two cool things: ogg support in mozilla and canvas for IE
by Christopher Blizzard
Two cool things coming out at the summit today.
First, Mozilla is committing to include native support for OGG video and audio in its next release that includes support for the video element tag. (Very likely to be Firefox 3.1 if there no huge change in course.) The code landed for ogg support last night. I suspect that the effects of this will take a long while to be felt but it’s a great first step in bringing open video to the web by delivering it to a couple hundred million people around the world.
Second, Vlad has written a native ActiveX control for IE that implements the canvas tag. In order to use it you just have to include a little .js snippit in your page and object tag that pulls in the control. It’s fully scriptable, of course, and the source code will be made available for other people to see and improve. With this control it means that canvas will be available on all major browsers, even though Microsoft has yet to implement it. We’ll have more details once Vlad makes a post on it.
Update: Vlad has made a complete post about the IE Canvas code.
Update 2: Chris Double has a post about the Theora backend.
Great news!
Very, very good news! It’s great to see this.
It’s great that we finally have integrated video support for a Free Software codec. Finally, a better alternative to Flash players — woohoo!
Allegedly, Microsoft has not implemented the canvas tag because Apple has claimed rights over some of the related IP
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-March/010129.html
[...] This is awesome news! Hooray for Mozilla! [...]
Wahoo! Fantastic, I’ve been hoping to hear of this for ages!
And nice job improving IE for the IE team! ;)
[...] night, out-of-the-box support for the Ogg Theora (video) and Ogg Vorbis (audio) open format codecs was enabled on the mainline Firefox development branch. Here’s the exact diff. These two codecs work in conjunction with the new <video> and [...]
Very cool, I made a test page http://www.skierpage.com/moz_bugs/test_audio_video_tags.html using some OGG files from Wikimedia Commons.
Works great, though autoplay=”false” and controls=”true” don’t seem to work.
The canvas tag, while definitely a better option than Flash, seems mildly suspect – I hope it won’t sway people away from styling their content with CSS and back to hardcoding content semantics into e.g. Javascript (or however the canvas is controlled).
Wikimedia/Wikipedia, by the way, pushes Theora/Vorbis BIG TIME. Basically because they’re the free formats that are acceptable on Wikimedia Commons. The FUDmeisters may have gotten them excluded by name from the HTML5 spec, but they can be taken as read and Apple and Nokia can just play catchup.
[...] Christopher Blizzard » Blog Archive » two cool things: ogg support in mozilla and canvas for IE (tags: firefox ogg) This entry was written by delicious, posted on July 30, 2008 at 5:33 pm, filed under del.icio.us. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « A petition to take back our freedoms [...]
[...] Chris Blizzard reports from this week’s Mozilla Summit: Firefox will natively support the Ogg Theora video format! [...]
[...] This really gives a kick in the pants to those who take short cuts and lose sight of software freedom. Kudos to Mozilla who actually has the critical mass to effect real change by endorsing Vorbis and Theora on all of their OS platforms. Soon it will be up to the content producers to make open formats ubiquitous. Having a delivery channel which people use on a regular basis means we can finally work from start to finish without touching a closed format if we so choose. That to me is freedom – not forcing everyone to encode in open codecs, but to allow for those who prefer open formats the ability to deliver their content without any barriers between them and their end users. There are those who don’t want to see this happen but I have to believe that momentum is starting to swing our way. [read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ] [...]
[...] Firefox 3.1 is about to support the HTML5 <video> element, and Opera already does. This means that both those browsers will have support for inline video in the browser without plugins. As usual, Internet Explorer lag behind, and sadly Safari does as well — they’re fast at implementing lots of stuff over at the WebKit team, but Apple don’t like easy video that isn’t in a patented format, so the Safari <video> support only plays stuff that QuickTime can do. Hopefully both corporate browsers will come around, or perhaps the WebKit team can add <video> support for Ogg Theora and then the Safari team can take it back out again if they need to — since Epiphany, the Gnome browser, is going to be WebKit, it would be great to have native video support in WebKit. (Do the WebKit Gtk hackers have commit access to the WebKit source in order to add this, I wonder?) [...]
[...] other news today, Firefox 3.1+ is gaining native support for the free and open OGG audio/video format! Could this be the final turnover that the OGG format needs to gain wide user margin? Let’s [...]
[...] is pretty damn cool: It was announced at the Firefix Plus summit today that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the [...]
[...] stuck with Flash. And Theora is the only accepted format on Wikimedia Commons. Posts: Greg Maxwell, Christopher Blizzard, Chris [...]
@skierpage: the boolean attributes should be controls=”" or controls or controls=”controls”, I guess to avoid confusion between on/off/true/false in different context
IE Canvas control = hell yes
[...] “Mozilla is committing to include native support for OGG video and audio in its next release that includes support for the video element tag.” [http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=492] [...]
[...] two cool things: ogg support in mozilla and canvas for IE [...]
I am obviously in the minority here, but I believe the whole point of Firefox was to be a smaller, faster, simpler browser. I don’t think having built-in video codecs is a good idea, at all.
I have nothing against video support, nor Theora. And I very much approve of open standards/source technologies to fight against proprietary ones (like MPEG, Flash, etc) But those would best be handled by external applications as plugins or helper apps!
Keep it simple. Keep it clean. The less code the:
1) less download size
2) easier to compile
3) easier to port to other platforms
4) fewer bugs
5) less possible security venerabilities
6) less memory used
7) faster loading/startup time
8) more customizable
[...] יודעי דבר מדווחים כי דפדפן הקוד הפתוח המוביל, פיירפוקס, [...]
Haha, finally made Havoc happy. My job is done here.
On the download size question it’s always a trade off. We’ve got a very small download size (go compare FF for Windows and Safari for Windows as examples) and the OGG stuff isn’t all that big. But it’s not zero, either. Video support is worth that cost.
The fact is that video is part of the web. Right now it’s done with flash. We should be doing it as part of the browser. So go compare the decoders for OGG with a flash download if you want to compare download sizes.
Great! I have been podcasting in ogg format for two years and my listners always had difficulty in listening it.
Thank you for this! (Ogg)
[...] that Mozilla Firefox 3.1 (codenamed Shiretoko) will support Open Video Format. Christopher Blizzard posted about Mozilla’s commitment to include OGG video and audio support for the video element tag. [...]
That’s fantastic news!
Next step: how about adding Schroedinger support? That’s a pretty good free video codec, too. Might even be higher quality.
I’ll second Dan Kegel’s question on what about adding Dirac video support through the Schroedinger implementation?
Great start with Theora for sure though :)
[...] av en viss tillverkare och att kreativiteten bland utvecklare kan bli större. I dagarna har också inbyggt stöd för de öppna ljudstandarderna Ogg Vorbis och Ogg Theora i kommande versioner av Fire… presenterats. Det är tänkt att de användas med de nya video- och audio-taggarna i HTML 5 (som [...]
I don’t know what the status of Dirac support is. But keep in mind that the backends here are pluggable. If you want it supported the first step would be to talk to Chris Double. Step two is to open a bug and step three is to start writing code.
On Linux with a gstreamer backend if the system has Dirac support you’re going to get it anyway. But if we’re able to ship mac + windows support along with the browser that’s where the real impact will be. So you have to worry about those as platforms.
What’s with all the ‘bloat’ trolling regarding Theora, here and elsewhere? It’s the 21st century and video is part of the web now, get over it.
Chris already made this same point but I’d like to echo and emphasise it. Go down this list posted earlier and mentally compare Open Source built-in Theora versus the proprietary, closed source, non-64-bit, unavailable for your obscure platform or handheld, punch-the-monkey advertising platform that everyone currently uses for video and audio streaming.
> Keep it simple. Keep it clean. The less code the:
1) less download size
2) easier to compile
3) easier to port to other platforms
4) fewer bugs
5) less possible security venerabilities
6) less memory used
7) faster loading/startup time
8) more customizable
For those not keeping score, Theora wins — big time. And don’t forget vorbis too!
For those asking about Dirac support, yes I’m looking at it. It would be dirac embedded in an Ogg container, using Vorbis for the audio. The ideal solution would be for this to be added to the Oggplay library I use and I’ll liase with annodex to see if anyone else is already doing that (in which case we’d get it for free essentially).
[...] bir dahaki sürümde yerleşik Ogg video (Ogg Theora) ve ses (Ogg Vorbis) desteği vereceğini açıkladı. Büyük bir değişiklik olmazsa, Mozilla Firefox’un 3.1 sürümüyle gelecek olan Ogg [...]
[...] we’ve announced ogg support for the next version of Firefox I thought it might be worth it to point out that there has been a lot of recent work to improve the [...]
> I don’t think having built-in video codecs is a good idea, at all.
Disagree. Add them, but only as few as possible -> Theora & Dirac. IIRC Theora decoder compiles to cca 64 KiB … cca 1% of FFX size, definitely worth the benefit.
But why not brew a FFX-light without AV, JS, spell-check (BTW: stop underlining the word “Theora” !!!) … etc. ?
> What’s with all the ‘bloat’ trolling regarding Theora, here and elsewhere?
> It’s the 21st century and video is part of the web now, get over it.
You are very wrong here. Not Theora is the bloat, the Adobe “Flash” mess + JS + WMW + MPEG-H-xxx + all_other_silly_codecs is the bloat. Get the facts right !
[...] September 19, 2008 Ahoy mateys of the open source seas! Here’s another thing coming in Firefox 3.1: open source HTML 5 video support! This is going to bring some cool new functionality to developers, such as being able to access video elements through the DOM, intersperse video with other web content, and manipulate playback with JavaScript – all without the need for lubber bilge monkey plugins (see blizzard’s post). [...]
[...] the exciting news about Firefox supporting Theora, the open video codec, I wanted to follow up with more good news. This is kinda geeky stuff, [...]
Firefox 3.1 is a blessing for OGGTV.com. OGG/THEORA content on the web, just got super-easy for everyone.
[...] it is completely awesome to click on Dan’s video and have it Just Open in my firefox nightly. Big thanks to the firefox folks in taking the jump to include <video>- I’m not sure it [...]
You guys rock!
Ogg Vorbis and Theora are a great great start!
But I also think to be really competitive you will need Dirac (Schrödinger?) at some point.
@Chris: I am totally excited that you are looking at it.
Maybe Mozilla could convince Google to incorporate those codecs in Chrome too. And then Google could convince Apple ;)
And then the world could convince Microsoft … Aww, dreaming is so nice ;)
Make Youtube HD dirac only!
[...] “Mozilla is committing to include native support for OGG video and audio in its next release that includes support for the video element tag.” [http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=492] [...]
Cool. Now to Opera and WebKit.
[...] Mozilla employee Christopher Blizzard announced, that (most likely) Firefox 3.1 will feature Ogg audio and video support for all [...]
[...] Mozilla employee Christopher Blizzard announced, that (most likely) Firefox 3.1 will feature Ogg audio and video support for all [...]
[...] via Christopher Blizzard · two cool things: ogg support in mozilla and canvas for IE. [...]
[...] Mozilla Firefox 3.1 will support Ogg Ogg support in mozilla Theora Video Backend for Firefox [...]