http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-co...
Huh, I got quoted (from the WHATWG list), and my quote even got illustrated with a lolcat:
In an e-mail on the WHATWG list, Wikimedia Foundation volunteer media contact David Gerard said that the organization is also interested in helping Mozilla to raise general awareness of the advantages that unencumbered video would bring to the Internet.
"I'd also point out that Wikimedia has vast publicity abilities in this direction," he wrote. "And we're watching the progress of Theora and Dirac on a day-by-day basis, for obvious reasons. So if you need large charitable organisations to help you with making this the obvious publicity choice for a happy Internet with cute fluffy kitties, I can tell you we'll be right there!"
[image of cute fluffy kittie]
(The "we" I was thinking of was Foundation staff and volunteers interested in the video efforts, and Commons regulars.)
Greg Maxwell and I have been posting to the mailing list to push Ogg Theora. I mean, H.264 is technically marvellous and it'd be a lovely choice, but it's known patent encumbrances - and that MPEG-LA enforce them - make it *radioactive* for our purposes.
It's IMO futile pushing much harder on the list - Hixie's the editor, it's his decision, he's an honorable fellow and he's decided he really can't honestly put Ogg Theora in the spec at present. So it goes back to pushing Ogg Theora as the de facto format for the web.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
Greg Maxwell and I have been posting to the mailing list to push Ogg Theora. I mean, H.264 is technically marvellous and it'd be a lovely choice, but it's known patent encumbrances - and that MPEG-LA enforce them - make it *radioactive* for our purposes.
It's IMO futile pushing much harder on the list - Hixie's the editor, it's his decision, he's an honorable fellow and he's decided he really can't honestly put Ogg Theora in the spec at present. So it goes back to pushing Ogg Theora as the de facto format for the web.
- d.
I also followed that. It's sad to look at Apple's position. Do you know what's the state about IE? (not from MS, but I suppose someone will be doing/have made some IE plugin)
2009/7/7 Platonides Platonides@gmail.com:
Do you know what's the state about IE? (not from MS, but I suppose someone will be doing/have made some IE plugin)
The best anyone's come up with is browser-sniffing IE then a workaround (Flash, Java, existing plugin, etc).
- d.
Apple's position probably has much to do with their video-playing hardware devices having hardware h.264 decoding which can't handle Theora.
On the other hand, Microsoft's position is worse, in that they're refusing to implement the standard at all.
-Matthew
On 7/6/09, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
Greg Maxwell and I have been posting to the mailing list to push Ogg Theora. I mean, H.264 is technically marvellous and it'd be a lovely choice, but it's known patent encumbrances - and that MPEG-LA enforce them - make it *radioactive* for our purposes.
It's IMO futile pushing much harder on the list - Hixie's the editor, it's his decision, he's an honorable fellow and he's decided he really can't honestly put Ogg Theora in the spec at present. So it goes back to pushing Ogg Theora as the de facto format for the web.
- d.
I also followed that. It's sad to look at Apple's position. Do you know what's the state about IE? (not from MS, but I suppose someone will be doing/have made some IE plugin)
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 9:08 PM, Matthew Brownmorven@gmail.com wrote:
Apple's position probably has much to do with their video-playing hardware devices having hardware h.264 decoding which can't handle Theora.
Please don't propagate this fud.
Processors half the speed of the ARM11 core in the iphone can decode theora with ease.
It may ultimately be the case that the particular hardware in the iphone allows it to get significantly better battery life with H.264, but the exact differences are hard to speculate on because H.264 generally needs more computation than theora, so isn't always obvious how much beyond closing that gap any specialization goes. But whatever it the results are it's *not* a matter of "not being able to handle it".
Of course, Apple needs their products to have great battery life— but no one has been advancing a "one format only" path for the standard, the push was always for a baseline. So if apple offered both, they could strongly recommend whatever gives them the best battery life, since apple isn't known for rejecting apps from the app store for merely using a lot of battery life, I fail to see how that would be an issue. (And indeed, they are already in the business of specifying format settings, because you need to use a very specific subset of H.264 for the iphone anyways).
And a final Apple specific point regarding hardware support… http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/07/VvxoETsSdYcyeoZQ-larg...
The large apple-logo chip in the top left corner of this board is the iphone 3GS' CPU. I don't think it's too bold to say that Apple's disinterest in supporting Theora (and every other unencumbered media format in existence save .WAV) is the cause of the lack of specialization in their harware and not the other way around.
2009/7/7 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
"I'd also point out that Wikimedia has vast publicity abilities in this direction," he wrote. "And we're watching the progress of Theora and Dirac on a day-by-day basis, for obvious reasons. So if you need large charitable organisations to help you with making this the obvious publicity choice for a happy Internet with cute fluffy kitties, I can tell you we'll be right there!"
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kittens.ogv
Hmm it looks like our kitten video selection isn't very extensive right now.