[Foundation-l] Recommending a Browser for High Quality Ogg Theora Video Support

[Michael Dale]

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