  
  Though I do support the move to H.264, I also very, very much appreciate Mozilla’s battle over the last 3+ years for an open codec for the web, and I’m looking forward to their position in the next battle in the war for an open web.
  
  For my part, I’m coming back to Firefox.
  
  March 19th, 2012 at 12:10
Brendan Eich

@Ryan: the issue is not open *source* — there are open source H.264 implementations aplenty — it’s patent encumbrance and royalty fees. Users and even small browser makers and Firefox downstream distributors cannot afford the royalty, and in our view should not have to pay it. Even video content hosting sites should have an unencumbered choice.

The patent system, part of the U.S. Constitution, has become a counter-productive perversion. This is a real issue on many battle-fronts, not just with video. The consequences of patents include our relying on Flash currently, and possibly even in the future when we use OS decoders, depending on the OS (WinXP lacks H.264 support).

Patents are a problem worth living to fight another day. I think you make too little of the threats to users, developers, and browser vendors in your comment, but I’m glad you are excited by this development, two-edged though it is.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 10:17
zzen

Get a grip guys. Mozilla is struggling to stay relevant. Insisting on absurdly impractical restrictions in the name of open web will just edge Mozilla out into extinction.

If anybody could be understood for being dogmatic, it would be /be, he has the battle scars. I applaud him smarter than most on this forum!

March 19th, 2012 at 10:22
Brendan Eich

@Test: I don’t know why you think I’m treating you as though you are stupid. Protesting about it without saying more won’t help.

I’m a realist and my post is not talking down to anyone or attempting any “spin”, it’s arguing about market constraints that we (and Google on Android, note well) cannot overcome right now. I wish it were otherwise, but wishes aren’t horses.

I do think there’s something broken intellectually (not stupid, some of the smartest people I know do this) in turning principles into dialectical matter and anti-matter. E.g. (@abarth on twitter) Google = “useful”, Mozilla = “open”, and if opposed then Mozilla must die on the “open” hill. No thanks, Firefox grew because it was useful *and* open. We wouldn’t be here today if we did only “open”. We do not do only “open” unto extinction.

We don’t do only “useful” either, which is why we must live to fight another day. If you know of a way for us to get mobile market share without H.264, I’m all ears. I don’t see it.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 10:24
Marcos Caceres

I think Moz is doing the right thing. Thanks for continuing to fight the good fight.

March 19th, 2012 at 10:36
aphid

I really hope you guys can find a way to do this without giving MPEG-LA a huge chunk of money that they will use to help crush webM and other open codecs (for which they have already assembled a patent pool). The irony would be too great.

March 19th, 2012 at 10:55
Zizzle

Do you think this sets a dangerous precedent?

Mozilla can still function and exist while having a slightly inferior video implementation.

I’m not sure it can if the web continues to be built around non-royalty-free standards. Close up the code base? Parts of it for the patented bits?

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the web wouldn’t exist today if it were build on for-pay patented technology.

I would rather have a slightly inferior video experience that no open web. No open source browsers.

And I guess us Linux users are screwed for H.264 anyway. Non of the distros will be able to ship a H.264 implementation. And I guess mozilla will not be.

March 19th, 2012 at 10:57
Brendan Eich

@Zizzle: now I know you’re either not reading what I wrote, or not having a stand-up and specific, carefully argued disagreement about it.

Mozilla cannot exist on mobile devices without H.264, period, full stop, end of sentence. *You* might be ok, just as RMS is ok on his fully-free-software-including-the-BIOS laptop. That’s too pure to get many users, and we will die or not even start up if we try that.

If we renounce H.264, most users won’t adopt Firefox on Android. As for B2G without H.264, we won’t even get on phones. Our partners won’t even try WebM-only.

From what Henri Sivonen tells me, Linux is in better shape than Windows XP. We will make sure Linux works. Indeed with Flash on Linux becoming a Chrome-only plugin, we must solve the H.264 decoding on Linux problem anyway.

I urge you to consider the reality *today*, without any change from Mozilla yet in our code. We rely on Flash to display H.264 video on the Web. Google supports H.264 from HTML5 video on Android because Apple set that standard. No Flash fallback on mobile.

The Web is still here and we must fight to keep it open, but blaming Mozilla for a precedent set by others is at best friendly fire. Please aim better.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 11:04
1. Zack
  
  I’m going to miss being able to play Flash-based games on my Linux box (after Adobe stops with the security updates for the NPAPI version) a lot more than I care about <video> working at all. But I freely admit to being a weirdo.
  
  On the larger topic, I think you should have mentioned the phenomenon where an absolute majority of third-party codecs installed on Windows desktops are actually malware. (can’t find a citation right now, but I know this came up in previous discussion of using system codecs on Windows).
  
  March 19th, 2012 at 14:05
ianjo

Basically mozilla once was about supporting all users equally, and fighting for an open web where all users have access and see the same content.

In the latest few releases, mozilla started delaying features for linux, not supporting this or that, such as the new gpu-rendering stuff, or the new menu, etc.
So now the time has come to clearly tell linux users that they don’t deserve to see the web as equals. You want the web, get windows, osx, or android.

Bah. User since phoenix, and very disappointed.

March 19th, 2012 at 11:14
Paul Lockett

While I prefer the use of WebM or Theora, the approach to H.264 has always seemed very US-centric. The relevant patents are recognised in very few countries; had the US not been one of them, I suspect that H.264 support would have been included previously.

March 19th, 2012 at 13:28
Brendan Eich

@Zack: my post was tl;dr enough, don’t you think?

But rest assured, we are not going to plug in anything claiming to be a codec. MPAPI (Media Plugin API) interface *and* presence on QA’ed whitelist required.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 14:10
1. Zack
  
  I had every confidence that the video team would do the Right Thing security-wise, fear not. :)
  
  I get your not wanting to make the post any longer, but then it seems to me that the parlous state of third-party codecs maybe deserves its own post (from the security team?) since “why doesn’t <video> just go straight to the system codecs?” comes up so often.
  
  March 19th, 2012 at 14:13
Asa Dotzler

Zack, the Gecko audio/video team have said that they don’t want to enable every possible codec for the Web. Just as we’re selective about bringing new image formats to the Web, so should we be about video formats. That’s independent of the security concerns.

March 19th, 2012 at 14:36
A.J.

Can’t we just crowdfund aquisition of the patents to then donate them to humanity? Or collect even more such that we can get rid of patents once and for all? What tools would we have? Lobbyism? Occupy Patent Office? Effectively none?
Overhead created by patents grows exponentially, just like human knowledge does. So we cannot go on like that forever anyway. Why not back out before the overhead becomes overkill and progress stagnates?

In reality, at this point, going H.264 is the only choice, but I would not want to have to make it.

Good luck Mozilla!

And a royality free, double handed gesture (prior art) to all those who implemented the patent system, those who keep it alive, and those who benefit from it. If compliant with applicable laws, I would happily assist in applying an appropriate transient force to their center of gravity, by the means of my foot.

March 19th, 2012 at 15:09
Maxim Fridental

Well, welcome to reality :)

I think calling you “naive” or “idealists” misses the point how in fact destructive your free software fanatism was and is for other people (and markets).

Besides of mobile market, where the difference between software and hardware video decode is relatively soft due to tiny screen sizes and quite powerful main CPUs, there is also a (potentially much larger) Smart-TV market.

In a typical smart TV, the main CPUs are so slow it is completely out of question to try software decode for even low bitrates, which would anyways look bad on full HD screens. Just to give you reference point: software decode of 256kbit/s MP3 takes 60% of main CPU power.

The only way to go in TVs is reliance on their H.264 chips, supporting extremely beautiful full HD videos at 60 FPS and up to 25 mbit/s bitrate.

Due to your guys stubborness the whole Smart TV market has issues bringing something trivial like YouTube on their devices, because Google can’t clearly commit to H.264 and many Smart-TVs can’t reasonably use any other codec, be it Flash or WebM.

So, were you successfull in changing the world? Yes. Have you changed the world to the better? To whom how. Waaaay to whom how.

March 19th, 2012 at 15:47
Epicanis

Unfortunately, I’m having trouble shaking the impression that what I’m really hearing (well, reading) here is “Well, we tried, but Google is a two-faced liar and Adobe won’t help us and Flash is dying anyway” (I won’t argue with you on either point, personally)”so we have to do what Apple dictates.”

I can understand the concern that without doing what Apple says as far as codecs go, it makes it harder to use Firefox as a television, and with all the noise about the <video> tag there’s a fear that it’s costing market share, and if you give in you may be able to preserve enough market share to do “something” later.

I’d even be happy about this move from a purely technical perspective, where it kind of makes sense to fall through to letting a presumably-locally-optimized media system handle media playback, or so I imagine, if it weren’t for the fact that it means I can’t play too. I don’t think I can afford the patent poll taxes to produce h.264 video or aac audio.

Yes, I know the majority of HTML5 browsers support webm and/or ogg audio and video (and virtually ALL of them outside of a small minority of iPhone and iPad users – yes, from what I can tell, they are only a few percent of overall web traffic. Not sure where you’re getting that Apple’s position is “Market Leading”, unless you’re saying that the market-share values and growth for Android that have been published are innaccurate?), but how long is that going to be the case if “everybody just supports h.264/aac anyway! Even Mozilla supports it now, and only ‘freetards’ care about this stuff anyway”?

The issue (for me at least, and probably for everyone else bothered by this situation) is NOT, really, that you’re going to give in on encumbered video (and, presumably, audio, which everybody seems to forget exists…), but rather the implied death of effective promotion of legally-free media participation (not mere “consumption”).

So far, I haven’t spotted anything in any of these apologetic “well, we tried” posts that suggests there are any plans to push back and work TOWARDS legally-free media, with the exception of the comment about WebRTC here.

Oh, goody: “Sorry, Linux users and anyone else without a paid-up h.264 and/or aac and/or mp3 license, you may not be allowed to play in the Web TV and Web Radio space legally much longer. Maybe if you’re lucky we’ll be able to let you play legally in Web Telephone space, though. At least, as long as Apple corporation says it’s okay.”

(I mean, I’m actually quite excited about the a href=”https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=694810″>Opus codec support coming at some unspecified date in the future in Firefox and perhaps elsewhere, but if Mozilla is giving up on <video> and <audio> support for legally-free codecs, I don’t have much hope that it’ll do us much good outside of “voice chat”.)

So, please, PLEASE tell me Mozilla actually has some kind of plan actively promote the use of legally-free open codecs so everybody will be able to participate, whatever that plan may be.

March 19th, 2012 at 15:53
Epicanis

(P.S. Sorry about the formatting on that comment – I’m not sure if that was me or the code on this site “processing” the HTML in the comments)

March 19th, 2012 at 15:55
sam

i’m delighted that you will be using h264 for desktops and mobile platforms, it is a better codec in terms of quality, speed and possibly legality.

I have a few suggestions regarding how to pay for the $6.5m licence:

1. have a donation button on the start page
2. ask users via tech websites in a campaign to all donate to pay for it.
3. have users watch 2 mins of adverts in order to enable h264 to be downloaded from mozilla’s servers and then installed.
4. ask adobe to make it so that mozilla can access the h264 codec without having to use flash itself, that way 98% of internet connected computers will be able to play h264 even without vista/7.

I hope mozilla/google/xiph and other organisations join together to write a spec for a competitor to HEVC that is BETTER in terms of filesize/quality ratio that way it could actually beat HEVC for internet streaming. I’m sure if google offered $10m for the codec to be created the codec would be coded really quickly once you guys create a spec of course. This would beat hevc to market as ateme, mainconcept and the other video vendors will take way longer to create a working codec implementation. Integrate this codec in firefox/chrome/opera and tell google not to integrate hevc that way hevc will hopefully never get off the ground in the video streaming market. Microsoft would be a big problem unfortunately, apple wouldn’t matter as android is more popular on mobile platforms and apple has hardly any desktop market share.

If you create a codec that is technically inferior like webm was then it will never get off the ground. hevc is allowed to be a max of 3x more computationally complex, make your codec have a limit of upto 4x more complex and all will be well :)

March 19th, 2012 at 16:20
Test

“I don’t know why you think I’m treating you as though you are stupid. Protesting about it without saying more won’t help.”

I don’t think saying more will help. Trying to find and sell arguments to excuse supporting H.264 and then expecting those that oppose H.264 will agree… It just won’t work.

Not just you but i read a lot of arguments from people that support H.264 and saying something in the direction this is ONLY technical question and nothing more… or it’s hard for us not supporting it and … if we don’t support H.264 we will loose all of the users…

This is just stupid.

“If you know of a way for us to get mobile market share without H.264, I’m all ears. I don’t see it.”

If only H.264 would be the only obstacle at this moment? Mobile market is very closed now and every vendor has it’s “own thing” right now that works only for him and nobody else. If u think only adding H.264 support will change anything drastically then i think you are wrong it won’t. How could it?

With or without H.264 support FireFox on mobile is in this moment just another choice for basic web browsing and to be able to work it has to implement a lot of vendor specific and from different vendors technology just to watch simple video and to do what default browser does by default?

And this is just first step. Every vendor has it’s own technology to access it’s services that has nothing to do with web but will probably be bundled in browser that is available by default.

If u want to be relevant player in mobile market then you need you own platform and you are going in that direction. You have two choices:

1.) Become another vendor with your “own thing”.
2.) Do what you always did. Open, cross-platform and that is it.

Use WebM hardware decoder instead and use your own identification for the Mozilla Marketplace (DRM) and so on. This if done successfully is your ticket to mobile market and nothing else.

Trying to beat every default browser on every platform and doing this by implementing vendor specific and web unfriendly technology that is needed to just to start competing will not get you anywhere.

March 19th, 2012 at 16:20
Brendan Miller

As far as webrtc goes, my company would *like* to use webrtc, but the codec situation makes it very awkward. We make (most?) of the video phones that are out there right now and they all use h.264. We have to be able to interoperate with our installed base.

Certainly, I’d love to find a workaround, and we have some in mind, but in the short term it means we are probably not going to be able to use webrtc.

Compromising on the openness of the codec at least lets us push forwards standards based solutions. Without h.264 in webrtc we end up with a solution which is built 100% on closed technology, and realistically will only work well on Mac and Windows. As a Linux user, I don’t find that desirable.

March 19th, 2012 at 16:43
Brendan Eich

@Epicanis Are you producing video for a paid service? H.264 is free to encode for free services. I’m not defending it on this front, just passing that along. It’s part of the evil of the patent system that such “free with conditions” is hyped as “free”. If you are not able to take advantage of this largesse from the MPEG-LA, I share your outrage.

By “market leading” I mean what I said about Apple’s devices and their responsiveness being “the gold standard”. Android can indeed have greater share by smartphones sold, but Apple is still tops in quality. We hear this from OEMs. Our B2G work is aimed at being as graphically slick and responsive as Apple. Same as far as I can tell goes for Android stock browser and Chrome on Android (which is finally getting there, but not quite good enough yet).

Mozilla cares about web content production as well as consumption. Consider our investment in Popcorn, which is actually ramping up. As I wrote, we are not “giving up”, far from it. You shouldn’t dismiss our work supporting unencumbered video/audio production as well as consumption. Facing reality re: H.264 on mobile has no direct effects. Mozilla is not big enough to matter.

Either you’re using us or another unencumbered platform (and more power to you), or you’re targeting H.264 — or perhaps you are double-encoding. Whatever the case, we cannot survive the shift to mobile without decoding H.264 using mobile hardware.

Handing H.264 in the HTML5 video element off to OS/HW decoders is a requirement to field mobile browsers and Web-based OSes. Google agrees by their actions with Android and its browsers. Facing this fact is in no way “giving up” on unencumbered media, which we continue to support. We will hardware-optimize the unencumbered formats where we can, too. As I wrote, we are in this for the long haul.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 17:25
Brendan Eich

Test: I don’t see anything “stupid” on any side, but I do not agree with what you wrote. Firefox on Android has to do very little vendor-specific format handling, B2G even less so.

H.264 is not even vendor-specific, it’s a standard — an encumbered one, but multi-vendor, open spec, and with open and closed source software as well as hardware implementations.

You write as if it’s some kind of IBM SNA or DECnet throwback and the Web fragments by its widespread use. I wish that were so, because that would limit its uptake and we would oppose it without issue.

Rather, H.264 is “open but encumbered” and because of patent FUD, OEMs and OS vendors (all of them) prefer to pay the protection fees.

The ways in which mobile is “vendor-specific” are mosty to-do with WebKit, e.g., -webkit- CSS prefixed style properties, WebSQL, and to a lesser extent, H.264 from HTML5 video (note that last is not peculiar to WebKit).

What you imply about mobile being a vendor-specific multi-headed platform is more nearly the case due to WebKit extensions. That is not a criticism of WebKit, per se. Many of the -webkit- CSS extensions should have been promptly standardized (and will be, if we have any say in it).

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 17:34
Test

“Firefox on Android has to do very little vendor-specific format handling, B2G even less so.”

By “vendor specific” i meant something like Native Client or Silverlight… Things different mobile platforms support by default and FireFox would have to implement them to start competing on that platform with them.

H.264 is just one of those things and nothing more. And i know there is big difference between Native Client and Silverlight, but you do get my point?

“Rather, H.264 is “open but encumbered” and because of patent FUD, OEMs and OS vendors (all of them) prefer to pay the protection fees.”

Yes, H.264 has it’s troubles and that is why we are here discussing it. I read somewhere you still believe WebRTC should not use H.264 but just few comments back somebody is saying if it won’t they will not use FireFox and just few comments above somebody recommends donations for Mozilla to buy H.264 support, this is where we are right now?

March 19th, 2012 at 18:04
Brendan Eich

@Test: Native Client is Chrome-on-desktop-only. See http://code.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/faq.html, quote: “Does Native Client work on Chrome for Android? We have no plans to announce at this time.”

Silverlight is dead, pretty much.

As I wrote, any recent single-vendor special sauce in the current mobile web market structure is likely to fail. Apple got on first and used WebKit to spread some extensions, but that was a one-company stunt.

Web developers won’t write for one platform beyond dealing with quirks and doing a bit of progressive enhancement.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 18:12
Test

“As I wrote, any recent single-vendor special sauce in the current mobile web market structure is likely to fail.”

Chrome on Android won’t support Native Client? When did Microsoft not use any “special sauce”? I think it’s normal to expect this things will happen.

We are discussing H.264 here aren’t we and the troubles FireFox is facing because Google didn’t drop H.264 support yet?

March 19th, 2012 at 18:47
Epicanis

“H.264 is free to encode for free services.”
I actually have tried to follow the Byzantine mess that is the licensing terms for H.264, and I Am Not A Lawyer™, but I THOUGHT there were other conditions beside “not charging for access”. Wasn’t there a license fee for “Free TV” (I wasn’t sure what fell under that definition) or some sort of fee triggered once you passed 100,000 downloads?

.mp3 audio has similar (and perhaps even more relaxed) loopholes, but still demands payment if the “entity” producing the audio makes more than $100,000US/year (no mention of “with .mp3”, so a private citizen with a salary+bonus of that much or more who makes web audio as a hobby would be liable wouldn’t they?) and requires a license fee in any case for anything they could label a “game”.

I’m not real comfortable with the idea that if I suddenly start doing anything “important” or get too “successful” with the patented media that I might suddenly be on the hook for a huge poll tax, much like a surprise roaming/overage charge from a cellphone provider.

“Our B2G work is aimed at being as graphically slick and responsive as Apple.”
Okay, now the Apple envy makes a little more sense. I was wondering where the strange emphasis on Apple corporation was coming from given that there will be no Firefox on iPhone or iPad.

“in no way “giving up” on unencumbered media, which we continue to support.”

I’ll take that as a definitive “we’re NOT going to REMOVE support for legally-free formats”, which, to be fair, I wasn’t really in doubt about. Good to see a clear statement of that though.

Does this support also include effective promotion, though? Enabling mere “consumption” is a good thing, but if there is a lack of production it’ll end up being pointless. Are there any projects planned in this direction?

(I do see that Mozilla is involved with Opus codec development. A project to actively help create rapid demand for this codec would help a great deal – if I ended up having to give up on Ogg Vorbis in favor of Ogg Opus in <audio> tags it wouldn’t really bother me much. Opus seems to be legally-free and possibly even better than Vorbis for quality.)

“We will hardware-optimize the unencumbered formats where we can, too.”

That would also help a great deal, or so people keep saying. Is this also an existing or planned Mozilla project, or just a “maybe someday” sort of thing?

“As I wrote, we are in this for the long haul.”

That, actually, is my biggest worry here – just how “long” is this metaphorical haul? The longer Apple corporation (and to a slightly lesser extent, Microsoft) gets everyone to encourage just finding a way to pay the internet-media “poll tax” to participate, the greater the danger that open codec usefulness will end up wilting away from disuse.

On a tangentially-related note, I really wish people would quit forgetting that <audio> exists, too, particularly since the barrier to entry for producing audio for the web seems substantially lower than that for producing video, and therefore perhaps has a much larger potential pool of “participants” (especially for speech and not just music).

On this note, does this decision by Mozilla foundation also apply to <audio>, and will it only be for .aac or also for .mp3? Or is this even ONLY for H.264/aac <video>?

March 19th, 2012 at 18:52
Zizzle

There is an interesting comment on how MPEG-LA have raised the licensing cap and added new patents to the pool over here:

http://lwn.net/Articles/487221/

Hoping they don’t raise prices or waiting for the patents to expire is not really a solution.

March 19th, 2012 at 19:00
Zizzle

There is another excellent comment over there:

http://lwn.net/Articles/487273/

“In my opinion Mozilla’s claim to fame in the current world of many fast competitive browsers, is being the champion of an open and unencumbered web.
If they can’t do that, they’re quickly becoming irrelevant already.

If they feel they are in not a position where they can say “no” to supporting known software patents, the current greatest threat to software freedoms, as a part of the web, what’s the reason for their existence ? To produce a very popular browser ? There are several takers doing a good job in that department already.”

March 19th, 2012 at 19:04
1. Reikachu
  
  “If they feel they are in not a position where they can say “no” to supporting known software patents, the current greatest threat to software freedoms, as a part of the web, what’s the reason for their existence ? To produce a very popular browser ? There are several takers doing a good job in that department already.”
  
  Even if you disagree with this decision, it seems overly binary and dramatic to imply (as others have) that it “infects” Mozilla and robs it of all character, like a unique snowflake melting into indifferentiable water.
  
  Patents are “the greatest threat to software freedoms” precisely because they sometimes possess (effective) legal, market, and social power, and because it is not obvious how to navigate those powers without suffering damage. Certainly Mozilla will suffer damage either way it chooses on the H.264 issue, and there are (valid) arguments on both sides as to which choice is more damaging to Mozilla’s core mission. I think (as in any political debate) that the losing side should have the grace and respect to continue to support and work with the institution, rather than fracturing into splinters (which is something of a tired cliche of both open and progressive moments in general).
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 07:25
Brendan Eich

@Test: Yes, Chrome on Android lacks NaCl — read that quote and follow that link I added.

Microsoft adds special sauce? Not now, they’re embracing HTML/JS/CSS. WP7 and Win8 Metro are way late and may not make it. They have too little share to yet push another brand-X native app stack.

You’re right that medium-big players are tempted. Consider Tizen, which is really SLP redressed with “HTML5” in reaction to B2G. But no one is going to build X-windows Enlightenment Foundation Library apps as their third native app port after iOS and Android — no one. Hence the liberal “HTML5” hype in Tizen collateral.

I think you’re reflecting on old Microsoft desktop behavior combined with obviously doomed attempts to imitate it, or the Apple version of it, on mobile. This has at most minor fragmenting effect.

So, no NaCl on Chrome for Android, and Silverlight is dead.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 19:08
Brendan Eich

@Zizzle: Mozilla’s purpose, unlike Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and the rest, is to advance the Open Web and User Sovereignty (the two are intimately related) above all other agendas. That’s hard to do for a publicly held company with a {search,device,social,OS,etc.} bottom line to defend.

Of course Mozilla is not nearly as big or rich as those companies, so we may have to adapt to facts we can’t change, e.g. H.264 support in hardware on mobile and in other HTML5 implementations.

If Mozilla doesn’t add enough value on the Open Web and User Sovereignty fronts then we’ll die.

So be it, but your repeated comments are tiresome because you imply that somehow, magically, if we would stick *only* to the Open=Unencumbered-Web side, and screw User Experience (an important precondition for User Sovereignty) on mobile, then we’d survive.

I say (repeatedly) that we won’t even get onto real mobile devices this year or next without H.264, not at all with B2G, and not in any significant numbers with Firefox for Android.

You have yet to address this point. Please do so, or give it a rest.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 19:17
Brendan Eich

@Epicanis: shorter, please — and look at Popcorn and the Foundation’s follow-on work with PopcornMaker. I didn’t see you advert to our support for the unencumbered production side.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 19:21
Test

“So, no NaCl on Chrome for Android, and Silverlight is dead.”

And we are discussing H.264 in FireFox? Something doesn’t add up if everything is open and everybody will support HTML/JS/CSS and everything will work everywhere.

Why then everybody does not implement WebM support too if this is the case and we would not have the problem.

One more very important question will (FireFox) push VP8 for WebRTC or will H.264 be supported for H.264 too and what then if IE and Safari will not support VP8 for WebRTC too?

March 19th, 2012 at 19:35
Zizzle

You (or Mozilla) seem to be assuming that:

a) people do significant browsing on mobiles devices (the experience is crap in my opinion) – they will throw away their PCs – mobile phones are the future of the web or Mozilla is dead
b) the carriers and handset makers will want to give up control of their eco system to run B2G or FF. “Here mozilla take our app store profits! Take control!”
c) B2G will somehow be more relevant than WebOS
d) users will actually go out of their way to download Firefox mobile when the platform browsers actually perform better
e) Mozilla is even capable of producing a performant browser on a phone. Hell look at the UI lag with FF on a modern PC, let alone a phone
f) HTML+CSS+JS+Mozilla’s rendering engine will be faster (or even comparable) to native iOS apps for all phone/tablet functions

And you think H.264 will make or break Mozilla?

You claim user experience is such a big deal, but apparently only HTML video is related to user experience.

Apparently breaking everyones plugins every cycle for several cycles is not user experience. Doing all I/O on the main thread so that the UI can’t even keep up with my typing is not user experience.

Only turning your phone into a TV is user experience.

It’s a joke. A bit of inconvenience around one feature of the web (video) and the whole open web thing goes out the window.

Let the patented formats in. We can’t have any user inconvenience by not having access to them right? That would be bad user experience.

Like people are already saying, if Mozilla isn’t about open any more (and hey H.264 definitely isn’t open), then why bother with them? What’s the next thing they’ll change the mind and sell out on. Better browsers are either already installed or just work better.

March 19th, 2012 at 19:38
Epicanis

(sigh) Okay, “shorter”:

“Popcornmaker” looks nifty (as does popcorn.js itself), but requires that you ALREADY HAVE PRODUCED media to work on, or so it appears. Producing the media (encoding) in the first place is what I’m referring to. I suppose if popcornmaker only supported WebM this would be encouraging production of legally-free media, though at a glance it doesn’t look like this is the case necessarily and I wouldn’t expect it to STAY that way if it was since “you have to be on mobile, and it has to be h.264 for that”.
(tl;dr: popcorn.js and related projects are nifty, but not directly relevant to generating legally-free media since it works on h.264/aac as well).

I’m not hearing or seeing anything about Mozilla’s plans to promote production of legally free media going forward beyond continuing to support playback for the currently-planned future. I think the volume of legally-free “content” is the real lack at this point (thanks, yes, largely to Mozilla’s support for “consumption” of it so far), so I was wondering if there were any projects to encourage legally-free media specifically in hopes of eventually weaning us back off of h.264/aac.

I’m, finally, also not seeing anything about audio – just “Browser TV”. Does this decision by Mozilla Foundation apply to <audio> as well, and if so will it include .mp3, or will it be limited to h.264/aac <video>.

March 19th, 2012 at 20:10
Epicanis

Quoting myself to clarify: “I think the volume of legally-free “content” is the real lack at this point (thanks, yes, largely to Mozilla’s support for “consumption” of it so far)”

I mean – the reason this is the problem is because the problem of “inability to play” has been mostly solved, largely due to Mozilla’s support. I’ve obviously been at this too long, I’ll stop posting and just watch the replies.

March 19th, 2012 at 20:24
Denver Gingerich

I’ve written some comments on this, in “Video, fragmentation, and Firefox”, which you can find on my blog: http://ossguy.com/?p=1137 I hope they are useful in the decision-making process. I’d be happy to engage in further discussion about this, either here or on my blog.

March 19th, 2012 at 20:40
1. Brendan Eich
  
  I replied to @Denver and we have exchanged comments over at
  
  http://brendaneich.com/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-web/
  
  /be
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 10:29
Brendan Eich

@Test: you brought up NaCl and SilverLight, not me — no fair complaining about my replying.

“And we are discussing H.264 in FireFox? Something doesn’t add up if everything is open and everybody will support HTML/JS/CSS and everything will work everywhere.”

Ok, we’re done. You are clearly rehashing bogus points already rebutted without having the decency to acknowledge the rebuttal or rebut it explicitly. H.264 is open as in vendor-neutral, open spec, multiple s/w and h/w implementations. And it’s ubiquitous.

That H.264 is patented is a problem, but not one you can reject by using “open” as a filter, and not one Mozilla can fix all by its lonesome.

@Zizzle: your ignorance of the B2G value proposition is on parade. Read the MWC coverage for why we have partners and we’re getting on phones. You might learn something.

And drop the “webOS” nonsense — not only was it too early and too slow (not due to any fault of WebKit, though), it was full of proprietary (that is, Palm-only) JS framework code.

@Epicanis: TV is a fine curse-word to reject video on phones and tablets, you seem to have Zizzle picking up on it. Meanwhile I shoot and preview short videos of my kids at the park, to save and look at years hence. TV, forsooth!

Address the issue without reducing it to an absurdity or mocking it based on your elevated tastes.

See the newsgroup thread (https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platform/browse_frm/thread/fb14de8b9ad84e15?hl=en&scoring=d&) for thoughts on audio formats.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 21:57
Epicanis

Okay – well, thanks for at least answering the question about audio with an affirmative, if not the others.

I will conclude by pointing out that your TV does not cease being a TV just because the VCR is playing home movies instead of mass-market commercial material, and I don’t recall saying anything about the value of the “content” (indeed, if the “content” were valueless, nobody would be caring about this). Now you’re just dismissing us because you’re tired of dealing with it. To be honest, I can’t blame you.

I understand you’re just reflecting the irritation being heaped upon you by a lot of very unhappy people, who don’t think the trade is worth it, so it’s okay. Good night and good luck.

March 19th, 2012 at 22:18
Brendan Eich

@Epicanis: I see at most three unhappy people rehashing and echo-chambering here.

Sorry I missed your other questions. Too many words, too little time — try asking one at a time? Overlong blog comments where you essentially filibuster are a poor way to get questions or answers across.

You did dismiss the topic of video with the TV trope. I think you should stand by that if you believe it. Yes, there are a few good TV shows — but we can agree there is a lot of dreck too.

Yet the problem before us is getting into mobile web browser/OS markets, where H.264 is “table stakes”, no matter what the video content. In this light putting down (or selectively praising) TV does not help.

/be

March 19th, 2012 at 22:30
Sunil

Hi Sir,

I am a software developer and not sure about one thing or I may not have much info about the real issue, I am just asking from a end user’s prespective that when my system have all the codecs installed and I can installl additional codecs if required. Why, browser vendores rewriting this again and supporting only a few codecs some doing H.264 and mozilla WebM. why not to do like my media player, If my media player can run a particular codec there is no reason why the browser sitting on the top of that can not do that. Mozilla can distribute the webM along with mozilla installation that can help all the media players on my system play WebM Videos.

March 20th, 2012 at 01:43
1. Robert Nyman
  
  The way it is being discussed right now is utilizing existing codecs on the operating system. But at the same time you want to be sure that it will work as supposed to, so there will be an evaluation for each codec, maintenance etc.
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 01:51
2. Jean-Yves Perrier
  
  It is important to note that a significant amount of codecs are malware. Their authors trick users by sending them a video and request them to install a codec to view it. It is important to prevent this on the Web.
  
  On the developer side, writing code for an application facing the Web is much more tricky than writing code for an application sitting on your computer using local data: code resilient to any corrupted/bad data in input is harder to achieve. Allowing any codec installed on the system will greatly increase the surface of attack the browser will have.
  
  Finally format fragmentation is a problem: as much as we don’t want 25 image formats on the Web, video codec fragmentation is not welcomed. That’s the current problem Web dev are facing (solving it by choosing one codec and hoping for fallback solutions on non compatible browsers).
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 02:28
sam

hey brandon, i asked a few questions about halfway up this page, please could you reply to it if you have time, thanks “sam wrote on March 19th, 2012 at 4:20 pm:”

March 20th, 2012 at 01:43
1. Robert Nyman
  
  Thanks for your input.
  It’s interesting to discuss different options. Where we are right at this moment, though, it mostly comes down to hardware support and what is available out there.
  
  For the future, though, it doesn’t exclude the option that another format or specification and we move on from this. Everything is evolving all the time. :-)
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 01:53
pete

I totally agree with Brendan’s sentiments and conclusions. This is a bitter pill, but not a fatal one. One battle has been lost, but not the entire war.

I hope that Mozilla and others can get together to push the Freedom aspect of other Web technology issues, such as WebRTC. It’s important to remind people how crucial unencumbered technologies are to the Web.

I can recall 10 years ago seeing IE totally dominate the browser market, and Web freedom looked endangered. Firefox came along just in time (although I was clunking along with the full Mozilla suite, but not loving it.)

I remember pitching Firefox to people I knew, and explaining how important it was to an open Web. But probably the most important reasons for them to switch was the greatly improved security (on Windows) and the tabbed browsing.

So cool features and usability can’t be casually cast aside to pursue Freedom goals. There has to be a realistic balance, and unfortunately, this is it right now.

March 20th, 2012 at 03:49
Steven

Brendan, will users have a choice? Most of the time, I am surfing with Flash disabled on my desktop. If I really need it, I can enable it without browser restart. Just to be safe, I use Flashblock, so it doesn’t get enabled accidentally for all sites. That’s cumbersome, but at least it’s possible. Will there be a way to selectively disable the H.264 codec specifically? I didn’t want it yesterday and I don’t want it now. I have tried Firefox on Android and I have found no way to disable Flash. That’s a bad precedent. People shouldn’t be forced to use H.264. Please leave us a choice that’s better than all-or-nothing.

March 20th, 2012 at 05:19
1. Robert Nyman
  
  I think it’s too early to tell at this moment how it will affect settings and choice. It’s an interesting point, though – thanks!
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 06:19
Joel

Firefox is popular enough to be in a position to affect a positive change. With Firefox supporting H.264 there will be less incentive for video producers to avoid the format. It only propagates the nasty, proprietary format further.

I am willing to make the sacrifice of not viewing videos distributed in H.264, and I know others are too. It’s a minuscule price to pay for the good that the Mozilla Foundation can do by respectably standing firm and rejecting the format.

March 20th, 2012 at 05:48
1. Robert Nyman
  
  Thank you.
  I think, though, and as outlined in the blog post, at this time Firefox/Mozilla can’t stand alone in this, and combined with mobile and hardware support, it’s something we unfortunately have to do.
  
  That said, I of course hope for a change in the long run.
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 06:23
Test

“Ok, we’re done. You are clearly rehashing bogus points already rebutted without having the decency to acknowledge the rebuttal or rebut it explicitly. H.264 is open as in vendor-neutral, open spec, multiple s/w and h/w implementations. And it’s ubiquitous.”

Yes, as i said in my first post:

“Please don’t treat us like we’re stupid with this kind of arguments and advertisement for H.264. We couldn’t care less.

Do what you have to do if you think this is the only way to go but don’t excuse something you will do with treating us like we’re stupid!”

You see now what i meant? And by far i don’t agree of your interpretation how good H.264 is for the web. You can’t implement support for it in FireFox if you want to keep the license you have for FireFox right now. Isn’t that enough? You can use hardware decoders and decoders on other platforms and nothing more. What if somebody decides you can’t use that anymore?

Don’t assume we don’t know nothing about H.264 or what is happening in mobile market.

And i didn’t get an answer for WebRTC that basically means you don’t know jet or it’s very likely H.264 will work too. It’s only technical issue isn’t it and nothing more? Sure!

But i do agree we’re done.

March 20th, 2012 at 07:19
Arialia

Well more and more devices support hardware H264 : phone, TV, tablet and now card video Nvidia and ATI so we all paid indirectly for this famous license H264
Tomorrow all devices will be hardware H264 : it is a standard.

So i think Firefox can without any problem use decoder hardware h264 if is present on system.

March 20th, 2012 at 08:41
Zack

@Brendan.
“Mozilla’s purpose, unlike Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and the rest, is to advance the Open Web and User Sovereignty (the two are intimately related) above all other agendas. That’s hard to do for a publicly held company with a {search,device,social,OS,etc.} bottom line to defend.”

So, basically, the advancement of the Open Web and User Sovereignty
falls squarely in your lap because you place it above all other agendas, unlike other participants who might have different agenda. That’s good to know, and a formidable responsibility.

“Of course Mozilla is not nearly as big or rich as those companies, so we may have to adapt to facts we can’t change”

“We’re not rich so sometimes we *have* to follow”. That’s a non-sequitur.
Why would you have to adapt to facts you can’t change because you’re not big or rich ? I would say that being nimble and free of a bottom line would be the perfect position to be in to respond to seemingly unchangeable facts.
In fact, I know this guy who did this for software in general once. Quite successful, he was. Granted, he’s not the most popular character around in software circles, but his work is far from this state-of-irrelevancy Mozilla seems to fear so much.

“If Mozilla doesn’t add enough value on the Open Web and User Sovereignty fronts then we’ll die.”

That is so wrong I don’t think you really meant to write that.

“you imply that somehow, magically, if we would stick *only* to the Open=Unencumbered-Web side, and screw User Experience (an important precondition for User Sovereignty) on mobile, then we’d survive.”

User Sovereignity is not helped in the long term by acknowledging new masters, benevolent thought they may appear for the moment, as part of the system.
Furthermore, the survivability of Mozilla is not the question here, and not a goal unto itself. If Mozilla can “survive” only by acting antithetical to the reasons it is “alive” in the first place, what’s the point ?

“That H.264 is patented is a problem, but not one you can reject by using “open” as a filter”

Then how about using “we’re dedicated to keeping [the Web] free, open and accessible to all. ” as a filter ? That should qualify it for rejection.

“and not one Mozilla can fix all by its lonesome.”

If not Mozilla, then who ?

March 20th, 2012 at 08:45
Brendan Eich

@Zack: let’s not go in circles. “Why would you have to adapt to facts you can’t change because you’re not big or rich ?” Because we can’t enter the mobile market at all otherwise, which means likely decline and irrelevance. I wrote that as clearly as I could in the post.

You may not like this rude fact. I don’t either. Moneyed interests have too much power. One consequence is H.264. Mozilla’s alternative is to reject, but (I keep arguing; you fail to respond directly) on mobile this means failure, which likely means that Mozilla goes away. Not a good trade-off!

/be

March 20th, 2012 at 10:12
Brendan Eich

@Test: when people disagree, they are not calling one another “stupid”. When I make an argument based on stated premises, you can point out a logical flaw that invalidates my deductions, or demonstrate that one of my premises is unsound. Doing neither, going on and on about someone calling you “stupid”, is a non-argument.

WebRTC is an open battle as I wrote. You want an “answer” from me in the form of a guess about what will be standardized? My crystal ball is not that good. and our energy is better spent working than speculating.

Right now the spec (http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc.html) says “User agents may negotiate any codec and any resolution, bitrate, or other quality metric.”

This is too agnostic in my book, and unrealistic on engineering grounds to boot. E.g. AAC is not a good audio format for two-way realtime communication — too high-latency. Mozilla is working on Opus, and there are unencumbered audio options. So there’s an audio chink in the armor and we should aim our pikes there, and also push for VP8 video.

When I wrote that the next battle is WebRTC, that was a call to arms, not a chance to hear me guess about the future or grumble that I’m an optimist. Let’s get to work.

/be

March 20th, 2012 at 10:23
Zack

@Brendan
Thank you for responding.
As a sidenote, you wrote “(I keep arguing; you fail to respond directly)”; I’m afraid you’re mistaking me for an earlier poster.

“You may not like this rude fact. I don’t either. Moneyed interests have too much power.”

But being a non-profit should allow you not to waver in the face of moneyed interest.

“One consequence is H.264. Mozilla’s alternative is to reject, but on mobile this means failure”

I’d like to put it as a simple syllogism.

premise: Mozilla’s mission is an open en unencumbered Web (and user Sovereignty)
premise: It is impossible to succeed on the mobile platform in an open and unencumbered manner

conclusion: Mozilla cannot succeed on the mobile platform.

If both premises are unequivocally true, the only way out of this is to drop the mobile platform and concentrate on where you can do good unimpeded.
Personally I don’t think there’s shame in that. ROI should not have to be a motivating force for a non-profit.

Right now it feels like you’re trying to re-interpret the first premise to making the conclusion not hold, whereas for me, the second premise looks a lot more shaky since it’s basically just an assertion. It’s the “impossible” and “succeed” you should be trying to redefine to make the conclusion not hold.

“which likely means that Mozilla goes away. Not a good trade-off!”

For Mozilla, and maybe for you. But the rest of the world already has an open-source browser, and a more-or-less open-source mobile platform. Why bother with Mozilla ? What does it have to offer other’s don’t if not for the promise to actually not do (or support) evil instead of just having it as a slogan?

I realise it feels like much ado about nothing; simply endorsing a single not-quite-palatable technology. And right over the horizon success is looming in the form of the mobile platform; alot more clout to do good things with afterwards. But clout is prone to quick depreciation, whereas goodwill is a far better long-term investment.

So,
“Whatever happens in the very long run, Mozilla can’t wait for such an event. ”
or
“Mozilla is here for the long haul. We will never give up, never surrender.”

which one is it going to be ?

Thank you for your time.

March 20th, 2012 at 11:21
1. Brendan Eich
  
  @Zack: no, I was referring to your one reply (I know you are not the other Zack ;-) where you didn’t respond directly to my “H.264 is mobile table stakes” point that I’ve made over and over. Thanks for responding now.
  
  Being a non-profit does allow less wavering and havering, but (a) we can easily lose users to the point where donations can’t sustain us (running the #2 or even #3 browser takes a lot of full time staff); (b) one non-profit of Mozilla’s size cannot necessarily overcome Apple, Microsoft, and at least half of Google — I hope that’s not surprising.
  
  Your syllogism is flawed, right there in the major premise where you relegate User Sovereignty to a parenthetical aside, also in the minor premise where you drop it utterly. Mitchell and I both blogged about how we do both “open” and “users” in order to serve our mission. Not just one or the other, and not one at the expense of the other.
  
  There’s no shame in renouncing mobile to stick to desktop, but there is in my best judgment likely our demise. Even if desktop Chrome hits some limits on growth that big ad and bundling bucks cannot overcome, desktop OSes are mutating to be more like mobile ones, e.g. Win8 Metro. Not clear we can get on all such OSes at all, or as a first-class browser app.
  
  It’s easy to project from certain market share trends that our desktop share will continue to go down, which eventually predicts failure. It won’t take going to zero to lose top hackers and leaders. The first and second derivatives matter, and turnover hurts.
  
  Of course, no one knows the future, and projecting trends is fraught with risk. Still, hoping to turn things around and overcome stiff, well-funded desktop browser competition, *and* overcome the new mobile-like desktop/tablet OSes that put up barriers to third party browsers, looks like a bad bet to me.
  
  Mozilla leaders have to make a best guess of what a desktop-only future holds, and our best guess is decline and irrelevance. The web standard process is increasingly mobile-focused. The exact details of a desktop-only decline don’t matter, but they’re non-linear at the turning points: top talent turnover, assault from the competition, user-share loss acceleration, spin-cycle in the media and blog/twitter-sphere, all can add up to a chaotic shift where our obituary (written many times in my life at Mozilla since the founding) will be written for real.
  
  I don’t mean to be negative. I’m trying to look ahead at alternative futures. This is not a hard topic for me to talk about, it’s a rational possibility to consider. I have a friend, now at Google, who thinks we’re doomed, mainly by Chrome’s ad and bundling budget. He could be right, but we’re ok for the next few years, and I believe we are ok so long as we keep serving our mission where users are found — which is increasingly on mobile.
  
  Since we’re arguing about the future, we are inherently speculating. We could lay bets if you care to wager. But I’m all in: my bet is my job at Mozilla and position in the community. I hope I’m doing right, along with other leaders especially including Mitchell, in favoring “users” over “open” on this H.264 battle-front, and in going for mobile instead of renouncing it to stick to desktop.
  
  If I’m wrong, we’ll probably find out soon enough, this year and next. I do not accept blame for “killing WebM” since Google is first in line there and we are still working on it and other unencumbered formats, none of which are dead. I also don’t see enough dissent in the community to step down.
  
  So I say: let’s find out what the future holds by continuing to build it where users live: on desktop and increasingly on mobile devices.
  
  /be
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 14:08
Jebemti

What a bunch of nonsense. So all of this is because of B2G? Does Mozilla think that people will use B2G over Android? If yes then Mozilla is out of touch with reality. Just focus on Firefox on the desktop instead of these silly side projects that have no future. No wonder your market share is shrinking, and this move will just speed things up. Soon you will join Netscape on the other side.

March 20th, 2012 at 11:43
1. Jean-Yves Perrier
  
  To achieve its goal, Mozilla has to be active on all places where the Web is. If not, companies will jump in there to create walled gardens. Today, Applications on Mobile, or the limitation of browser engine on iPhone are such walled gardens.
  
  It is this second walled garden that created the situation of today, making H.264 a must have on the whole Web. It is the absence of Mozilla on the mobile market that prevents us to maintain alone our position without H.264. And as the partners in this fight already surrendered (without telling it officialy), we are alone.
  
  Gaining credibility on the Web will allow us to fight future battles, like market share on the desktop allows us to fight battles on the desktop.
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 12:04
  1. jebemti
    
    No one asked Mozilla to enter the mobile market. You know why? Because there’s no room. Even Microsoft with its boatload of money is having a hard time, so how is Mozilla going to do it?
    
    As for H.264. No it’s not a must have. What’s a must have is that youtube works, that’s all the average user cares about. Apple figured this out a long time ago. When the iphone launched there was no flash and only a youtube app that only showed videos that were encoded with H.264 and lots of videos were missing because of it. Over time it got better. Why can’t the B2G youtube app only show videos that are WebM? All new uploads are in WebM format, and they’re is doing a pretty good job at transcoding all the old stuff.
    
    You want credibility? Stick to your previous promises and listen to existing users. They’re the ones that have stood by you even when other browsers came along that had stuff that Firefox was missing. Without them you’re nothing.
    
    March 20th, 2012 at 13:23
    1. Brendan Eich
      
      @jebemti: B2G has a role to play, mobile is not full (“no room”). That is a laughable assertion.
      
      For one thing, Android (not just ICS, even older Android) does not even fit on the QualComm phone we demo’ed with Telefonica and QualComm at MWC, and that phone is priced to sell to tens of millions of feature-phone owners in many parts of the world where smartphones are not on the market or are prohibitively expensive.
      
      Even ignoring B2G, the idea that mobile is all locked up is silly. We’re nowhere near the beginning of the end. We’re barely at the end of the beginning.
      
      I’d like to know why you are so angry, though. We’re doing better on desktop Firefox after some troubles following Firefox 4 (good release though it was). As ever, Mozilla lives in the fishbowl and so can’t pretend to be perfect, but we’ve persevered and even won alpha-hackers back from Chrome lately.
      
      I suggest less anger and more thoughtful reflection about what Bell’s Law (if it’s real; we can debate) means, and what it should mean for Mozilla. See my reply to Zack just above.
      
      /be
      
      March 20th, 2012 at 14:17
      1. jebemti
        
        I am angry because Mozilla broke its promise. I am angry because a select few have decided to throw in the towel without community input.
        
        You can try to break into the phone market but WebOS with HP behind it failed, WP7 with MS and Nokia is going the same way, and so is RIM/Blackberry. And you believe B2G is going to be a hit just because Telefonica is on board? Gimme a break.
        
        If you still want to work on B2G, spin it off and leave desktop Firefox alone. That way B2G can have H.264 if you think it will help you in the mobile market, while the rest of us continue to fight for open and royalty free video with WebM.
        
        March 20th, 2012 at 15:31
Zizzle

@Jean-Yves Perrier

I’m so glad that we are ditching the walled gardens for the openess of H.264.

It seems like Mozilla’s position is “We need to support closed non-royalty-free formats to save the open web!”

Doesn’t quite add up to me though.

March 20th, 2012 at 12:26
Test

“Test: when people disagree, they are not calling one another “stupid”.”

I didn’t call you stupid i said don’t treat us as stupid and assume we don’t know why H.264 is not suitable for standard web video and try to convince us it is. It’s not.

“When I make an argument based on stated premises, you can point out a logical flaw that invalidates my deductions, or demonstrate that one of my premises is unsound.”

Supporting H.264 is logical flaw. That’s all and i don’t believe this will bring you market share on mobile platforms.

And thank you for commenting on WebRTC. I though it will hard to use anything else than H.264 here too now i see what is happening and to be honest we will not need Flash for web video but we will need H.264.

We kind of failed. Maybe next time then!

March 20th, 2012 at 13:00
1. Brendan Eich
  
  @Test: in your comment at
  
  https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-web/comment-page-1/#comment-1454977
  
  you wrote “This is just stupid.” I think you called something (not me, thanks for that) stupid there ;-).
  
  Anyway, logic aside, we could be stuck with different premises that depend on speculations about the future. Can’t use logic there. If you are right that we could stick with WebM and Theora only for HTML5 video, and survive, we will need the multiverse viewer to find out — and you can say “I told you so!”.
  
  Given our mobile initiatives, as I keep saying, we don’t even get to first base without H.264. So in *this* ‘verse, we’re going to get past the kind-of-failed state and keep fighting the long war.
  
  I don’t think anything here is “stupid”. Making a call based in part on analysis of likely futures is tough. The easiest part of this call for me is analyzing what Apple already did, and Google did and did not do (Adobe, ditto). That outweighs anything Mozilla can do in terms of supply side effects.
  
  /be
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 14:24
sam

so many ungreatful people on here! What would you rather do, just have firefox and opera go it alone with WebM and sites have to encode 2 videos and waste a lot more bandwidth serving webm? No alot of sites would serve only h264 and firefox would lose out. This is the best option, its a shame that h264 is patented and requires licences but donations would easily cover the amount h264 would charge mozilla.

We just need mozilla/google/xiph to create a better codec than HEVC in terms of size/quality then release that spec and start coding it as fast as possible. This could then be the new replacement for h264 for web streaming, but it MUST have better quality/size than HEVC if it is to survive and become a standard. It won’t take long for hardware encoders to be released for it and working hevc codecs won’t be out for 18months+ i’m sure so we could possibly beat them to market.

Google could do with donating $5m+ for people to code it and random coders would be paid based on how much they contributed, this would allow the codec to be created very quickly and it would be fast. Use OPUS for the audio for the newer standard, get all browser vendors to sign documents saying they will only support this standard for the future standard and not hevc and we are on to a winner.

March 20th, 2012 at 13:04
1. Brendan Eich
  
  First, we plan to use OS or otherwise-distributed H.264 decoders, so we are not going to pay the MPEG-LA anything.
  
  Second, we’re working with Xiph folks on better stuff. Opus and Daala. See http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.media/browse_frm/thread/9e97462d35c3a6c0# but note that it’s early. You’re right we need to move fast. I wish Google had evolved VP8 to compete with H.26[45], or just to improve the encoder. They even got lapped by ffvp8 on performance. Anyway, Mozilla and Xiph are working on the unencumbered future.
  
  Future’s not set in stone, any more than it was in 2002 when IE topped ~95% share. People need to stop crying doom because of this H.264 _fait accompli_.
  
  /be
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 14:29
  1. Zizzle
    
    But when MPEG-LA comes out with future codecs, people will now expect you to just support them.
    
    “Mozilla supported H.264, why wouldn’t they support H.xxx?”
    
    March 20th, 2012 at 14:36
    1. Brendan Eich
      
      So? We’re not slaves to their words. We are in charge of what we do and why we do it. Our rationales are clear and we are continuing to work on unencumbered formats.
      
      Of course patent rentiers will bluff and bluster — that’s how typical protection rackets roll. Never mind their noise. They’re not in charge of our decisions, we are.
      
      /be
      
      March 20th, 2012 at 14:47
Test

“so many ungreatful people on here! ”

Don’t treat other as stupid please.

“This is the best option, its a shame that h264 is patented and requires licences but donations would easily cover the amount h264 would charge mozilla.”

So you do understand?

“We just need mozilla/google/xiph to create a better codec than HEVC in terms of size/quality then release that spec and start coding it as fast as possible.”

And you think if WebM has problems that now somebody else will offer better solution that WebM?

“Google could do with donating $5m+ for people to code it and random coders would be paid based on how much they contributed, this would allow the codec to be created very quickly and it would be fast. Use OPUS for the audio for the newer standard, get all browser vendors to sign documents saying they will only support this standard for the future standard and not hevc and we are on to a winner.”

You clearly don’t have the info how much was spent already on WebM and on what terms you can use it and that it has hardware support already in a lot of places (but i don’t quite understand why it’s not used all the time).

I just hope one thing. If H.264 is supported or not by FireFox that there will always be another solution in good condition like WebM supported on all platforms and that Mozilla will push this until it happens!

March 20th, 2012 at 14:01
1. Brendan Eich
  
  Dude, you did it again! @sam wrote “ungrateful” (spelling fixed), you took that as “stupid”. Saying someone is ungrateful does not make them out as stupid — it’s a charge of lack of gratitude. Please give the s-word a rest.
  
  /be
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 14:31
2. sam
  
  @Test: i Didn’t call you stupid, just not greatful of the great browser that mozilla has given us for FREE.
  
  And you think if WebM has problems that now somebody else will offer better solution that WebM?
  
  yes mozilla have already stated they are working on a codec, now Brandon has clarified that they are helping with Daala.
  
  “You clearly don’t have the info how much was spent already on WebM and on what terms you can use it and that it has hardware support already in a lot of places (but i don’t quite understand why it’s not used all the time).”
  
  I do know how much money was spent, google paid $160m and they and mozilla have spent more improving it. As for hardware support there is little on cellphones and it isn’t in IE/Safari/ios. I can be hardware decoding by the latest gpu’s and apu’s too.
  
  @Zizzle:
  
  “Surely it could have been the other way around. If Mozilla are partnering and having a close dialog with the mobile phone manufacturers and carriers, and WebM is truly free/open, then surely Mozilla is in a position to push WebM. To get more WebM hardware out there.”
  
  and what about the countless phones already out there that don’t support webm hardware decoding, should we tell them to sell their expensive phones away so that they can play vp8? Clearly not, webm wasn’t available before android became popular, now there are lots of people who don’t need/want to upgrade to a newer smartphone as theirs does everything they want.
  
  “is different. It is in the HTML5 spec. Which was exciting. HTML is an open spec, that is why the web flourished. Surely the open web browser would support the open .
  
  By supporting H.264 Mozilla is saying it’s ok. Open web is not that important.”
  
  mozilla aren’t removing webm support, therefore your point is null and void, they support open web + closed web.
  
  “People will expect mozilla to support H.265 or whatever comes next. Why wouldn’t they? It’s no different to supporting H.264.”
  
  its very different, h.264 was released in 2003, almost all new hardware supports it, it is already ubiquitous and has hardware decoding support in all the latest tech and has done for 2yrs or so. h.265 has yet to be fully standardised, still a few months until the spec is complete. If mozilla/xiph can complete the spec of Daala at a similar time to MPEG-LA and google offers cash for programmers to help code it quickly and efficiently then we may have working encoders before h.265 and hopefully the video/quality ratio will be better. If these things are all true then it will be the best codec for the web, we just need browser vendors to sign legal documents to say they will use it and not h.265.
  
  p.s h.265’s real name is HEVC incase you didn’t know.
  
  I think brandon should ban the user “Test”, he is just plain rude offering no new informative debate on this subject.
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 15:04
Zizzle

It’s surprising that Mozilla decided that entering the mobile market is reason to throw in the towel on the open web.

Surely it could have been the other way around. If Mozilla are partnering and having a close dialog with the mobile phone manufacturers and carriers, and WebM is truly free/open, then surely Mozilla is in a position to push WebM. To get more WebM hardware out there.

If not a pure HW implementation then at least a GPU accelerated version.

Mozilla on mobile should make WebM more viable, not less.

If B2G really is all that, something that users, manufactures and carriers actually want, then surely Mozilla ends up on some position of influence over the hardware. Especially if it saves on licensing costs.

Mobile phone hw has one of the shortest refresh cycles around. What is dominant in the market can easily be gone or replaced in 2 years. I don’t buy the “H.264 is fully entrenched because of the iPhone” argument.

March 20th, 2012 at 14:14
1. Brendan Eich
  
  Do you intend to troll? It’s a good way to get moderated.
  
  Entering mobile does not mean throwing in the towel on the Open Web. The Open Web is withstanding the patent fees of H.264 and it will survive those onerous fees. We’re not going to pay them because we’re going to delegate to the OS decoders shipped by the big companies that bought into the protection racket. Some fitting irony there.
  
  Yes, it sucks. No, it’s not the end of the Open Web, nor is it all naughty Mozilla’s fault. Yeesh!
  
  Ok, troll shields up on this point.
  
  /be
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 14:33
  1. Zizzle
    
    Sorry you think I’m trolling. There are some valid points in my post, but you mostly ignored them and started calling names.
    
    Flash is a known proprietary POS whose time has nearly come. When it fades, people will stop installing it, it will be gone. It is not in the HTML specs, it’s just in popular use (ATM).
    
    is different. It is in the HTML5 spec. Which was exciting. HTML is an open spec, that is why the web flourished. Surely the open web browser would support the open .
    
    By supporting H.264 Mozilla is saying it’s ok. Open web is not that important.
    
    People will expect mozilla to support H.265 or whatever comes next. Why wouldn’t they? It’s no different to supporting H.264.
    
    Why would Mozilla put up a fight against any proprietary web extensions? They caved on H.264 and stopped pushing the open codecs for some perceived market share.
    
    Why would the next attempt to close the web be any different to H.264? Surely they would be market share upside for Mozilla to support the proprietary extensions.
    
    March 20th, 2012 at 14:47
    1. Brendan Eich
      
      I asked if you meant to troll. That’s not calling you a troll. You’ll know when I do that!
      
      I didn’t ignore your fine points, I focused on your central, first, non-fine, untrue and trollish assertion: that Mozilla by entering mobile “throw[s] in the towel on the open web”.
      
      The Open Web is here, it’s not going away, we continue to work to evolve it and keep it open. That H.264 is both required on mobile and patent-encumbered truly sucks, but we can’t overcome its penetration, on production and consumption sides including hardware in consumers’ hands. Remember, Open and Unencumbered are not identical according to conventional definitions.
      
      Mozilla’s definition of “Open” includes “Unencumbered”, but Apple definitely disagrees (SJ himself mailed Hugo on this), and so FWIW does Microsoft.. Apparently Google disagrees with us too — or at least Google throws in the towel on this one open-but-encumbered standard.
      
      Mozilla (my blog post and mitchell’s) explicitly says that H.264 support is *not* ok and that Open as Unencumbered is still important. We further argue that this evil outcome of H.264 being table-stakes, which we did not cause, is necessary to accomodate in order to survive and fight for the Open Web in general.
      
      You, on the other hand, are repeating the unjustified assertion that by our actions we are saying something we’re not.
      
      You may reject “lesser evil” ethical arguments. I do too when there is intention to commit the lesser evil. When the evil outcome is an unintended and possible but not inevitable effect of an action for a greater good — or in this case, an already certain outcome we did not cause — then the intended action can be justified. Search for “double effect ethics” if you’re interested in more on this.
      
      Again, we didn’t make H.264 a requirement on mobile. We held out as long as we could.
      
      Our actions are justified by the battle being lost but the war still raging, and our ability to fight another day. If you don’t agree that we will not survive if we reject H.264, let’s debate that (as I have with Zack just above). I get that you don’t like H.264, but that’s not at issue. Please believe me that I don’t like H.264 (the patents, not the tech) either.
      
      We put up a very big fight against H.264. We were last to “cave” (even Opera on Android uses H.264 decoding hardware). The burden on you is to stop rehashing your own words as if they are ours, and instead either say why Mozilla should hold out forever and risk becoming that skeleton on the park bench, or find a better path.
      
      I sometimes wondered why Google did not do something aggressive to transcode H.264 video for free, providing a WebM version via a proxy-like highly-available caching service. That might have helped, although the cache miss experience would suck. That’s something Google-scale that Mozilla couldn’t have done. Perhaps it wouldn’t have worked without lots of cache priming. There are privacy issues too.
      
      Anyway, that didn’t happen and we couldn’t have pulled it off. We will keep working with Xiph on unencumbered formats, and fight the long war. I hope you’ll join us rather than condemn us or keep commenting here in the same vein, trollish or whatever you want to call it.
      
      /be
      
      March 20th, 2012 at 15:08
      1. Zizzle
        
        Firstly, I didn’t bring the language of good/evil/ethics into this. I don’t think it appropriate.
        
        I know you have me painted as a freetard who hates H.264, but I don’t. I don’t really care about it. I care about what the browser who claims to be all about open is doing supporting it when they can’t even ship me the code. I care about the precedent it sets.
        
        I question whether I should continue to trust or put any hope in Mozilla.
        
        You misquote me to make me a troll. I said mozilla is throwing in the towel by supporting H.264 not by entering mobile.
        
        I explained how I see a difference between a fading proprietary *plugin* and a core HTML tag.
        
        If Mozilla supports H.264 then why would any WebM holdouts even exist? Video would become H.264 only. Mozilla then can’t even ship a codec to support an important, widely used HTML tag.
        
        I can’t even point to Mozilla and claim that there is a chance that an alternative codec is viable.
        
        That doesn’t sound like fighting for the open web. That sounds like throwing in the towel on the open web and conceding video to the proprietary domain (once again, you can’t even ship the codec).
        
        You assert that H.264 support and mobile will save mozilla. Like you said to someone else it’s future prediction and could go either way.
        
        I think that the mobile space is ruled by profit motivated companies that have a “do whatever it takes” attitude. Hence the massive mobile patent wars. Hence Google completely caving on WebM.
        
        A world where technical excellence doesn’t matter. What matters is selling your users out to please the carrier. Where making a buck off an appstore, advertising and creating maximum lockin matters.
        
        How would Mozilla succeed in such a space?
        
        It seems Mozilla’s core principle of an open web has already been compromised by just considering entering the space.
        
        If Mozilla caves on H.264 for market share reasons, why won’t they cave for the same reason in back room deals with the carriers?
        
        If a carrier offers to ship B2G in exchange for selling user data from the browser, what grounds would Mozilla say no on?
        
        If market share is the primary goal, which is the reason given in the H.264 case, then surely it would win in his case too?
        
        March 20th, 2012 at 15:40
Denver Gingerich

In response to http://brendaneich.com/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-web/#comment-11651 (since I think my reply, reposted below, is stuck in moderation there):

@Brendan:

It sounds like Mozilla’s mission is not what I thought it was, which is fine, but good to know. When http://www.mozilla.org/ says “we’re dedicated to keeping [the web] free, open and accessible to all”, I suppose for Firefox this means “free” is as in “free beer”, “open” means one can view the code or docs that it implements, and “accessible to all” means “to all people who are willing to run non-free software”. I’m not trying to be snide here, I’m just trying to understand what it means. If you think the statement implies more freedom, openness, or accessibility than I’m giving it, I’d be happy to hear it.

My views on Mozilla’s mission echo those that Zizzle expresses in the comments on https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-web/ : Mozilla’s position is unique in that it doesn’t need to worry about the bottom line and it should use that to its advantage, by not trying to “compete” in the traditional sense, but to be a leader in freedom and openness for the web.

If the main push for H.264 is Boot2Gecko, then I’m a bit confused. In the case of B2G, Mozilla would have some degree of control over the hardware (as the OS would have to be designed for particular devices) so it could choose to use devices that support certain instructions that most optimally help to decode WebM. I’m not sure if the goal is to provide ROMs for existing devices or to work with manufacturers to produce a ships-with-B2G device, but this comment applies in both cases. In the latter case, it would be even easier since Mozilla could work with the manufacturer select chips that contain the instructions that are most useful for WebM decoding, perhaps even burning a chip of their own with the WebM hardware decoding reference implementation.

Since you worked with MicroUnity, I won’t belabor the above point too much as you probably have more experience with video decoding than I do. It just seems to me that with all the hardware out there and the hardware instructions available that decoding WebM quickly on mobile devices should not be insurmountable in the near-term. But if you feel it is currently insurmountable and that Mozilla must move to mobile before mobile WebM decoding improves, then I suppose that’s the direction you will take.

I am implicitly assuming in this discussion that by not including H.264 in Firefox, sites will eventually switch to WebM. This might be the biggest difference in the approaches that you and I take to the H.264 issue (if you believe otherwise). I can understand the fear that if Firefox doesn’t support H.264, then eventually no one will use Firefox anymore and the whole web will just use H.264 (I don’t think this will happen, though it might). But I hope you will agree that by supporting H.264, Firefox will be discouraging any transitions to WebM that are currently underway, which effectively brings us to the same end result of everyone just publishing H.264 (except with perhaps a higher Firefox usage share). And discouraging these transitions now will make it harder to fight against people moving to HEVC and other patented codecs that will undoubtedly follow. It is better to nip this problem in the bud now, even if it results in lower Firefox usage share for a little while.

March 20th, 2012 at 15:21
Zack

Fair enough. Disagreeing on a reasoned argument is no sin.

The decision is made already, and I hope it pans out as you planned.

Please don’t consider those critical of the move as simple detractors, as they might actually be the most staunch supporters Mozilla might have.
The Web as an open medium is one of the modern time miracles. It is a thing of unimaginable value for us and future generations. Alas, things of value attract those who will try to appropriate it for their own purposes if someone doesn’t stop them. So let me reiterate the only point I really wanted to make,

“If not Mozilla, then who ?”

Once again thank you for your time.

March 20th, 2012 at 15:39
1. Brendan Eich
  
  I agree with every word you wrote.
  
  If not Mozilla, then who? is a good question. We’ll keep working with Xiph and try to bring big companies into that process.
  
  Who knows, we may even need to build a RF patent pool with big-enough partners. Mozilla has legal hackers too. No promises but I’m thinking about all options.
  
  /be
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 16:29
Brendan Eich

@Zizzle: you’re arguing about good and bad, defined by some system of morality — get over it. There’s nothing inappropriate about using ethics here, it’s mandatory given the very real costs on people trying to produce and consume video and audio on the web. Not life and death, but not trivial either.

Robert O’Callahan has argued that we have in effect required authors to write Flash fallback by supporting only unencumbered formats in HTML5 video for the greater ecosystem good, but (roc adds) if doing so has no real effect in holding back the H.264 tide (because of Flash fallback handling H.264 on desktop) then we are kidding ourselves about the greater good.

If mobile is as harsh and corrupted an environment as you believe, I agree that we’ll probably fail. But it seems like the Open Web (with H.264 video taint) is winning. See

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57400136-264/survey-android-programmers-shifting-toward-web-apps/

The Java/Dalvik native-app stack is already going down. The Web is winning. B2G is even stronger (although early stage) evidence.

/be

March 20th, 2012 at 16:27
Test

“Dude, you did it again! @sam wrote “ungrateful” (spelling fixed), you took that as “stupid”. Saying someone is ungrateful does not make them out as stupid — it’s a charge of lack of gratitude. Please give the s-word a rest.”

Yes i did it again. Saying i am ungrateful because i don’t believe in H.264 as standard web video… Then only those who agree are grateful and the ones that don’t are ungrateful?

“@Test: i Didn’t call you stupid, just not greatful of the great browser that mozilla has given us for FREE.”

H.264 and FireFox are two totally different things.

“yes mozilla have already stated they are working on a codec, now Brandon has clarified that they are helping with Daala.”

Then use Daala instead of H.264. Problem solved.

“I do know how much money was spent, google paid $160m and they and mozilla have spent more improving it. As for hardware support there is little on cellphones and it isn’t in IE/Safari/ios. I can be hardware decoding by the latest gpu’s and apu’s too.”

And now new codec that has all that we would like and that cost less will be made? I am not against this but am i missing something? How exactly will this work out and why don’t you push this “new thing” then instead of H.264?

“I think brandon should ban the user “Test”, he is just plain rude offering no new informative debate on this subject.”

Because i don’t agree and find it hard to believe another codec will emerge and will have it all in the near future?

It’s not hard “to do it again” if this kind of arguments are made but something new and interesting did came out of it. If i understand correctly Mozilla does not believe H.264 or WebM are long term solutions?

You are working on another codec? I am not saying you will not support WebM but if i understand correctly you are working on something else and believe it’s “future proof” and could become standard video solution on the web in the future?

March 20th, 2012 at 16:28
1. Brendan Eich
  
  @Test: I think @sam’s point was not that you are ungrateful for H.264 or this decision, rather for the whole of Mozilla, the community and our work.
  
  Also, Daala is starting. It’s not done. No way can we “use Daala instead of H.264”. This forgets the battery-friendly hardware decoding — in this year’s phones and next — requirement.
  
  I left a link to mozilla.dev.media above, not sure the postings there are self-explanatory enough but it’s a start. Yes, we are working with xiph.org folks on future unencumbered formats. We (Mozilla) are also wrangling big-company (and I hope more reliable) partners to help.
  
  /be
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 16:39
Brendan Eich

@jebemti: Mozilla never promised to be die on the unencumbered-formats-from-HTML5-video hill. We did not sign up to be that skeleton on the park bench. Why do you think we did?

A promise of that sort is unwise. It is like handing a loaded gun to our fierce competitors, who do not share our mission.

I know some free software and open source supporters (I do not use the word “freetard”, note well, @Zizzle) value “Open” above “Users”, even unto decline, irrelevance, or death. But Mozilla has never written in our own blood that “Open” trumps “Users” for all formats used on the Web. Firefox wouldn’t exist if we had.

/be

March 20th, 2012 at 16:49
Brendan Eich

@Zizzle: this bit is a low blow, I hope you’ll agree on reflection:

“If a carrier offers to ship B2G in exchange for selling user data from the browser, what grounds would Mozilla say no on?”

The same grounds on which we won’t do it in Firefox. We won’t do anything with partners that we would not do in Firefox.

You seem to think that because we’ll add H.264 support from HTML5 video, therefore we are rank consequentialists who will do whatever it takes to achieve any end, push grandma down the stairs, just to get market share. That’s clearly false. There are many things we won’t do, as I wrote in the original blog post.

On the other hand, pushing *ourselves* down the stairs by renouncing the H.264 _fait accompli_, or renouncing all of mobile? Those are bad plans, too likely to leave us in decline with no way to uphold the mission.

We have long embedded Flash to handle H.264. That’s the reality. Embedding OS-specific MPAPI-interfaced decoder plugins is not different in kind. But now I’m repeating my blog post, which you’ve read (right?).

/be

March 20th, 2012 at 17:02
1. Zizzle
  
  Ok you’ve made a big point about
  
  Market share > H.264.
  
  It’s out of your hands. Even though supporting H.264 is against the Mozilla mission (hence why Mozilla made a big deal out of not supporting it not so long ago), everyone else is using it. Hands are tied.
  
  In the post above you are admitting to:
  
  Market share > open.
  
  Which is ok, except that http://www.mozilla.org says in massive type:
  “We Believe in an Open Web. And we’re dedicated to keeping it free, open and accessible to all.”
  
  Ok, so what you do and say are two different things, and it turns out that open and accessible is not really that important when market share is on the line.
  
  Now I propose:
  
  Market share > Selling user data
  
  And you cry foul. But it’s not that different.
  
  It seems to me, based on this H.264 about-face all we need is the “everyone else is doing it” excuse… which is not outside the realm of possibility in the mobile space.
  
  The open web pledge doesn’t matter when push comes to shove and market share is on the line.
  
  Can you at least see how some of us would trust Mozilla a whole heap less now?
  
  You keep repeating that it’s not about market share, it’s about survival. But that is far from definite. “The desktop is dead” has been claimed for years. Yet here FF is with 400 million users.
  
  And “Hey we’ll just use the OS decoders” doesn’t really sooth me.
  
  The Linux distros can’t legally ship H.264 decoders in the base install. In fact, Flash player is probably more legally distributable. Situation worse.
  
  The message to Linux users seems to be to get a “real” OS from MS,Apple or Google.
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 17:22
  1. Brendan Eich
    
    Not “Market share > open”, that’s simplistic. As I wrote, and I’ll avoid repeating much, we need both “Users” and “Open”. Not one over the other if putting one over the other is fatal to the mission because fatal to the project.
    
    “Open” is not all or nothing. We’ve always supported plugins. It happens that one, Flash, is ubiquitous on desktop and it handles our H.264 fallback for us — on desktop. So we do “Open + plugins”.
    
    Since Flash isn’t on mobile, we are proposing to do different plugins for H.264 support — not fallback, but the effect is the same or better for users and video encoders, and actually easier for authors.
    
    The crucial effect for Mozilla is to let us try to gain share on mobile, where without this plugin change, we cannot.
    
    Many Linux distros manage to provide H.264 decoders. See Henri’s posts in the m.d.platform thread about Fluendo.
    
    The desktop, like the drive-in, will never die, but have you found a drive-in movie theater in your area? They are rare. In relative terms, mobile devices — smart phones and tablets — will dominate. That is already affecting web content.
    
    Firefox may have ~400M users but that will not continue to hold — competition moves share up or down and mobile competition matters more by volume, also in its effects on emerging web standards that matter on the desktop too.
    
    If Mozilla renounces mobile and clings to desktop, then Mozilla will shrink, Gecko will fail to be as competitive as it would all else equal (already true: B2G has improved Gecko vs. WebKit greatly), we will lose top talent sooner and revenue later, and we will in all likelihood die.
    
    Three years best case is not out of the question, based on what I know (not all of which I can share). Less than two years life left is possible.
    
    So, I’m sorry: that you are sanguine about our desktop-only prospects doesn’t cut it. Mozilla leaders including me are not so optimistic, and we’ve spoken. At this point (if not earlier), rehashing your hopes or complaints or exaggerations or simplistic greater-than relations is pointless.
    
    Equating what amounts to a swap of new H.264 plugins for old with selling user data is morally dense. I’m glad you’re not in charge!
    
    /be
    
    March 20th, 2012 at 17:54
Test

“@Test: I think @sam’s point was not that you are ungrateful for H.264 or this decision, rather for the whole of Mozilla, the community and our work.”

And he is grateful because he agrees?

“Also, Daala is starting. It’s not done. No way can we “use Daala instead of H.264″. This forgets the battery-friendly hardware decoding — in this year’s phones and next — requirement.

I left a link to mozilla.dev.media above, not sure the postings there are self-explanatory enough but it’s a start. Yes, we are working with xiph.org folks on future unencumbered formats. We (Mozilla) are also wrangling big-company (and I hope more reliable) partners to help.”

I am not against that how could i be but i do feel i am missing something. WebM does offer open/free beer/free speech/quality/hardware decoding/web presence/WebRTC… solution and i can’t loose the feeling based on this discussion i am missing something?

Is this based on H.264 not dropped from Chrome and WebM not implemented in Flash or is there anything more?

March 20th, 2012 at 17:25
1. Brendan Eich
  
  WebM does not have hardware decoding on too many devices. It’s coming but too late. I heard Google tried to require it of Android OEMs and they said “no”. That’s the rumor.
  
  Your last paragraph asks if there is anything more. There’s more: Apple market primacy. Lack of WebM hardware decoding. Lack of dual-encoded content and many devs willing or able to afford dual-encoding. On top of the things you listed.
  
  /be
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 17:37
Test

“WebM does not have hardware decoding on too many devices. It’s coming but too late.”

I do agree more could be done yes but on other hand in two years time i think something has been done.

“I heard Google tried to require it of Android OEMs and they said “no”. That’s the rumor.”

“and many devs willing or able to afford dual-encoding”

But then we lost? Then we can win because the answer will always be no if it’s not H.264?

“Apple market primacy.”

But Android has grater market share and this should kick start WebM on Android devices?

“Your last paragraph asks if there is anything more.”

But there is nothing i should know about WebM that would change my support toward it? Mozilla still does believe in WebM but you would like Google would push harder?

March 20th, 2012 at 17:55
1. Brendan Eich
  
  Yes, we still support WebM. We’d like to see it both evangelized harder and improved technically. There may be work I’m not aware of to do both going on at Google, but can anyone tell? It’s not affecting Android or Chrome on ICS.
  
  To clarify talk about Xiph, work on Opus, Daala, and future stuff: we have to keep doing this. It’s necessary since the state of the encumbered art keeps evolving. Fighting the next battle includes doing new formats and codecs (and IPR protection for them, not just from deep pockets but at least from big partners).
  
  Winning in the long run consists of having better unencumbered tech. H.264 will die hard but there will be new and better formats. See my point in an earlier comment about WebRTC needing low-latency encoding.
  
  /be
  
  March 20th, 2012 at 18:00
chico sajovic

A lot of people’s principals are getting in the way of good a computing experience. Why do people care about the H.264 license? H.264 is a good product, it has a lot of OS support, it has a lot of hardware support. Hopefully we can move on into a world where all video is H.264. Pay the fee if you can or use OS level support if you can’t. The end goal is not free but one high quality format supported by all producers and all consumers.

March 20th, 2012 at 18:20
1. Zizzle
  
  “good computing” experience is subjective.
  
  Sure you may want the web to turn in a corporate dominated play thing where you have to cough up cash for each click.
  
  I do not.
  
  Luckily for you, you can already go an pay-for-play on iTunes and iOS.
  
  Please leave the open web alone.
  
  The web only got to where it is because it was open. Don’t try to close it now.
  
  You cannot ship a free OS or web browser with H.264 support.
  
  March 21st, 2012 at 18:36
Test

“Yes, we still support WebM. We’d like to see it both evangelized harder and improved technically.”

I agree.

“There may be work I’m not aware of to do both going on at Google, but can anyone tell?”

I can’t confirm but my gut tells me they are.

March 20th, 2012 at 18:24
Wolfgang Spraul

Let’s build our own hardware, collaboratively and with free licenses. Google has ‘opened’ the webm hardware encoder and decoder sources only behind a longform IP license, i.e. not at all. Elphel has done groundbreaking Ogg Theora hardware encoding over 5 years ago, but nobody cared. Sources are still out there under GPL. Mozilla doesn’t need to shed crocodile tears – read your own blog post and you realize the decision is made ‘in hardware’. So if ‘we will never give up, we never surrender’ should mean more than heroic blog posts, join one of the many great open hardware movements out there, with full power! This stuff is easier than you may think, no need to treat ‘hardware’ as that magic black box where all the decisions you don’t like somehow get made…
Checkout http://www.milkymist.org for a GPL licensed SoC. No video hardware decoding and encoding. Why not? We are working on it – join if you like.
Cheers, keep it up!
Wolfgang

March 20th, 2012 at 19:28
sam

I was referring to being greatful of mozilla and also h.264, the video quality is better and the filesize is smaller. We won’t have to pay for the licence as win vista/7 already has h.264 and there is hardware decoding in pretty much all smartphones.

Web developers can still choose to use webm if they want, mozilla isn’t removing support and i doubt google will either, whether they stop development is another matter entirely.

Daala could potentially kill HEVC (a.k.a h.265) if the spec is better than theirs, we can easily make our codec faster to encode/decode than theirs depending on the spec of course as we have huge numbers of open source contributors, just look how great x264 is!

You do a lot of complaining but you don’t offer suggestions, how can mozilla force all mobile platforms to have hardware decoding onboard, how can they add hardware decoding for 99% of phones that don’t currently have it, how can they make the video quality and filesize better instantly, how can they get google to remove h.264 capability. They can’t do any of these things, they are out of their hands. Blame google and adobe.

Mozilla has learn’t a lot from this mistake, with some careful planning the problems can be prevented from happening with Daala/Opus.

As for all your comments about Daala replacing h.264, do you really think that in 2yrs time (assuming daala is out by then) that mozilla will stop using h.264 and the whole internet will switch? h.264 will be around for MANY years, they will both be used. Do you really think everyone upgrades their hardware as soon as new hardware is released?

Mozilla need to get detection of gpu/apu built into the html5 spec that brings up a dialog box asking the user if it is ok to share this info with the website. Then if hardware decoding support for Daala is found the youtube for example can tell the browser to use Daala, if not it will send h.264. Daala will use far more cpu than h.264 therefore it would be a bad idea to send it to anyone who doesn’t have hardware decoding for it. h.264 spec was released in 2003, hardware has been around for around 7yrs, you can’t just kill off h.264 and replace it. People don’t want/need to upgrade to another hardware device to be able to use Daala, they will both be available just like how h.264/webm are now. After 6yrs of daala hardware decoders being available most people will be using devices capable of it therefore maybe then h.264 will be cut loose. Codecs are long-term projects.

Now developers just need to create 2 .mp4 files, 1 with h264/aac and another with h264/vorbis. they wouldn’t need to encode 2, just mux the audio. This will satisfy all html5 browsers assuming opera follows firefox’s lead.

March 20th, 2012 at 19:49
sam

hopefully RTC will use h.264/Opus as h.264 is the best video codec and has hardware decoding in all devices and opus is the best audio codec. There’s no way MS and apple would add support for WebM for this. I’d focus on making sure Opus gets picked as the audio codec.

March 20th, 2012 at 19:54
Jason

I always thought it was a better idea to use whatever the OS or Hardware supports, but if FF could use H264, which other codecs are possibly being considered if FF uses the OS or Hardware capabilities?

March 21st, 2012 at 09:25
Brendan Eich

Just for everyone’s information, I’ve been replying to @Denver over at http://brendaneich.com/ (he has a comment posted here that was posted there first).

/be

March 21st, 2012 at 10:33
sam

Do we have a rough date for when RTC video/audio standards will be chosen? Will IE10 have RTC in it or will there not be enough time? We really need IE10 to have Opus support built-in and RTC support built-in if we want Opus to take off as a standard. October 2012 is when win8 will be on sale so will probably go RTM in July/August along with IE10 as a standalone for Win7.

March 21st, 2012 at 10:56
sam

btw, regarding Win XP, i hope mozilla stops supporting that in april 2014 once MS stops supporting it with security patches, we could do with the extra man power being used elsewhere. Ask Opera and google to stop supporting their browsers on XP then too otherwise you may be forced to support it in order to not lose users to chrome as i bet google will carry on supporting as they only care about $.

March 21st, 2012 at 12:16
1. Robert Nyman
  
  When it comes to Windows XP and support: according to statistics, Windows XP has a 45% market share of all desktop operating systems.
  
  It’s impossible to say how big that will be in the future, but for now it doesn’t seem like a good idea to stop supporting it.
  
  March 21st, 2012 at 18:04
Test

@sam

You dream too much. If WebM will not take off then i don’t believe anything else will compete with H.264 for at least for few years.

You obviously like H.264 so be a man and say you don’t have problems with H.264 as standard web video instead of calling other ungrateful because they don’t agree with you.

If WebM (VP8) will not take off than i believe WebRTC is lost too at least for few years.

Google should respond because a lot of valid points where made here and be more reliable partner and if that does not happen we probably lost big time. But hay you like H.264 so you won’t have any problem with that.

The only reason i responded is because you addressed me directly and not because you said anything of value too me.

March 21st, 2012 at 12:36
Test

And i guess there is a lot of people like you out there that got wings now Mozilla changed position on H.264 based on this article:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA3NDM

I hope in the end you all fail big on this one.

I must say i hope Mozilla fails big too regarding H.264 (not on everything else that i believe in and you do good of course)!

March 21st, 2012 at 12:46
JohnSmith

Well, wars are hard thing and imply some casualities. But as for me it looks like if Mozilla has got their morale low and has abandoned goals of keeping standards free and unencumbered. That’s a worst thing could happen at all. You’re traitor, sir. You’ve backstabbed us. Thank you very much, that’s what we deserve for trying to help make you browser better and promoting it everywhere, doh. Looking on how mozilla develops I can admit it’s jut a poor ripoff of Chrome evolution. But please know: nobody needs “as chrome, but a little worse, little slower, etc”.

If you’re about to become chrome #2, you already lost your war and will perish. If you’re about to abandon your initial goals and become smth like IE/Chrome, you’re likely unneeded at all. After all, don’t you mind that not each and every system supports H.264 without extra pay? And don’t you mind that this will put ones in disadvantages over others?

What this reminds me? Well, I can remember old, IE only web. I can remember ActiveX. Can you please explain, how the heck requirement to have patented codec is better than requirement to support activeX? It’s a web breakage and you’ve about to get involved in it. That sucks and there is no excuse for such a blatant abandoning of your initial goals. Shame on you.

March 23rd, 2012 at 11:08
HeWhoE

April Fools?

Darn! It’s not April yet!

March 23rd, 2012 at 13:05
Paul Lockett

“After all, don’t you mind that not each and every system supports H.264 without extra pay?”

That’s true only in a very few countries where such patents are recognised. The systems in those countries are such a mess that it’s arguable that almost any codec could be covered by such a patent.

I’m not sure that the defective systems in a small minority of countries should dictate the approach taken worldwide.

March 24th, 2012 at 03:32
Brendan Eich

@JohnSmith: you can call me names and predict Mozilla’s death from behind an anonymous-coward ‘nym, but that’s all empty talk and noise until you face the reality that we were *already* handling H.264 via Flash on desktop, there’s no Flash on mobile, and H.264 in HTML5 video is widespread in Web content sent to mobile devices.

What is your justification for Mozilla’s long-standing support of Flash to handle H.264? What is your solution to the no-Flash-on-mobile problem? Put up your non-ranting and practical solutions, or shut up.

/be

March 24th, 2012 at 12:09
JohnSmith

> That’s true only in a very few countries where such patents are recognised.
“There are only few people who can’t run ActiveX”. The web, 10+ years ago. Standard reply from supports. Well, I struggled them at my best and looks like we won… only to get backstabbed?! Standards can’t be discriminating. Failing to understand this means all Mozilla mission about to end with EPIC FAIL. If Mozilla is about to allow discrimination based on patents recognition in countries, that’s the very same like discrimination on ability to run ActiveX, etc. After all if I want to publish video, I want it to made universally available to all people, regardles of their country or OS. Not to mention this dirty move puts opensource OSes at disadvantage in countries where patents are recognized.

> it’s arguable that almost any codec could be covered by such a patent.
I doubt anyone would dare to attack google. After all they honestly bought the On2 and quite problematic to blame. But anyway, many SW things happens to be developed in those countries. Effectively this would put opensource OSes at competetive disadvantage of force them to pay for licensing H.264. In fact that’s looks like a good backstab to opensource world. Thanks, huh.

> I’m not sure that the defective systems in a small minority
> of countries should dictate the approach taken worldwide.
And how this crappy approach is better than “anything that can’t run activex is a defective, use IE, we don’t support anything else”? Don’t you think it’s the quite the same approach MS took with ActiveX and IE? Everything that is not IE under Windows has been claimed “defective systems”. Unfortunately, Firefox itself has been counted as “defective”. Have Mozilla forgot their hard story and going to backstab those shared their goals?

> until you face the reality that we were *already* handling H.264 via Flash on desktop,
Flash is 3rd party addon and sunks slowly. It’s not a part of standards. So I don’t care about it at all.

> there’s no Flash on mobile,
And so what? Sure, apple nuts want some patent royalties from h.264. Let’s help them, yep?

> or shut up.
Never. I spend enough time on doing bugtracking for FF and promoting FF as I believed I share the same goals as Mozilla does. I’ve been here before even 1.0 appared, using Mozilla Suite and dreaming about web without activeX, web where everyone would be equal, regardless OS, country or whatever, doing my best to file the bugs and promote it. Now looks like Mozilla has abandoned idea that web standards should be non-discriminatory and royalty free. As for me I feel being backstabbed by a traitor when least expected. Pretty cool feeling, ouch!

As for non-ranting offers: have Mozilla attempted to discuss these matters with google, their teams, etc to clarify google’s position? Maybe there is better way to go, after all?

March 24th, 2012 at 16:45
Brendan Eich

@JohnSmith: Your Flash response is a non-answer. Using 3rd party OS H.264 decoders rather than a 3rd party plugin differs *how*, exactly?

Mobile browser market entrants must support H.264 from HTML5 video to gain share rather than die in the cradle. Your “And so what?” response is again a non-answer. Have the brains and guts to say “Mozilla should renounce mobile” and you’ll be giving a better (but in that event suicidal for Mozilla) answer.

Mouthing off in a blog comment gets you a “put up or shut up” from me. Cite your real name and contributions to the project, or at least make some smart suggestions, and you’ll get some respect. Nothing you wrote here so far merits any.

Just grinding your gears and ranting, without answering the two concrete questions I’ve posed (about how Flash vs. OS decoders differ, and about either entering the mobile market or renouncing it), is a waste of everyone’s time.

/be

P.S. I can’t comment on Mozilla/Google communications except to say we communicate frequently and at various levels and on many diverse initiatives, through standards bodies and directly.

March 25th, 2012 at 14:28
1. Zizzle
  
  Brendan,
  
  Your a smart man, I cannot understand how you keep missing this point.
  
  Flash is a plugin for a plugin API. There are other plugins that used that API. Flash plugin will someday go away. Flash was never distributed by Mozilla as being “part of the core web”.
  
  Mozilla supported an API more than Flash itself.
  
  There is a clear boundary. HTML is open, if you want something closed, use the plugin API.
  
  HTML has always been free open. HTML5 was sold as a way to free us from video locked in proprietary crap.
  
  H.264 in HTML5 is saying “Were OK with non-roalty-free stuff in HTML. We’ll implement in and support it indefinitely, and we’ll support whatever non-free codecs come next”.
  
  THAT is how Flash differs from H.264 being supported/shipped/including in Mozilla.
  
  March 25th, 2012 at 15:24
Brendan Eich

@Zizzle: that’s a fantasy.

(1) Flash is not going away on Desktop soon. Don’t hold your breath. Mozilla is not.

(2) Plugins are plugins, why does it matter if they’re for <object> or for <video>?

Give a detailed answer for (2) about why the element the plugin extends matters in reality, not in your future Flash-free fantasy land. Flash may go away, but there will be plugins of other kinds as far as I can see.

You keep using “Open” for HTML but again you are in fantasy-land. Do you mean to include touch events? Encumbered, Apple asserts patents, w3.org has set up a PAG. H.264, which is all over the “mobile web”? H.264 is “open” meaning multi-vendor/open-spec/multiple-implementations (even open source ones), but it is encumbered.

Neither multi-touch nor H.264 is going away any time soon on the mobile web, and as I keep saying and you keep ignoring, if Mozilla renounces both we fail on mobile devices and tablets and have a grim future.

Deal with the world as it is and move it in a better direction. Don’t insist on fantasy land where your wishes come true and free lunches get delivered forever without worry. That’s not the world we live in and you are not doing good by dreaming about it. You are actually doing harm.

/be

March 25th, 2012 at 17:18
1. Zizzle
  
  I can’t work out why you are nicer to the trolls that are calling you names than you are to me.
  
  I don’t expect you to agree with me, just acknowledge some points.
  
  > (1) Flash is not going away on Desktop soon. Don’t hold your breath. Mozilla is not.
  
  Adobe is winding down investment in the Flash creation tools and the players. Sure flash will be around for years, but Mozilla is looking down the barrel of having to support H.264 for decades and not even being able to ship a decoder.
  
  > (2) Plugins are plugins, why does it matter if they’re for or for ?
  
  It’s all about people’s perception.
  
  Allowing H.264 says “Hey, we’re willing to put any encumbered crap in HTML5 and support it indefinitely”.
  
  And so people will. And think it normal.
  
  The notion of having an unencumbered base for the web will be gone.
  
  I don’t disagree that Mozilla is a hard place on this, and haven’t all along.
  
  All I’m saying is that the shift away from the notion of encumbered stuff goes in this plugin API over here and is a 2nd class citizen is bad.
  
  Freely implementable HTML? Gone for good?
  
  March 26th, 2012 at 08:25
  1. Brendan Eich
    
    Sorry, we didn’t do the misdeed, and we couldn’t stop it. A good part of the blame (see my multi-touch and Steve Jobs points) falls on Apple. Not all, though.
    
    /be
    
    March 26th, 2012 at 17:04
Brendan Eich

Our predicament is a dilemma, so it can be analyzed under the “Flash dies fast on desktop” assumption too (even though I believe Flash will linger on desktop for a long while).

If Flash died on desktop tomorrow, only Firefox would fail to play H.264 HTML5 video. We’d be in the same boat as we find ourselves in right now trying to get users on Flash-free mobile devices. The lack of working H.264 video from HTML5 would, all else equal, make users switch to other desktop browsers.

Also if Flash does die on desktop quickly, it will be the death-blow of Steve Jobs on mobile, combined with the Bell’s-Law shift to mobile accelerating, that together finish off Flash on the desktop.

Open-source and free-software fans, people who actually know how patents are used and abused and therefore hate H.264, and other too-rare freedom-motivated users, will not save Mozilla. See my earlier comments about trends in growth vs. decline, top paid hacker retention, etc.

Only successfully shifting to mobile with B2G and Firefox on Android will save Mozilla, under the Flash-dies-fast hypothesis, as under the Flash-lingers-on-desktop-but-mobile-matters-most hypothesis.

This is why I dared @JohnSmith to embrace the only consistent alternative: Mozilla-renounces-mobile-because-mobile-doesn’t-matter.

Mozilla’s leadership finds renounce-mobile-and-thrive an extremely long-odds bet — I believe orders of magnitude longer than B2G or even Firefox on Android gaining significant numbers of users — and we’re not going to make it.

/be

March 25th, 2012 at 19:02
Brendan Eich

@JohnSmith: one last reply. You wrote:

“Now looks like Mozilla has abandoned idea that web standards should be non-discriminatory and royalty free.”

No, and of course my blog post said we are fighting on with Xiph and others to help keep WebRTC and better, future standards (ones that will beat H.264 in actual quality, unlike VP8) unencumbered.

I mentioned royalty-free patent pools, I’m not kidding. If you keep calling me traitor I’ll just ignore you and work on this anyway, but I think you should want to do better if you are commited to the good side. If Mozilla succeeds in the long run, you’ll look like a hot-headed child who stomped away crying at the first loss.

Indeed I can’t grok how you anonymous posters fail to see that *we lost* this battle. Insisting that Mozilla die on this hill leaves us dead, and no use in the future battles of the long war. Face it, we lost on H.264, but we need to live to fight other days.

Calling me a traitor for seeing this (along with many others who see it, including all of the Mozilla project’s leaders) is just kooky.

/be

March 25th, 2012 at 21:58
Denver Gingerich

@Brendan:

Which comments are you referring to when you say “my earlier comments about…top paid hacker retention”? I went through all of your comments on this post and couldn’t find anything about retaining top-paid hackers (or similar). I’m curious to know how “top paid hacker retention” plays into this discussion.

March 26th, 2012 at 08:06
Brendan Eich

@Denver: see “top talent turnover” (among other points) in

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-web/comment-page-2/#comment-1458122

I hope this is clear enough.

/be

March 26th, 2012 at 13:04
Denver Gingerich

@Brendan:

Yes, it is. Sorry I missed it. Thanks for the link.

March 26th, 2012 at 15:37
Cassandra

It’s simple, corporations are taking over the web.

Mozilla have to bend over or/and disappear. Now they decide there is no space for third party plugin, in the near future there will be no space for third party browser. It’s so obvious and clear.

I blame Apple for that, and all the appletards, his monopolistic strategy that people are happy to support will become essential to survive. It’s over but you don’t see it just yet (but remember to blame your coworker with a mac).

March 27th, 2012 at 19:53
1. Robert Nyman
  
  Personally, I believe it’s far from over – but yes, there is, and have always been, a threat that corporations would have too much control over the web.
  
  March 29th, 2012 at 11:26
Kise

I find it rather ironic that you guys dont have a problem supporting “flash” but yet unable to support h264, even tho people are moving to platforms that have h264 builit-in

our servers host about 3TB of videos all of them are in h264 we wont be converting our whole database to support less then 10% of our viewer base, and increase our spending, so they get to deal with flash, not all of us small companies have thousands of servers ready to convert or the manpower to do so

March 31st, 2012 at 01:58
1. Joel
  
  @Kise — In whatever capacity I can, I’m willing to volunteer to help you convert your 3 TB of videos to a web-freedom-respecting format (WebM or Ogg Theora), with my desktop and laptop computers. I can probably get some of my friends to help out too. It might be a slow process, but we can get it done!
  
  March 31st, 2012 at 11:47
Sam

How long till H.264 support lands in the Desktop Firefox version?

I’ve been having to use Internet Explorer everytime I visit YouTube and various other media sites. I’d like to stay with Firefox but I’m getting tired of always having to switch web-browsers because I run into something Firefox can’t do. It’s leading me to want to make Internet Explorer or Chrome my default web-browser.

April 4th, 2012 at 07:47
Jemski

All this grief about H.264! The bottom line is that Firefox will have this support, without paying licenses as it will use the OS codecs.I agree with Brendan that this was the correct move in the face of overwhelming market trends. In addition, the process of generating H.264 files is widely accessible (FFMPEG etc. etc.). Like it or not H.264 IS the standard. WebM is IMO a dead duck. You can always encode your content to WebM if you don’t like the situation. Firefox has not blocked proprietary plugins in the past, so how is the decision that bad? Having to rely of Flash rollback is actually more odious.

April 25th, 2012 at 14:10
Andre

Bullshit, lacking mp3 support lacking mp4 support, we are here in almost the end of the world, and still I have to develop a warning in each one of our LMS courses sites that firefox should not be used, Mozilla come on, release this for yesterday.

September 13th, 2012 at 13:13
avner

We’re developing a new video service (one to be hopefully used by billions of consumers :) ), and there’s no way we’re going to double our efforts by maintaining a dual javascript + flash codebase. Since the service is for live feeds it is not feasible to serve dual encoding, so h.264+aac is our only option, whatever the latency. The bottom line is that users using our service with any browser that doesn’t render h.264+aac in HTML5 will be requested to use another browser; with current browser trends and flash’s demise this policy will hardly churn our user base, yet it will allow us to build a far more attractive user experience. I personally use FF as my primary browser, and I truly wish that it will stay up to par with the rest of the market. I believe that if you will offer a method for embedding 3rd party decoders, we will all enjoy the results sooner than a home-grown solution. gstreamer, ffmpeg, x264, whatever, just let the community compete for gluing this hole.

December 9th, 2012 at 05:54
uffo

I dont know what developers are waiting, easier is to add ffmpeg library support in plugins folder and thats it, no horror gstreamer needed. Everyone would be easy to use ffmpeg plugins.No harm to mozilla because by default ffmpeg is NOT irepeat NOT included.

Lets hope someone comes to senses and adds ffmpeg support to FF18

December 10th, 2012 at 03:07
1. avner
  
  a plugin won’t help because ffmpeg can’t do the screen render, the rendering must be done by the browser in order to be well integrated with the entire page layout. What Mozilla should do is provide a media api that will enable dynamic codec loading (first of all decoding, but I believe they must allow also encoding to save WebRTC from the doom it is currently heading), as well as a media protocol api for stuff like multicast and p2p apps, and for backward compatibility with devices running rtsp, rtmp, etc. No need to invent the wheel here, it has all been done before. Since ffmpeg already contains most if not all relevant codecs and protocol handlers, a simple frameserver will probably do the job.
  
  BTW, the above method is imho the only “right” way to support the hw decoding that is already promised by Mozilla, otherwise we’ll be experiencing a format-support-matrix havoc, with Mozilla eventually having a backlog in supporting the various combinations of encoding profiles against new hardware decoders.
  
  December 10th, 2012 at 05:40
Test

U-turn?

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Google-and-MPEG-LA-make-a-deal-1818785.html

March 7th, 2013 at 13:35

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By Brendan Eich

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Where we are today

Mobile matters most

What Mozilla is doing

Our mission continues

About Brendan Eich

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Video, Mobile, and the Open Web

By Brendan Eich

Some history

Where we are today

Mobile matters most

What Mozilla is doing

Our mission continues

About Brendan Eich

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