video for the web
by Christopher Blizzard
Robert O’Callahan points out that there’s an article with quotes from Chris Double in it about Mozilla and Opera supporting video for the web.
Chris put up new video-enabled builds to test with about 4 days ago. Here’s a screenshot of it running on my Fedora 8 machine:
Back in August Chris also made a post about mixing video and SVG transformations and made a video of it. You can see a version on youtube or see the ogg version.
It’s great to see Alp doing similar work in WebKit for Linux. The question that I have is will Apple, who is by far the largest distributor of WebKit today, also be including video support with baseline Theora support so that we have at least one base open standard for video on the web? Otherwise it’s the format wars all over again and we’re all stuck with Flash or, even worse, Silverlight.
Well, the GStreamer back end I did in WebKit is based on Apple’s QuickTime integration. So it works, even better, on the Mac. But your question is, will there be a common codec for all browser: I sure hope, if not you are right: it will be useless.
As I understand it, Apple do not plan to ship Theora, apparently due to submarine patent fears. Whilst there is widespread agreement that a common format should be required it’s not at all clear that a format that everyone can agree on (and that has good enough compression to be worthwhile shipping) actually exists. There’s a W3C video workshop sometime soon which will, hopefully, lead to some progress on these issues.
Yeah, I know about the workshop. I’m hoping to hear good things from that as well. It just feels to me that there’s a unique opportunity here to make the lives of web developers easier and try and do some neat things with video that can unleash it from the plugin prison. If we don’t end up with a common codec, I suspect that video is still a win for people and we can offer compatibility via scripts. It still means it’s able to interact with the content around it and hopefully publishing is as easy as dropping a file into a directory.
There’s also the problem that devices can frequently decode H.264 in hardware. The same can’t be said for Theora..
Yep. Or mp3, or other random formats that can be done in hardware. Of course, create enough demand and maybe people will start building hardware to decode it.
Webkit on OS X uses QuickTime which in turn supports Ogg Theora / Vorbis if the XiphQT plugin (http://xiph.org/quicktime/) is installed. Right now Apple is not willing or even looking into shipping XiphQT.
Yeah, that was what I am worried about. It’s easy to say “it’s the operating system’s responsibility, we just pass through to whatever it provides” but given how inconsistent video is across operating systems I worry that it pushes that particular problem up into the browser.
Once again, video as an element is still a huge opportunity compared to plugins and helpers. I just hope that we can get the double win and end up with at least a free and open baseline.
There’s interesting position papers for the video workshop here:
http://www.w3.org/2007/08/video/positions/
Looking at Apple’s position paper, it looks like they are purposefully avoiding any mention of media encoding format…
I believe that the tag is purposefully designed to allow fallback through multiple codecs, although having multiple copies of the same media seems ugly it’s certainly better than being forced to use flash…
Yup, the build labeled “Ubuntu” works OK on Fedora. I wonder if there is any point in labeling it “ubuntu”, after all is a generic Linux tarball.
Greg alerts us that the language including OGG from the HTML 5 specification has been removed … at the concern of Apple and others:
http://gregdek.livejournal.com/20602.html
[...] Open formats are essential to a free and open web. [read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ] [...]
Video as an element is still a huge opportunity compared to plugins and helpers. I just hope that we can get the double win and end up with at least a free and open baseline.
it works, even better, on the Mac. But your question is, will there be a common codec for all browser: I sure hope, if not you are right: it will be useless.