- Sunday, 8 November 2009
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When anything goes wrong Lord Button is brought out of retirement - Tony Benn
Mozilla champions Open Source Web video
THE MOZILLA FOUNDATION is putting its significant clout and cash behind an initiative to create an open video format on the Web which would let users watch streaming video all over the Internet without having to use a plug-in.
In order to achieve this, the Mozzarella foundation is passing around $100,000 in grant money through the non-profit Wikimedia foundation for the development of Open Source video codec, Theora and its noisy twin, Vorbis, the audio format.
Mozilla also said its upcoming Firefox 3.1 browser would have native support for Theora which can be directly embedded into web pages, much in the same way images are. To watch video clips, users won't need special software, or a plugin, they'll just need a browser which supports the format.
By the number of Mozzarella blog posts on the matter, it would appear the issue of OS video codecs is an important one to the firm, with Mozilla director of evangelism Christopher Blizzard waxing lyrical about its virtues.
Blizzard says that, although videos are available on web sites like Youtube, "they don't share the same democratised characteristics that have made the web vibrant and distributed". Blizzard continues by stating the importance of being able to deliver video encoding technology without needing such irritating little things as permission or licenses. "It should be available on a royalty-free basis and without encumbered documentation."
Per-unit royalties, large up-front fees and the encoders needed to create video content in the right formats is prohibitively expensive in Blizzard's opinion, and Mozilla, he claims, hopes to change that.
Three firms not likely to be dancing for joy at Mozilla's announcement are, of course, Adobe, Apple and Microsoft, who hold a tight monopoly over contemporary media playback and streaming technologies. All three receive substantial licensing payments for videos encoded in Flash, MPEG-4 or Windows Media Video (WMV), something they'd rather not give up, especially in the current economic climate.
True, Adobe's Flash Player plug-in is free and a lot of its code has been released under a generous OS license, but for content creators, Adobe's authoring tools are still incredibly expensive and, if you want to flood the web with Flash, you gotta have the cash (not to mention the proprietary, enterprise-class server software).
It's not just video seeing itself get tied up in an ugly jumble of proprietary file formats either. Audio is in a similarly nasty situation. Any software maker today who attempts to build a programme capable of playing MP3 audio or high-definition H.264 video is slapped with a hefty licensing fee to pay the patent holders.
That isn't the case for either Theora or Vorbis, both of which fall under the umbrella of an Open Source license.
The only problem is, it will probably take a long time before users get used to the idea. After all, only 21 per cent of all web users even use the Firefox browser, and despite the fact Opera too has said it will support Theora for video playback in the latest versions of its browser, that's a long way off from being a 'universal standard'.
It is, however, a good start, and like all things Mozzarella, a foxy, cunning plan. µ
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yeh very pretty, lets come to buisness whats skweesing rate of this two bitches Theora and Vorbis ...
"Any software maker today who attempts to build a programme capable of playing MP3 audio or high-definition H.264 video is slapped with a hefty licensing fee to pay the patent holders.
That isn't the case for either Theora or Vorbis,"
Browsers cannot really drive this, however. The real driver comes from their adoption by popular online video and audio hosting services. It may be incomprehensible to those of us who still use the web primarily to look up very specific information about encryption algorithms, or content filtering, but the poilices of sites such as Facebook and Myspace may have a far wider influence on how these technologies progress than the widely derided image these services may have in the IT press might suggest (ordinary web users actually DO want to know what flavour soup, their mate Gladys, from accounts, is having for lunch today, oddly enough). Browser adoption could be driven by a user's relative ability or inability to view some footage of a cat opening a door, in some ingenious way on their new phone, without having to download a 56 MB plug in, first. Hosters of such services may further see advantages in using Theora as a standard, if the current gorillas in the marketplace start pushing for the removal of content that can be shown to have been generated using pirated copies of their software (and I somehow feel that the amount of pirated proprietary software, in use around the world is about to spike upwards, sharply, for some reason). I know Opera have been looking at VLC - which supports Theora as one of it's core codecs - for some years, and are probably well ahead with what ever plans they have, knowing them. Factor in, also, Opera's much higher level of use in mobile devices and other non-traditional devices (which is surely the natural home of streaming video content, showing old Monty Python sketches, footage of hilarious and rather painful-looking accidents, and the missives of various presidents, popes, and pious terrorists).
You can encode video files into FLV format using the free FFMPEG
You can distribute these FLV files either as progressive download, which does not require any server side technology, or , if you want streaming, you can use the open source free RED5(the equivalent of Flash Media Server)- in fact you can even use a PHP file for streaming
Adobe, Apple and Microsoft have had it their own way for far to long, competitors ?? i dont think so, these three have well and truly stitched up the vast majority of web media with their own flavours of codecs and DRM infested garbage, not to mention their invasion of joe publics privacy with their stealth/silent methods of reporting home, particularly adobe's flash, which, when installed without asking permissions opens up your rigs security to every webmaster and their dogs by default, its about time this cartel (which should probably include javaFX/runtime too) were seriously investigated and their collusion and underhanded practices stopped grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr........../rant over...............ahhhhhhh thats better :O)
Wow, but I hope that will be less code and more compatibility.
An let us all move to linux for better security. At the right time.
Yawnfest.
yet again, Firefox is playing catchup.
Maybe if Youtube and Google Video offered 'higher quality' versions of their videos (a bit like the so called 'high definition' videos they currently on Youtube) then it may increase the user base of both Firefox/Opera and the adoption of Ogg Theora & Vorbis (especially if they made some dead easy to use tools available, or I dunno, added the upload in high quality option to something like Picassa).
Rob
Isn't the Theora codec based on an old On2 codec? I believe it was version 2 of their codec. Wasn't there some concern for the open source community about this? As in, they can turn around and pull the plug on the whole thing?
Please Phil Radelat, stop spreading misinformation. A simple Google search would have revealed you that OGG Theora is PATENT FREE.
ON Tecnologies gave away its copyrights and patents and released its ON2 codec as GPL software.