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Microsoft Looks to a Future of H.264-Based HTML5 for Web Video Content

Bytor65 said:
Quoting yourself isn't a source. There are multiple definitions of open standard:
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I was quoting myself to present the ISO/ITU/IETF definition. The fact that there are multiple definitions is not something that helps your position, as was also previously discussed.

Saying that the thing that crosses the river isn't a bridge because a bridge is a musical transition is the same thing. When multiple definitions exist, you can say "no, it's not" only if none of the definitions apply.
But if you further qualify something as Fully open as you did, that would be closer to the definitions that include free use. Fully Open means I can do anything with it.
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No, again, the ISO/ITU/IEC/IETF/et al. definition of "open" is accessible to any interested party under RAND terms. "Fully open" means that no interested parties are turned away, should they wish to join. If you wish to redefine the term, you're welcome to, but that doesn't mean that the standard accepted definition stops being valid.
The H.264 is heavily patent encumbered, so calling it fully open is farcical.
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The definition of open, as used by the applicable standards groups, has nothing to do with patented vs. unpatented, so making that a criterion of a term that has been in use longer than either the personal computer or computer video patents have existed is the farce.
Fully Open != Patent Encumbered.
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Agreed. Fully open is not the same as patent encumbered. But patent-free is also not the same as fully open. They're totally separate issues .
Patent Free Open (PFO) standards are the solution we are looking for.
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There you go.
PFO Standards are what we need for support by open browsers like Firefox.
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Why should the browser care in the first place? Firefox currently displays proprietary formats, closed standard formats, open standard formats, patent-free open standard formats, and any combination of those types. Mozilla just wants to raise the profile of open source solutions, which is fine. But let's not pretend there's an actual issue with H.264 and Firefox, because it plays in dozens of browser plugins right now.

If Mozilla doesn't want to license H.264 and bundle it in their browser, they don't have to. Someone else will release the appropriate add-on (or Windows Media or Quicktime plugins can be used).
 
Great read

Max(IT) said:
:::snip:::

you are wrong: in the past Adobe screwed up Apple many times.
If you have time, read THIS article.
It is very interesting. ;)

:::snip:::
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That was a great read. I loved it, everyone should read it for a great laugh. LOL :D

Hugh
 
Damn, damn, damn!

If Mozilla or other developers use OS-frameworks to decode the H.264 video (embedded with HTML5) on NVIDIA or AMD/ATI hardware, who pays then exactly the licensing fees? Btw, Apple does it already in Safari.

Man, you should check the facts, before you make such statements!
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No YOU misunderstand. The license in Safari is only one aspect. If YOU are serving content to people then YOU are the content provider and YOU have to pay a license if you are making people pay for that content. The licensing terms are very clear in black and white.
 
SimonMW said:
No YOU misunderstand. The license in Safari is only one aspect. If YOU are serving content to people then YOU are the content provider and YOU have to pay a license if you are making people pay for that content. The licensing terms are very clear in black and white.
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Most web video right now is h264 served inside a Flash player, so what exactly changes if we move to h264 served in HTML5?
 
SimonMW said:
No YOU misunderstand. The license in Safari is only one aspect. If YOU are serving content to people then YOU are the content provider and YOU have to pay a license if you are making people pay for that content. The licensing terms are very clear in black and white.
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They can't do ****. A license agreement can't change the law.

You already have right to decode H264 with most recent paid OSes.

BTW, I've looked on the MPEG LA site. There is NOTHING there that can back up your claims. So unless you start providing links you're falling on death ears.

Otaviano said:
Most web video right now is h264 served inside a Flash player, so what exactly changes if we move to h264 served in HTML5?
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He getting fretted up over nothing.
 
ct2k7 said:
So, you might want it gone, there are others, far more in numbers that you and those alike, who want it to stay.
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and do you have proofs of that ?
As far as I can see, Microsoft and Apple are saying Flash is crapware (Microsoft in a slightly polite way), you and a bunch of "Apple basher" ( people that if SJ says "A" are just saying "no, it's B", whatever A or B is ) in this forum are desperately trying to save Flash from its inevitable destiny ...

Who are the "others" ? The lazy developers that don't want to learn something new ?
 
-=XX=-Nephilim said:
Yeah!

I think I changed my mind and will be getting an iPad asap!

I saw this awesome HTML5 demos on it and I thought omfg woooooow!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4

Awesomeness!

Flash is dead! :D
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This video is completely useless. The guy running the demos doesn't tell you that these demos were made for use with a keyboard.

As a web developer for 12 years, I say it is time to move away from Flash and embrace web standards and the world will be better for it. And yes you are right, Flash is certainly dead going forward.
 
richman555 said:
This video is completely useless. The guy running the demos doesn't tell you that these demos were made for use with a keyboard.

As a web developer for 12 years, I say it is time to move away from Flash and embrace web standards and the world will be better for it. And yes you are right, Flash is certainly dead going forward.
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the world or your world?

Max(IT) said:
it is the same with Flash apps: they are not designed for multitouch interface.
But your post is clearly biased ...
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are you sure about that? you should check out the multi-touch APIs for Flash.

[EDIT] interestingly, multi-touch and Flash was just discussed here. check out the video demo and see for yourself.
 
Bytor65 said:
The H.264 is heavily patent encumbered, so calling it fully open is farcical.

Fully Open != Patent Encumbered.

If you insist on being pedantic, we shall have to say.

Patent Free Open (PFO) standards are the solution we are looking for. PFO Standards are what we need for support by open browsers like Firefox.

So for the Pedantic, PFO.
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PFO would be preferred. I would even settle for paying my $.10 for every H.264-enabled hardware encoder or decoder out there. What I won't settle for is an MPEG-LA orchestrated shutdown of all FOSS that embeds H.264, and, I won't settle for MPEG-LA royalties to be paid mid-stream on H.264 content, or distribution royalties to be paid on free content. That is why we need a functional alternative to H.264, whether it is VP8, Theora, or heaven forbid Motion JPEG. So that content can be distributed for free without paying rent to MPEG-LA.

I know there are some folks out there who trust the MPEG-LA to do the right thing, but, I have seen no commitment from MPEG-LA that will assure royalty-free distribution of free content. At the moment, all we have is a moratorium, not such a commitment.
 
GFLPraxis said:
Seems like Microsoft is agreeing with Steve Jobs, but phrasing it so as to be more polite towards Adobe.

So, the two major desktop OS developers (Microsoft and Apple) are both pushing to move the internet away from Flash. Hopefully, that also means the end of Microsoft's Silverlight (a plugin which I've so far refused to install; Flash gives me enough trouble as is).

This is great for the future of devices. Flash, being a proprietary technology, is entirely reliant on Adobe's implementation. If Adobe can't get it to perform well, it won't. Thus, Flash for Macs has run terribly for years, and Flash for mobile devices has been endlessly delayed over the past year. The beauty of open standards like HTML5 and the H.264 video codec is that, since they are open, others are free to compete for implementations! Apple's now open-source WebKit rendering engine is one HTML rendering engine (used by Chrome, Safari, and Android's browser), Microsoft's IE is another, Mozilla's Gecko is another, and everyone can compete to make it faster and lighter and run on more platforms.

Meanwhile, every video player competes to play H.264 with less overhead, and video card manufacturers now build hardware acceleration into their cards, allowing H.264 video to be played with absolutely minimal overhead (which is why it works so well on the iPhone without impacting battery life).

Open standards result in competition to increase performance and usability. Flash has simply gotten bulkier and slower over time, because Adobe had no motivation to improve it (as no one else can build a better Flash player) and continued to cram in features. Then when called to port it to mobile devices, suddenly, they're facing a major challenge.

Kudos to Microsoft.

I wonder how Shantanu Narayen will respond to this.
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Re: Flash on Macs, in all fairness, Apple has some blame as well:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...eat_flash_surprising_results_of_new_tests.php

Adobe could still do a better job with Flash on the Mac, but for Microsoft to be the more emotionally mature of the two leading companies to dis Adobe, Microsoft has to win this round. :(

It'll be fun to see how all of the browser developers warp and twist HTML5 to suit their platforms. Especially Microsoft, whose history of "open standards" is even worse than Apple. (that and open standards prevent other companies from coming in with anything better, in essence "preventing another Flash" - gotta protect themselves from possible future competition, of course.
 
thermodynamic said:
Re: Flash on Macs, in all fairness, Apple has some blame as well:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...eat_flash_surprising_results_of_new_tests.php
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No, in all fairness, Adobe is trying to shift blame onto Apple with a lie wrapped around a tiny kernel of truth.

Apple's hardware acceleration is available through QTKit and Core Video, as of 10.4; H.264 acceleration has been a part of that since the launch of the 9400M MacBooks. Anything using QTKit to render, including third party applications, has access to H.264 acceleration (and anything built on Quartz technologies has access to general hardware acceleration). Flash, until version 10.1 (Feb 2010), used QuickDraw. QuickDraw, replaced in 2001 by Quartz and deprecated in 2004 with a stern final warning about future support, can't use any of the Core technologies, including CoreVideo and QTKit's accelerated functions.

Saying "Apple doesn't make the API available" conveniently neglects the part where it is and has been available to developers not still using a technology replaced just shy of a decade ago. When Windows made a major overhaul to its rendering layer in Vista, Flash was rewritten within a year, even though old versions continue to work. It took Flash 8 years to do the same for the Mac.

Apple decided to pull the API out of QTKit for software using their own renderers for 10.6.3--but the API still requires a Cocoa application. In other words, if Apple had released the acceleration API two years ago, Flash wouldn't have been able to use it until two months ago anyway. Adobe certainly wasn't being held up without it.
 
matticus008 said:
No, in all fairness, Adobe is trying to shift blame onto Apple with a lie wrapped around a tiny kernel of truth.

Apple's hardware acceleration is available through QTKit and Core Video, as of 10.4; H.264 acceleration has been a part of that since the launch of the 9400M MacBooks. Anything using QTKit to render, including third party applications, has access to H.264 acceleration (and anything built on Quartz technologies has access to general hardware acceleration). Flash, until version 10.1 (Feb 2010), used QuickDraw. QuickDraw, replaced in 2001 by Quartz and deprecated in 2004 with a stern final warning about future support, can't use any of the Core technologies, including CoreVideo and QTKit's accelerated functions.

Saying "Apple doesn't make the API available" conveniently neglects the part where it is and has been available to developers not still using a technology replaced just shy of a decade ago. When Windows made a major overhaul to its rendering layer in Vista, Flash was rewritten within a year, even though old versions continue to work. It took Flash 8 years to do the same for the Mac.

Apple decided to pull the API out of QTKit for software using their own renderers for 10.6.3--but the API still requires a Cocoa application. In other words, if Apple had released the acceleration API two years ago, Flash wouldn't have been able to use it until two months ago anyway. Adobe certainly wasn't being held up without it.
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Great post. Adobe doesn't wish to commit resources, play by the Mac OS rules, and use the best tool for the job. All they care is Windows. The certainly had it coming.
 
H.264 is NOT a good thing. It's a mess of patents that MPEG-LA could enforce at any time in the future. Does anyone remember GIF? While the LZW compression was patented, it was not enforced and Unisys said they wouldn't enforce it for websites, etc. Only for commercial software. Then, in 1999, with GIF firmly entrenched, Unisys started asking websites using GIFs made with open software for $5000. Seriously.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. H.264 is the new GIF, and MPEG-LA the new Unisys. Enforcement could come at any moment in a sweeping blow to helpless web designers, etc firmly entrenched in using it. The beneficiaries? Apple, Microsoft, and especially MPEG-LA.
 
Darkroom said:
[EDIT] interestingly, multi-touch and Flash was just discussed here. check out the video demo and see for yourself.
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This entire thread made my head hurt. Also, I'm a designer not a developer, so forgive me if I'm at all incoherent as I post here. I looked at the above video and while it was certainly an interesting use of Flash and multitouch, it looked a bit clunky and judging from how edited the video was has more problems than they are actually showing...

I have been a Flash user since version 1. A few things that I've learned about Flash have been A) the developers have no idea what kind of tool it is and really have just made a mess of the program with each upgrade that they've done. B) Adobe and many people in this thread give the illusion that it's a program that makes it easy for Artists to create cool interactive games and website. Nothing could be further from the truth. You still need to be a programmer to be able to develop anything in Flash so in the long run, rather than paying someone to develop something for me in Flash, I'd rather pay my money to someone who can develop in Java and HTML5.

Furthermore, I will go on to say all the people that say "Adobe is dead", you have no idea what you're talking about. Designers are too dependent on Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects for the company to ever go away. The open source or paid alternatives just aren't as good. So, Adobe isn't going away anytime soon. Although whoever was saying that Adobe sucks for destroying Freehand again. I completely agree, I miss Freehand.

P.S. while I'm a huge Apple fan boy, and a complete hater of Flash, I can see that this is just a fight between two huge companies jockeying for support for their standards.
 
newwavedave said:
This entire thread made my head hurt. Also, I'm a designer not a developer, so forgive me if I'm at all incoherent as I post here. I looked at the above video and while it was certainly an interesting use of Flash and multitouch, it looked a bit clunky and judging from how edited the video was has more problems than they are actually showing...

I have been a Flash user since version 1. A few things that I've learned about Flash have been A) the developers have no idea what kind of tool it is and really have just made a mess of the program with each upgrade that they've done. B) Adobe and many people in this thread give the illusion that it's a program that makes it easy for Artists to create cool interactive games and website. Nothing could be further from the truth. You still need to be a programmer to be able to develop anything in Flash so in the long run, rather than paying someone to develop something for me in Flash, I'd rather pay my money to someone who can develop in Java and HTML5.

Furthermore, I will go on to say all the people that say "Adobe is dead", you have no idea what you're talking about. Designers are too dependent on Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects for the company to ever go away. The open source or paid alternatives just aren't as good. So, Adobe isn't going away anytime soon. Although whoever was saying that Adobe sucks for destroying Freehand again. I completely agree, I miss Freehand.

P.S. while I'm a huge Apple fan boy, and a complete hater of Flash, I can see that this is just a fight between two huge companies jockeying for support for their standards.
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If I have ever said Adobe is dead, I mis-spoke. I still say that Flash is dying (not quite dead yet), and it appears that Microsoft agrees, at least in part. Does this mean they are abandoning their failed venture in Silverlight?

As a side note, I really wish Microsoft would stop developing on Internet Explorer and focus all those resources on their other endeavors (improve Windows 7 to a point where it actually gives me a reason to switch back). Other web browsers are just a lot better and provide much greater predictability of behavior for a web designer. Ship Windows with Firefox, Chrome, or even Safari for that matter.
 
I think Microsoft supports H.264 encoding for one reason: lots of companies offer programs to encode video in H.264 format, while relatively few companies offer programs to encode video in the Ogg Theora format.

When both YouTube and the AVC format used on Blu-ray discs use H.264 encoding, why bother with still another format?
 
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