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two cool things: ogg support in mozilla and canvas for IE

July 30, 2008 in Firefox, Mozilla, OGG, Open Web, Video | 46 comments

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.

  2. Ralph Giles’s avatar

    Ralph Giles on July 30, 2008 at 1:36 pm

    Very, very good news! It’s great to see this.

  3. Cyde Weys’s avatar

    Cyde Weys on July 30, 2008 at 1:47 pm

    It’s great that we finally have integrated video support for a Free Software codec. Finally, a better alternative to Flash players — woohoo!

  4. Anonymous’s avatar

    Anonymous on July 30, 2008 at 2:40 pm

    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

  6. Christopher Allan Webber’s avatar

    Christopher Allan Webber on July 30, 2008 at 3:56 pm

    Wahoo! Fantastic, I’ve been hoping to hear of this for ages!

    And nice job improving IE for the IE team! ;)

  8. skierpage’s avatar

    skierpage on July 30, 2008 at 5:02 pm

    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.

  9. Anders Feder’s avatar

    Anders Feder on July 30, 2008 at 5:43 pm

    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).

  10. David Gerard’s avatar

    David Gerard on July 30, 2008 at 5:53 pm

    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.

  18. hdh’s avatar

    hdh on July 31, 2008 at 9:28 am

    @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

  19. Havoc’s avatar

    Havoc on July 31, 2008 at 11:58 am

    IE Canvas control = hell yes

  22. Mark’s avatar

    Mark on July 31, 2008 at 6:31 pm

    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

  24. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on July 31, 2008 at 7:42 pm

    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.

  25. उन्मुक्त’s avatar

    उन्मुक्त on July 31, 2008 at 10:02 pm

    Great! I have been podcasting in ogg format for two years and my listners always had difficulty in listening it.

  26. Roy Schestowitz’s avatar

    Roy Schestowitz on August 1, 2008 at 2:21 am

    Thank you for this! (Ogg)

  28. Dan Kegel’s avatar

    Dan Kegel on August 1, 2008 at 9:56 am

    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.

  29. Simon Holm Thøgersen’s avatar

    Simon Holm Thøgersen on August 1, 2008 at 4:31 pm

    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 :)

  31. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on August 2, 2008 at 12:47 pm

    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.

  32. dave’s avatar

    dave on August 2, 2008 at 2:24 pm

    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!

  33. Chris Double’s avatar

    Chris Double on August 3, 2008 at 5:24 am

    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).

  36. wow’s avatar

    wow on August 31, 2008 at 4:12 am

    > 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 !

  39. William Lacy’s avatar

    William Lacy on September 24, 2008 at 7:06 pm

    Firefox 3.1 is a blessing for OGGTV.com. OGG/THEORA content on the web, just got super-easy for everyone.

  41. Tom’s avatar

    Tom on December 6, 2008 at 12:30 pm

    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!

  43. Michael

    Michael "WebKit" Howell on February 21, 2009 at 3:41 pm

    Cool. Now to Opera and WebKit.