Facebook Plunges Again
Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
Developer wants to stick an H.264 fork in Firefox
One serious downside to the lack of consensus is the fact that your browser may very well not have built-in support for some video files embedded with the tag. Firefox, for example, is running with Ogg Theora and won't be bolting on H.264 support. Apart from patent issues, there's a $5 million price tag to be paid to MPEG-LA if Mozilla did want to support the codec, and they still wouldn't be able to include that code in their open source.
But developers love to spin remixes of the Fox, and it only makes sense that someone would take matters into his or her own hands. Enter Maya Posch, who has launched the Wild Fox project on SourceForge. The plan: add H.264 support to Firefox's stable branch using libavcodec or GStreamer.
Posch feels "that decisions have been made due to patents which do not apply in most parts of the world." He continues, "The Wild Fox project aims to rectify this by releasing builds with these features included, builds which will of course only be available to those not in software patent-encumbered countries."
That sounds useful, right? A nice, pre-packaged Firefox build with H.264 support? Sure it does, but there's a potential pitfall.
While you would probably be able to download and install Wild Fox even in the U.S. and Korea (two of the patent-encumbered countries), Thomas Holwerda of OSNews warns that you'd be doing so at your own risk, saying "MPEG-LA has clearly stated that it will sue unlicensed users (and is clearly not afraid to do so)." Their director of Global Licensing, Allen Harkness, has said "where a royalty has not been paid, such a product remains unlicensed and any downstream users/distributors would have liability."
Yes, that means MPEG-LA could come after you if you choose to browse with Wild Fox. However, it's infinitely more likely that they'd target Posch and Wild Fox.
Comments
16
Subscribe to commentsKeegdnaBMay 16th 2010 2:12PM
While Chrome (or at least Chromium) is an open source browser, Google is still a for-profit company who has cash to throw around so licensing h.264 isn't a huge deal. Same goes for Apple, Opera, and Microsoft. Given that Firefox has pretty much been the browser to beat for several years (even if IE still has a larger marketshare, it's constantly losing) it make sense that everyone else would be looking for a way to turn Mozilla's greatest asset into a huge weakness. Jumping on proprietary codecs is just the thing.
NickMay 16th 2010 2:30PM
I expect the VP8 codec to be open-sourced next week, so this whole H.264 debate should be over by then.
Ogg Theora for mobile devices, VP8 for more powerful devices.
birotundaMay 16th 2010 3:01PM
Theora especially for mobile? I thought mobile devices were the biggest argument *against* Theora since most of them offer hardware h264 decoding, and there are currently no hardware Theora decoding chips. Software decoding kills batteries quicker.
It's also pretty unrealistic to assume VP8 is going to end the video debate; it's probably just going to stir it up more.
NickMay 16th 2010 3:06PM
True, but there are various software codecs (like the Google backed TheoARM) specifically built for ARM devices capable of OpenMAX acceleration.
This way you don't need specific H.264 decoders.
I assume VP8 will not (directly) end the video debate, but I think the W3C will acknowledge this codec as HTML standard.
Don't forget Google can push it through YouTube, Google Video, Android and Chromium, which gives them a lot of power.
There is a big chance the Linux Foundation and the Free Software Foundation will accept this as video standard aswell.
hazardMay 16th 2010 7:13PM
If Google do indeed open up VP8 then hardware implementations are a certainty. Apple is the only one that might pose some serious resistance and would push very hard [in the courts] if Google tried to push VP8 only out of Youtube.
r3loadedMay 16th 2010 2:35PM
Wait, so all this crap is purely because of US laws?
*head hits desk*
totoroMay 16th 2010 3:35PM
"clearly not afraid to do so"
And the FUD continues from all sides.
Raffi12May 16th 2010 4:11PM
All software that runs on Windows is free to use the H.246 codec that Microsoft licenses, I imagine something similar is available on OSX. Firefox can just use that, probably 80% of their users run Firefox on Windows anyway.
The only place there's a licensing issue is Firefox on Linux.
hazardMay 16th 2010 11:41PM
AFAIK only Windows 7 has bundled h.264 support on the MS side of the fence and not sure how many versions of OSX have it ... so that 80% figure of yours is dropping fast ...
GreenwaldMay 16th 2010 7:46PM
Ugh, if H.264 is so much better why the hell doesn't Google just buy the codec, open source it, and make life easier. It had to cost them millions to encode all those youtube videos. It's not like they have a shortage of money.
Christina WarrenMay 16th 2010 9:09PM
Because it's controlled by a giant consortium of patent holders including Microsoft, Apple, and most largely, RCA, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung and so on and so forth. They'd have to buy the individual patents from each owner and then also take on the legal responsibility for any future patent claims -- which would be stupid.
Mozilla could easily pay the $5 million a year (the for-profit Mozilla Corporation takes in like $150m a year from Google alone) or just use the existing H.264 license that Mac and Windows users already have -- they choose not to because they want to stay ideologically pure. Which I respect.
I also hope they'll understand why I won't use them if/when HTML5 becomes more standard and why their dwindling hopes of having any chance int he mobile space will all but evaporate if they continue to take that stance.
JimMay 16th 2010 11:39PM
Nope, not just US law. If you look at the list of patents (at http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx), you can see that it's not just US and South Korean patents. I'm just 3 pages into the list and I've already seen US, Canada, Japan, Germany, UK, Ireland, France, Czech Republic, China, Hong Kong, Spain... (and the list goes on). Now, I'll admit that there are still a lot of people not covered by the patents (I haven't seen any Indian patents, for example), but that's still a high percentage of the world's internet users.
I, for one, would be pretty happy if Firefox would at least use the native codecs on OSes that are licensed. I've been a Firefox user for a long time and I'd hate to have to switch if HTML5 leaves them behind. (I'm not optimistic about Theora support.)
hazardMay 16th 2010 11:47PM
"I, for one, would be pretty happy if Firefox would at least use the native codecs on OSes that are licensed."
Ironically that's part of the problem right there ..
sherl0kMay 17th 2010 7:49AM
That's hardware patents, not software. Big difference between the two.
JonaMay 17th 2010 7:48AM
"MPEG-LA could come after you if you choose to browse with Wild Fox" - while the threat is there, it is exceedingly unlikely that such a thing would happen. MPEG-LA would more than likely just cause Wild Fox as a project to be shutdown.
And Maya 'Elledan' Posch seems to have totally misunderstood that way the patent system works, or has never looked at the list of patents covering h264. The "patents which are only valid in a small number of countries, including the USA and South-Korea" quote is absolute rubbish.
JimMay 17th 2010 9:56AM
sherl0k, are you basing your statement on something at my link or just the countries involved? I don't see anything in the pdf that says that, so I'm a little confused.
If you're basing it on the countries, than you're mistaken. Or at least it doesn't mean what you think it means. It is entirely possible to get a patent on a software invention in many of those countries. (I don't know the law in all of them, but I have a good idea of how it works in Europe and Japan.) You're not allowed to have patents to software per se, but you can get patents on software that configures hardware to act in a particular way or that modifies real-world data. Inventions for video compression generally don't have a problem in Europe and Japan.
On top of that, you're also wrong that there's a big difference between "hardware" and "software" patents. First, any good software engineer knows that the boundary between "hardware" and "software" is often more of a design choice than a hard line. The obvious example of this is hardware support for h.264. The codec can be implemented in the OS or on specialized hardware and on a fast enough processor you wouldn't know the difference. Second, you could have an invention that uses both hardware and software. Is that a hardware patent or a software patent?