There has been a technical discussion on wikitech-l regarding the
recommendation of a browser for the high quality open video experience.
Some native implementations are ~presently~ non optimal and the java
cortado applet we use where no native support is available is a poor
user experience relative to native support. Therefore we are considering
informing people who want to view video that for a high quality
expericne with free formats they should use a particular browser.
Presently that browser is Firefox 3.5. Key to this recommendation is we
will continue to support playback in other browsers the best that we can
but we should inform people that a better experience is possible. This
hopefully will encourage other browser vendors to improve the free
format experience and support or lose market share.
== Technical Support Considerations ==
* Mozilla Firefox 3.5 release version -- has worked closely with the
xiph community and supports html5 ogg theora video natively with a high
quality experience across all platforms.
* Apple Safari -- supports html5 video but recommends the h.264 as the
format. To support ogg you must install the xiph qt components written
by
xiph.org community members. The installation involves downloading a
file, mounting an install image and dragging a component to the
library/components folder on the target machine.
** In the present release version of Safari its difficult to reliably
detect if the browser support the video tag with free formats.
** Seeking past what has already been downloaded does not work.
** The quicktime framework / ogg component does not work well with
server side seeking helpers we have been developing.
* Google Chromium -- supports h.264 and ogg theora video natively. Again
ogg performance is not very high quality. It uses the ffmpeg library
which features a non-optimal theora decoder. Things like seeking
presently don't work very reliably.
* Opera -- Was one of the first browsers to demo ogg theora support in
their browser. They are presently working on re-including it in a
release. ~presently it does not support the video tag~
* Microsoft IE -- has no support for the video tag and no support for
ogg theora. We support playback in IE via the java cortado applet.
** the java cortado applet is a fall-back for browsers that don't
support the native video tag. Its not a very high quality user
experience. Sometimes java crashes the browser, it generally takes a
while to startup; seeking does not work very well and video is not
cached causing more expenses to the wikimedia foundation on repeat video
views.
== Institutional Support Considerations ==
Institutional the Mozilla foundation has worked with Wikimedia and the
xiph.org community to realize Ogg Theora video in the open web platform.
They supported
wikiemdia/xiph.org with a 100k grant early this year to
improve the ogg libraries for playback, improve codec encoding quality
and develop open source server side technologies for improved seeking
performance.
While Apple does at least support adding in of codecs into the quicktime
system and some people form Apple have had friendly conversations with
us. The Apple Corporation essentially says "it can't ship default
support for xiph because of perceived patent risk". With Google shipping
Chrome with ogg support the submarine patent argument (that no other
large company is shipping ogg) would appear to be less valid. Perhaps we
as "wikimedia" could help apple do the right thing?
Also have not heard much from Microsoft regarding free formats. Again I
think market pressures are the only thing that will drive adoption in
this case.
== Proposed Approach and Proof of Concept ==
Presently the proposed solution is to soft link to the Mozilla Firefox
browser: see mockup:
http://metavid.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/upgrade_to_firefox.png
or see it in action:
http://metavid.org/wiki/File:FolgersCoffe_512kb.1496.ogv
Note that informing the user that a better experience is possible with
alternative browser software, it will not disable or remove our
fall-back java support.
peace,
--michael
