Firefox 3.5 Beta Boosts Open Video Standard 281
bmullan writes "Dailymotion, one of the world's largest video sites, announced support for Open Video. They've put out a press release, a blog post on the new Open Video site, and an HTML 5 demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5. (You can get the Firefox 3.5 beta here.) Dailymotion is automatically transcoding all of the content that their users create, and expect to have around 300,000 videos in the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats."
Other sites with support exist as well (Score:5, Informative)
There are some other sites which have had <video> support for a while now, such as omploader [omploader.org]. It would be nice if some big sites like youtube get rid of flash too, but I'm not holding my breath.
Disclaimer: it's my site
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http://www.youtube.com/html5
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Yes, so just use the tag with mpg4(h.264).
Theora has improved (Score:5, Informative)
The h.264 codec that is used to stream their content is far and away better than that Theora garbage format.
The version of Theora that was in ffmpeg2theora 0.19 sucked. But Theora has come a long way since then, coming much closer to x264's fidelity [slashdot.org].
Re:Theora has improved (Score:5, Informative)
But Theora has come a long way since then, coming much closer to x264's fidelity.
You must have missed the retraction that was done when it was shown that they were calculating PSNR wrong for x264. Theora is nowhere near the quality of even a low-range h.264 codec.
'Publishing' the graph like that drew well-deserved scrutiny and unfortunately our own data was also off (although by considerably less). ffmpeg had another bug we didn't know about which caused it to mishandle the colorspace on x264 output, so the x264 PSNR value was too low by 1-4dB. Greg fixed the error in the data collection and immediately set about collecting new measures:
Re:Theora has improved (Score:5, Interesting)
You must have missed the retraction that was done when it was shown that they were calculating PSNR wrong for x264. Theora is nowhere near the quality of even a low-range h.264 codec.
I read that part. VP3 was garbage, as was the alpha version of Theora included in ffmpeg2theora 0.19. But even the corrected graph shows that Theora has gone from garbage to only 3 dB behind x264.
Sort of related, because a lot of people have DivX on their PC or in their DVD player: how does Xvid (an MPEG-4 ASP video encoder) compare to recent Theora and x264?
Re:Theora has improved (Score:4, Interesting)
I read that part. VP3 was garbage, as was the alpha version of Theora included in ffmpeg2theora 0.19. But even the corrected graph shows that Theora has gone from garbage to only 3 dB behind x264.
Yeah, on one single clip using the default settings of x264 which hardly give the highest attainable quality.
Sort of related, because a lot of people have DivX on their PC or in their DVD player: how does Xvid (an MPEG-4 ASP video encoder) compare to recent Theora and x264?
Theora can't beat XviD and XviD is inferior to x264.
Re:Theora has improved (Score:5, Interesting)
Theora can't beat XviD and XviD is inferior to x264.
Nothing beats Xvid for low bitrates. (The bitrates which create ~350MB videos)
It blurs more details than some other codecs, which lets it save on space and put more detail into important stuff.
h.264 gets quite blocky well before Xvid does; mind you, it does a better job preserving details when a higher bitrate is allowable. h.264 is often the preferred format for raw video footage, since at high bitrates it comes remarkably close to totally uncompressed video. (which is usually too big to do anything with)
For static content, VP7/VP8 are quite impressive, but VP3... not so much.
A presentation with slides occasionally changing works wonderfully in VP7. It'll use a couple hundred kilobytes on the first frame, plus any frame where it suddenly changes, but aside from that it won't use much/any bandwidth. The result is a video that looks like a 32bit gif animation(perfect quality).
On2's algorithms for figuring out which pixels changed are quite advanced; a 10 second video showing a slide was a couple kilobytes smaller than a 4 minute video showing the same slide... with x264 and xvid, I didn't get results like that even after spending a day tweaking everything.
On2's encoder also automatically removes minor jitter/angle abnormalities, so if the camera was being held by a person, the difference in size will be even more pronounced.
Too bad last time I checked, their encoder was single-threaded. I'm also betting "Superior codec for lectures." isn't the kind of endorsement they wanted. :P
3 dB (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:3 dB (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:3 dB (Score:5, Informative)
3 dB is a factor of ~ 1.41 times.
A factor of two is 6 dB.
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Depends on the reference. What is 0 dB? For sound pressure (for example), you're right. However 3 dB is a two-fold increase in watts (power).
Re:3 dB (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on what your working with. Just straight amplitude, 3dB = double. If you're working with power, then 6dB=double.
But.. audio uses the amplitude scale.
What does dB even mean in this context?
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But even the corrected graph shows that Theora has gone from garbage to only 3 dB behind x264.
only?! inst 3db about 50%? huge lag behind.
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only?! inst 3db about 50%? huge lag behind.
No, it's about 29%
(1 - (1 / 1.41)) * 100
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I think apples are much tastier than apple trees.
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yes, and no...
h264 will impose moneys to be paid to the MPEG-LA for each second of encoded video after 2010...
and that, my friend, is a big no-no
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Thought not.
Oh and soon there will be a fee on *providing* content in h.264.
And I left out all the other parts of the license agreement that firefox would be forced to follow before they would be given a license. And this would make it incompatible with GPL or even open source in general.
Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, bye bye karma... but..
How is this a Linux story/Firefox story? It's a new HTML standard. All browsers will support it, eventually.
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Re:Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Really, only Firefox? Because I could SWEAR it was working for me in Safari 4 with Youtube's HTML 5 demo site.
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IE8 tries to download openvideoframe.
FF3, Safari 4 and Chrome 2 say you need FF3.5 (dont have Safari3 to test),
So no, this wont work in Safari 4.
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Try going to http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/ [dailymotion.com] in Safari 4
That landing page requires FireFox, but the actual video pages work fine in Safari.
Re:Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Safari supports the HTML5 video tag, but doesn't include Theora support because Apple considers it a patent lawsuit magnet.
Thus Safari users are shown better compressed, but definitely patented, h264 streams on those sites.
IIRC some other WebKit browsers use GStreamer as the back end for their video tag support, and thus probably support Theora.
Re:Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Safari supports the HTML5 video tag, but doesn't include Theora support because Apple considers it a patent lawsuit magnet.
Ummm... Apple doesn't include it because it REALLY doesn't want a free video/audio codec becoming widely used.
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Wait, people who prefer to get money instead of pay money are loonies?
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Shit, in Canada the money is the loony.
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Just like they all support all portions of the previous 4 HTML standards, CSS, XHTML, etc...
Yeah, screw you too (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera has supported for a while now. Stupid site says I'm not allowed to open it cause I'm not using Firefox.
Hmm, does this seem familiar to anyone?
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:5, Informative)
Considering that the demo is intended to show what an emerging standard can do better than current ones, it's understandable that they want it to look the best it can, which means they're going to want people to watch it using the optimized platform and not something that's barely going to run their demo.
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that the demo is intended to show what an emerging standard can do better than current ones, it's understandable that they want it to look the best it can, which means they're going to want people to watch it using the optimized platform and not something that's barely going to run their demo.
So, they intend to showcase an open standard by publishing something that only works on a single "optimized" platform??
While I understand the pragmatism, it still seems odd.
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So, they intend to showcase an open standard by publishing something that only works on a single "optimized" platform??
While I understand the pragmatism, it still seems odd.
That the standard is open does not mean that every browser implements the standard properly yet. If you intend to showcase an emerging standard, you want to actually showcase the emerging standard. As this is such a showcase, it's perfectly reasonable to restrict presentation to those browsers capable of displaying the page as intended.
As I quoted earlier FTFA:
We would be happy to work more closely with developers from Webkit and Opera.
Based on that, I expect that we'll see similar demos running on those and other HTML5-capable browsers in the near future.
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Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:4, Insightful)
So...you're limiting Opera to official/final releases but Firefox Beta is fine?
How cute...
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For starters, one could check also devbuilds of Opera 10...would be good for integrity.
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not really the fault of Firefox or HTML5, it's the fault of the site, but really I do think HTML5 is indeed a step backwards.
It reduces separation of the content and presentation layers and it increases parsing ambiguity by relaxing standards. Of course, ambiguity is bound to lead to a performance hit too, albeit perhaps rather small so may not really matter. This is really not great news as far as the web is concerned as it's exactly what we've been fighting against for the last decade with reasonable success - the web is certainly more portable and accessible now than it used to be.
From what I've read previously of the HTML5 spec and comments surrounding it the idea is to make HTML development more accessible, but I'm not sure this is the right way to go about things. If we're going to increase the amount of people who can publish on the internet then a better option seems to be to improve the applications for doing this - whether they're web applications (i.e. Wordpress to Twitter to Facebook to MySpace) or whether we simply make better quality WYSIWYG desktop applications. If we do this on a spec that's better built for the real web developers - those who really need clear separation of concerns to ensure their sites are truly enterprise ready then we'll undoubtedly end up with a much better web.
With tags like and so forth added it's meant to increase clarity, but really it doesn't, because ultimately it will never fulfil everyone's needs, someone will want or so on, this means they're back to something like
meaning half your markup is in the div format and half not, or you could just ignore the feature but then effectively you may as well just carry on using XHTML anyway.
Let web developers develop and let users use applications to publish - it's worked so well as many Web 2.0 successes have shown.
Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall.
Standards should be lightweight, extensible and well defined, I would argued HTML5 is flawed in all of these areas, whereas with XHTML that is much less the case. HTML5 simply makes worse the very reasons we started to move away from HTML to XHTML in the first place.
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Let web developers develop and let users use applications to publish - it's worked so well as many Web 2.0 successes have shown.
Actually, it didn't. HTML 5 isn't actually suited for *web applications*. It is suited for *documents*. These two are entirely different entities - for example, there is no need for navigation buttons in a web application. HTML 5 reflects today's actual web needs much better. The web is no longer primarily made up of hypertext document, it is primarily made up of web applications.
Also, the market forcing a standard ends up with closed standards that require licensing and whatnot. Even if the specs are open.
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HTML 5 isn't actually suited for *web applications*.
For some reason, Slashdot submit ate the <.
It should read "HTML <"
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, no version of HTML is really suited for "web applications" but that's how we roll anyway.
I'd love it if documents and web applications were really treated as "entirely different entities" (i.e. the only thing they'd have in common is the set of transport layers).
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Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall.
According to the w3c site [w3.org], the members include:
I may be wrong, but I believe this encompasses all the major rendering engines on the web today. There are about 390 other members on the page too. I do not understand how this is a smaller clique of people than just having the developers of Webkit, Gecko, Trident and Presto doing their own things.
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"Dude, HTML 5 is still in the process of being finalized, and it makes a LOT of things much easier to develop."
So, is your point is that we shouldn't complain about HTML 5 because the standard isn't finished, but we can talk about how great it is because the standard .. how does that go again?
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Out of interest, do you feel we should have a longer term goal over and above HTML5 that does work to provide a markup language that really is actually good rather than good enough then?
I guess I just follow the school of thought that if you're going to do something properly you should do it right the first time if time permits and I do not personally see any urgency in getting a new spec out there when we have XHTML1 which is extensible enough.
I do not feel HTML5 actually brings anything to the table. HTML
The demo at Dailymotion are developed by Mozilla (Score:2)
From here: http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo [dailymotion.com]
Featuring:
* no flash involved
* only the new HTML5 video tag
* + javascript/CSS3
* + some svg filters too
* + animated PNG
* easy to maintain
* easy to extend
* demos and skin from Mozilla and Dailymotion
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, it's simply exchanging browser monopoly for browser duopoly - previously we've had "best viewed in IE", now it's "...in IE & Firefox". No real progress at all.
Posting from a place where Opera is quite popular (8.5% here, 31.6% in neighbouring country (yeah, more than Gecko - 24.5%); most countries in the region have less than 50% IE usage); trust me, browser-agnostic web is a much better idea.
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score:5, Informative)
> That's kind of misleading .... All the upcoming versions of browsers that aren't IE are getting support for parts of HTML5
Speaking of misleading - IE8 already supports parts of HTML5 and Microsoft have committed to support it "in full" in future versions. Can we tone the bias down a little?
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Opera can't afford MPEG, so they go with Theora
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Opera has different preview versions for different functionalities.
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Opera follows FF/wikimedia/dailymotion in supporting Theora. The YT demo is h.264, which needs Safari.
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Having support for it in some unreleased or nightly beta doesn't count.
You should probably tell the article submitter that.
Firefox 3.5 Beta Boosts Open Video Standard
Styling the UI? (Score:5, Insightful)
How does the open video format handle styling the UI? One of the reasons sites love flash for video so much is that it gives them complete control over how the video is presented, e.g. available controls, positions, colors and themes to match the rest of the page, etc. Then you have the more intrusive things, like Youtube's overlay ads, text captions, and suggested videos after playback finishes.
If open video means a widget that site owners have no control over, like Quicktime video embedding, then commercial site operators aren't going to be too keen on it.
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There's a default UI, but you can turn it off and use whatever HTML/CSS/XML/SVG you care to dream up.
Look up the controls attribute (Score:5, Informative)
If open video means a widget that site owners have no control over, like Quicktime video embedding, then commercial site operators aren't going to be too keen on it.
HTML 5 Video [whatwg.org] states that a page can ask the user agent to show a built-in control widget (by providing a controls attribute) or hide it and provide its own widget that controls the video player through its DOM (by omitting the controls attribute).
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How does the open video format handle styling the UI? One of the reasons sites love flash for video so much is that it gives them complete control over how the video is presented, e.g. available controls, positions, colors and themes to match the rest of the page, etc. Then you have the more intrusive things, like Youtube's overlay ads, text captions, and suggested videos after playback finishes.
If open video means a widget that site owners have no control over, like Quicktime video embedding, then commercial site operators aren't going to be too keen on it.
HTML5 video isn't a widget, which is the point. You can place anything you like over the top of the video and mess around with it using JavaScript. HTML5 video isn't a 'widget' in the same way that images aren't 'widgets'.
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finally (Score:4, Interesting)
Thank flying spaghetti monster. Flash is the only proprietary software I use. I can't wait for in browser ogg theora support to take off, and the online video market to embrace it. As soon as I see it working, I'll delete my google video account and self-host all my videos.
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Why promote an "inferior" product? (Score:3, Interesting)
While I am happy to see that Mozilla and Firefox are setting the standards, let me remind readers that previous evaluations have found the Theora encoders inferior compared to contemporary video codecs. In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.
Ohh wait a minute...There is a Slashdotter who noted [slashdot.org] this as well.
Frankly, it bothers me big time. Why not wait until the standard is "up to par" with the likes of Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe's Flash?
Re:Why promote an "inferior" product? (Score:5, Insightful)
Theora is great for embedded devices like cell phones since it is "cheap" when it comes to cpu cycles. For top quality video, Dirac should be used. I wonder when Firefox, Opera or Konqueror will have native support for Dirac.
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I wonder when Firefox, Opera or Konqueror will have native support for Dirac.
For Gecko (which means Firefox & friends): As soon as libogg supports it, which is pretty much
now. However, it isn't part of the upstream stable libogg yet, so it will not ship with Firefox 3.5,
but very probably show up in the version after that.
Sometimes worse is better (Score:5, Insightful)
In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.
But as of 2009, Thusnelda is coming soon. The Thusnelda encoder has already fixed [slashdot.org] some of the problems that Theora inherited from On2's VP3, thanks in part to the flexibility that Xiph added to the Theora bitstream format. Sure, it's still inferior to x264 (50% bigger rate for same distortion as of about a month ago), but it's improving.
Why not wait until the standard is "up to par" with the likes of Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe's Flash?
Because sometimes worse is better [wikipedia.org]. For example, worse can be better because it's Free and thus more available for deployment on devices other than PCs.
Re:Why promote an "inferior" product? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I am happy to see that Mozilla and Firefox are setting the standards, let me remind readers that previous evaluations have found the Theora encoders inferior compared to contemporary video codecs. In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.
The important thing is that we move toward open standards, away from proprietary solutions, because open standards allow us to do more cool stuff with them.
Remember RealPlayer? Remember all the bitching about what a piece of crap it was? People had to have it, even though it sucked, because a lot of content was only available in RealAudio format. Today, RealPlayer is all but gone, and you can play the same type of content using whatever software you like. Why? Because when Apple added Podcast support to iTunes, Podcasts suddenly became hugely popular, and virtually all of the content providers that used to offer only RealAudio now offer Podcasts instead. This means that users are free to choose whatever software they want, and competition will drive the software to improve.
In the same way, if web sites move away from Flash video players to using HTML5's video tag, it will mean users will no longer be dependent on Adobe's plugin to access the content. Unfortunately we still have patent issues to deal with; Ogg is unencumbered, but better quality codecs will be supported by most browsers, and if we can get content providers to get used to the idea of making their video content freely available (instead of wrapping it up in Flash), there can be competition among codecs too.
It's not a perfect world, but it's one step closer.
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>It would be nice if some free (as in beer) software could ship with a working video encoder that isn't illegal in some countries
It might be nice, but it ain't gonna happen, unless google or someone gets really altruistic and foots the bill or MPEG LA changes their mind about licensing.
Eye of the Beholder (Score:4, Insightful)
[smarmy]An objective evaluation of H.264, VP6 and WMV9 show that they are still not as free as Theora. While we hope that these codec's patent holders will continue to work on this defect and catch up, as of 2009 it is still premature to say that any of them will ever be "up to par" with Theora, which totally stomps those other codecs in all freeness tests. Why promote an "inferior" product?[/smarmy]
Now for a little less smarminess: we're talking about interchange formats, used on the fucking internet where you don't know what OSes and archs either side is using. I know Theora is portable to everything and usable by everyone. I don't know about those other codecs. If you want to use WMV9 for your internal security camera, that's totally fine, but on the internet how could something like that be useful? What's the use in serving video in a format that people can't play? Theora doesn't have that problem.
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Perhaps this happens because most of the discussion is focused on "getting rid of flash". If getting rid of flash is the key motivation for using it, who cares about quality?
Frame rate, looping, size... (Score:2)
Is it possible to set frame rate, size, and looping attributes inside the HTML? Does the video get anti-aliasing if the size is reduced?
How about lossless video? is that supported? What codecs are supported?
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try reading the spec: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video [whatwg.org]
I hope it doesn't a quad core CPU to run (Score:3, Informative)
While using a different player, the movies uses 10 time less CPU cycles. I can't wait for something to replace that bloat from Adobe.
Widespread adoption and annoying ads are over. (Score:5, Funny)
As soon as major sites such as youtube adopt this standard and drop that PoS adobe flash then flash will be practically relegated to crappy early 90s sites and annoying ads, which means that removing the flash plugin from any system will vastly improve your web experience. Good riddance.
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The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs (Score:5, Interesting)
The video tag is great, but it has a fatal flaw (actually two fatal flaws, but one is much more important.) The attempt to standardize on a single codec was correct, but now that it has failed the video tag becomes much less useful. At least with flash you can host a video and be sure that most of your audience will be able to view it. With the video tag, even when browsers that support it become widely available, which codec do you encode the video in? Already the browsers are going in different directions, with Safari using Quicktime to play h.264.
Hopefully it gets sorted out soon. Personally I would like to see h.264 adopted if the licensing issues can be sorted out.
I blogged about this issue a couple of days ago [sandfly.net.nz], if anyone is interested in a longer version of this comment.
(The other fatal flaw is that the video tag makes it easy for people to download the original video file - something none of the big content providers want. Yes, everyone knows how to do this with Flash videos, but the illusion of content protection is there.)
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Neither flash nor h264 will be opened unless competing alternatives gets strong enough. Implement html5 tags as options in your site and hope for the best.
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Personally I would like to see h.264 adopted if the licensing issues can be sorted out.
I'm sure there's a non-GPL implementation of h.264 that microsoft can use. Licensing shouldn't be a problem at all.
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The attempt to standardize on a single codec was correct, but now that it has failed the video tag becomes much less useful. At least with flash you can host a video and be sure that most of your audience will be able to view it. With the video tag, even when browsers that support it become widely available, which codec do you encode the video in?
Yeah, just like the lack of a single image format killed the <img> tag right? I think we'll see browsers coalesce around two or three codecs that all of them will end up supporting, plus they will all likely also hook into the OS to support whatever codecs it provides. Sure, it would have been nice if Theora was left as the blessed default, but with YouTube and DailyMotion supporting it you can bet it will become the de facto standard anyway.
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Sure. We can look forward to content that is state-of-the-art garage quality.
Major Typo in the Article Title (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe I misread, but it seems to me that they're claiming this is somehow standards-based. This is a working draft that's basically implemented in a single browser... and it's not even complete. It's just amazing how everyone has already started trashing Microsoft for not implementing this "standard" when it's a complete paper tiger. This is an unfinished standard with no means of standard implementation.
This is not "standards" behavior. This is calling random firefox features "standards" while Opera and We
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Safari and Opera are implementing this too. However article itself is too "Firefox hyped". Opera started playing with long before Firefox, AFAIR.
"standard" (Score:3, Insightful)
While this new "standard" format is open, it's also something with almost zero support, especially across legacy browsers. /with/ new javascript capabilities.
This means Flash is here to stay, even
Any License that will Prevent Transcoding? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a really naive question.
Is there any License that will prevent transcoding original video produced by me, to another format, like .flv?
I'd like to make my videos open source only, including the "container".
It's about time (Score:2)
We've badly needed a system with support for open video formats, and without
the Flash prerequisite, for a long time now. This could potentially
dramatically increase FreeBSD/Linux's market share, as well. I've been
without Flash support since I first installed a month ago, and altho I've
since learned how to install it for FreeBSD, it is not a trivial process.
I am grateful to the Firefox developers for making this change, and can only
hope that YouTube in particular decide to support it, since that is probabl
Poor performance of Firefox's audio and video (Score:3, Informative)
So far, I have been completely and utterly unimpressed by Firefox's built in audio and video features. I'm using 3.5 Beta.
Whenever it plays a WAV file, it plays for a few seconds, then skips audio and runs at 100% CPU usage, then plays again. Sounds like a really bad buffering issue, like they can't get something as basic as buffering correct. Audio which is intended to loop does not. OGG Vorbis files also skip the same was as WAV files.
Video performance is dismal, even worse than Flash player. Videos skip and take more CPU power to play back than other players do. Upscaling the video is done slowly through software, even though Overlays surfaces have been around since 1997 with the NVidia Riva 128.
From what I've seen, in terms of CPU usage, the best video player for the web is Windows Media Player, using non-microsoft video codecs (FFDshow).
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However, adobe may not charge for flash applet generation and google may not pay a single penny to adobe for the flash portion. If that is the case (which is more likely as a "free" media standa
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IIRC, Flash won over Shockwave because the developer had to pay to use Shockwave but didn't for Flash.
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IIRC, Flash won over Shockwave because the developer had to pay to use Shockwave but didn't for Flash.
They were made by the same company: Macromind, then Macromedia, then Adobe. And until Macromedia/Adobe documented the SWF format and later released Flex SDK, you did have to pay for Flash authoring software (mid to upper three figures USD) to make SWF files.
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So what if it's cheaper than employee lunches? What does that have to do with anything?
If they saved a few millions a year, that is more money they can throw at another project that they actually control
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So what if it's cheaper than employee lunches? What does that have to do with anything?
That the licensing fees they would pay would be a pittance in their entire budget.
If they saved a few millions a year, that is more money they can throw at another project that they actually control
They already have 20 billion in cash. A few extra million is a drop in the bucket.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, because Flash boasts huge market penetration (http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/). Of course it's Adobe's own market research, but it's probably true that they have most of the market in their grasp.
Add to that the fact that IE still has the largest browser market share.
Those two practically guarantee that Google will stick with Flash for most part. Maybe they will create a dynamic service which would prefer support over flash, but Flash is here to stay for quite a while longer.
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I would assume that most users would prefer not to have to download Flash plugins..
Most users are probably more inclined to download the flash plugin that happens automatically for them versus downloading a whole new browser to get HTML5 video tags to work.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but if all browsers have HTML 5 code in them, which will happen in the next year, then they won't have to download anything extra.