Building the world we want, not the one we have
8 August 2008Thanks to the hard work of Chris Double, Robert O’Callahan, Johnny Stenback, and many others the <video> and <audio> tags along with native support for Theora video and Vorbis audio are currently enabled in the Firefox nightly builds. This will ship in Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 coming later this year.
This is not new news but I did want to provide my perspective on why this is important.
If you read the HTML1.0 specification from 1993 carefully you’ll notice it doesn’t specify the image format even though there are dozens of them. GIF is excellent for logos, line drawings, etc but is limited to 256 colors and is thus non-ideal for photos. JPEG is lossy-compressed and thus great for photos but less suitable for vector art and drawings. PNG came later to work around some issues in GIF and wasn’t fully and properly supported in Internet Explorer until version 7. Before PNG was fully natively supported in all browsers there were many plug-ins to fill the gap.
A patent encumbered technology (GIF) critical to the web was replaced by a truly open and free format (PNG) first through plug-ins and then quickly after natively in browsers. The HTML specifications did not specify a particular image format but a few became ubiquitous through common usage.
This is where I believe we are going with <video> and <audio> tags. Right now hundreds of millions of users can view videos in their web browsers, but it requires one of several proprietary plug-ins which support proprietary formats to play. This means if you build a website with flash/silverlight/WMV video it will not work on millions of iPhones and other mobile browsers. It may or may not work on Linux. Getting it to work requires lawyers, money, and business agreements between multiple parties.
By shipping HTML5 <video> and <audio> with royalty free open source formats in Firefox we hope to make these formats ubiquitous through common usage. Royalty free open source formats will allow all web-browser makers to enable native video and audio playback on all platforms, devices, and environments, without restrictions. They will allow all open source products to embed native video and audio playback without fear. They will allow web authors to use audio and video freely in their websites without worrying about whether a particular platform has a particular version of a particular plug-in installed. As an end-user we soon won’t have to worry about whether we can watch video content from a particular website on our new phone, tablet, or PC because all systems can support open video standards. Perhaps I’ll be able to watch the 2010 Olympics on my mobile phone.
True ubiquitous access to content. This is the world we want.
There’s not much content encoded in Theora/Vorbis at this time - what’s the point?
Ten years ago there wasn’t any content in H.264 but it is fairly common now. Until Flash video became common there wasn’t a ton of video content encoded in VP6. New content is created all the time and transcoding to Theora/Vorbis is quite simple. Shortly after Firefox 3.1 ships there will be almost 200M desktops capable of playing this kind of video. Content should follow quickly.
I can already watch video using Flash, Quicktime, Sliverlight, etc so what’s the point?
Having native video/audio support as part of HTML5 along with open source and royalty free formats means that every browser vendor, device, etc can support this format. If adopted widely it means that web authors will soon be able to use one format to target all devices. As a native web technology video can now be intermixed with all other advancements in the web as seen here.
Doesn’t Theora kill battery life and/or eat CPU time?
Many systems today ship with some form of hardware acceleration for H.264, MPEG-2, and other formats which reduces their CPU usage and thus battery usage. With adoption of the format we expect Theora to benefit from similar hardware acceleration in the near future. In the meantime HD video at 5-6MBp playes smooth on modern system without any hardware assistance.
Doesn’t the video quality of Theora suck?
It is very watchable and getting better all the time with work such as this.
Are there any legal issues?
We’ve done a careful legal analysis of all known issues and to the best of our knowledge Theora and Vorbis do not pose any patent risks. They’ve been around for a while with no issues; however, there is always the risk of what folks call submarine patents but this risk occurs for every software developer writing any kind of software. There’s also always a risk someone asserts a claim, which doesn’t necessarily mean that the claim has any merit. We believe there are no issues, but if push comes to shove we can: i) evaluate any claim and determine if its meritorious; ii) use the power of the web to gather relevant prior art to demonstrate invalidity; and iii) remove or disable the functionality quickly if necessary as a last resort.
What about HD?
Theora can play and encode HD content. Based on current implementations the video quality is not as good as H.264 but much can be improved. In addition we’ve been talking to the fine folks behind Dirac and I’ve seen some very impressive looking 720P videos encoded in Dirac. The good news is once we get the basic video/audio infrastructure into Firefox adding new codecs/formats will be relatively straightforward. This is just the starting point to get baseline video capabilities ubiquitous.
Why didn’t you just license H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, or <insert favorite codec here>?
We looked very carefully at this option and we could have very well done this for all “Official” Firefox binary releases at significant monetary cost to us. But this had several issues:
- It would require the inclusion of close-sourced code into Firefox.
- Any derivatives of Firefox or Mozilla code would *not* be able to ship it.
- No other open source project would be able to use it.
This would solve the problem solely for Firefox users. We are more interested in solving the problem for the entire web.
Why not just use native Directshow/Quicktime/GStreamer on each platform?
We are working on this as well as you can see here, here, and here. However, this approach has two major limitations: a) codec support varies dramatically from platform to platform and b) this does nothing for phones or other systems. We wanted a baseline format that all web authors can count on in all environments.
This is awesome, how do I help?
Download a Firefox nightly build here and test it out here or on Wikimedia Commons. Produce native content in Theora/Vorbis. Help transcode other formats to Theora. Tell your friends.
103 Responses to “Building the world we want, not the one we have”
August 8th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Admire the effort & principal but it wont take off with inclusion just in Firefox.
H.264 is pretty much king of the hill it destroys all other encoders in terms of quality (note: don’t compare against Apples 264 encoder as there’s is the worst).
The odd man out Microsoft will be including H.264 in the next version of Windows or Windows Media Player. H.264 support was pulled at the last moment from a recent update to Vista media capabilities so its going to happen.
Flash has already gone H.264 along with DivX 7 which is also H.264.
With the massive industry support behind H.264 not to mention swarms of H.264 encoders that cater to every possible use & market (especially content authors who are the most important), Theora has a huge mountain to climb.
The only way it will ever get traction is if someone convinces Microsoft to include support for Theora in Windows Media Player/Internet Explorer, there is no way anyone is going to switch away from H.264 en mass just because of principle.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
from MPEG-LA’s terms —
* Internet broadcast (non-subscription, not title-by-title) – Since this market is still developing, no royalties will be payable for internet broadcast services (non-subscription, not title-by-title) during the initial term of the license (which runs through December 31, 2010) and then shall not exceed the over-the-air free broadcast TV encoding fee during the renewal term.
So post 2010, it won’t even be free as in beer.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
@The Dude: You may be right, but you’ve missed the point (along with many others I’ve read). The issue isn’t “quality” but the quality/bit ratio.* If Theora’s quality is within about 50% of h.264, then the web will be able to digest (in terms of bandwidth requirements) the alternative format — at least, under the right circumstances.
What are the right circumstances? Anything that promotes the use of the format. This consists of 3 important things:
* Tools
* Player support
* Content
I can’t comment on tool support, but it sounds as if it’s workable, albeit with a lot of room to improve in terms of ease of use and popular encoder support. Speed might also be an issue, I’m not sure.
Player support will receive a massive boost from inclusion in Firefox. Ideally, Mozilla (yes, Mozilla) should create and promote simple-to-install “plugins” for other browsers, the way Vlad has been trying to add support for canvas in IE. This could be as simple as writing a .js file that looks for tags and replaces them with s + installing the codecs if missing. Standalone player support *will* follow if this is done (look at how common .flvs have become). One problem: I notice that Firefox’s implementation doesn’t appear to have a full screen mode. This is critical for adoption.
Wikipedia is one great source of current and future content. Somebody should also set up a more liberal video sharing site based on Ogg Theora vids exclusively — the idea is *not* to create a popular site that might replace YouTube, but rather to stimulate the creation of new Theora content.
Ultimately, Dirac looks like it will beat H.264 in quality/bitrate. It would be a natural complement to Theora today, and would be its eventual successor once processing speed is less of an issue.
I note that nobody (beyond Apple & Nokia) seem to have an issue with Vorbis…
* Note that efforts like this (http://www.osnews.com/story/19019/Theora-vs.-h.264) are of no practical value in assessing /desired/ quality, because the author didn’t ask users whether the quality is acceptable. Something similar happened with HD video — which is why uptake of pure HD (i.e. ignoring special features, multi-channelling etc.) has been so ridiculously slow, because it turns out most people don’t care for the higher quality.
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Ogg/Theora open source?
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August 18th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Regarding “Not Much Content”, you can find a list of videos online that were encoded with the Ogg Theora codec here:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos
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