Thu 31 Jul 2008
Native Vorbis and Theora support in Mozilla - oh my!!!
Posted by J5 under Open Formats , Politics , Standards , communityThis really gives a kick in the pants to those who take short cuts and lose sight of software freedom. Kudos to Mozilla who actually has the critical mass to effect real change by endorsing Vorbis and Theora on all of their OS platforms. Soon it will be up to the content producers to make open formats ubiquitous. Having a delivery channel which people use on a regular basis means we can finally work from start to finish without touching a closed format if we so choose. That to me is freedom - not forcing everyone to encode in open codecs, but to allow for those who prefer open formats the ability to deliver their content without any barriers between them and their end users. There are those who don’t want to see this happen but I have to believe that momentum is starting to swing our way.
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July 31st, 2008 at 9:33 am
I can already play Ogg Theora and Vorbis in all the applications that can play video/audio in the OSs that I use, because generic CoDecs exist.
Why are we bundling support into Mozilla?
July 31st, 2008 at 9:47 am
So that producers are guaranteed support for a baseline codec much like they are guaranteed support for gif, png, jpg and wav. Put it this way, back in the day when you had to install a plugin to display png files no one used png. VRML died because it wasn’t a feature of the browser. About the only plugin I know of that ever became ubiquitous is flash and that is because on the majority of systems it comes preinstalled. I don’t know how many times I have pointed family and friends to Ogg content and the plugins to make it work and they just couldn’t make it work. Getting rid of that step means I can produce free content and know that my family and friends can view/listen to it because I know they use firefox.
July 31st, 2008 at 10:47 am
Well… Not sure it is desired in a web browser, or we might end up with Mozilla being a Konqueror bis… :-/
I like the plugin way, even if it might be a little more complicated for newbies (well, not on Linux at least as the plugin are pre-installed and installing the codecs is rather easy). To me, the Web Browser is a tool for displaying web pages in a nice way and interacting with them (that includes (x)HTML, CSS, JS) and being open enough to allow plugins to be added to it.
And why didn’t they add Flac support ? And also ODF/PDF support with a “document” tag ?
Finally, is this “video” tag a W3C standard ? Or did Mozilla decide to support it, and it will only work on gecko-based browsers (as other browsers might prefer a “media” tag instead, or whatever they want) ?
July 31st, 2008 at 4:31 pm
The Video tag is part of the HTML 5 Spec which is not finalized, but it will be part of the spec. There was some news going around several months ago, because they were considering on making Ogg support part of the official spec for the video tag but it was eventually removed because Apple, and Nokia didn’t want it to be part of the spec.
August 1st, 2008 at 7:52 am
Well, perhaps the codecs could be added to the installation package, so that the free content can be used in all of the applications?
I’ve been a bit dubious of the Mozilla design/development decisions for some time. I’m fairly convinced now that they’re not right in the head.
August 1st, 2008 at 10:05 am
@Matthew,
And you are an authority in Mozilla’s application design because of what? It is sort of like saying the coach of a champion sports team doesn’t know what they are doing. Sure Mozilla may have made some design missteps or more likely have different design goals but they have also been a huge success. Disagreeing with their design is one thing but calling them “not right in the head” just reveals your prejudices.
August 1st, 2008 at 7:39 pm
[...] Firefox’s work will streamline the delivery of video to users, wrote a user by the name of J5 on his blog. [...]
August 2nd, 2008 at 5:15 am
Webkit has had a gstreamer backend (and hence ogg support) for the video tag for a few months now, so why is this mozilla thing news?
August 2nd, 2008 at 7:57 am
Because webkit isn’t as widespread and Apple isn’t going to ship safari with gstreamer support. The point is Mozilla is the only browser that can effect the status quo by virtue of their wide distribution and user satisfaction with people beyond the typical geek set. That is a huge achievement and something webkit can not claim as of yet. Mozilla’s commitment to an open web and their ability to put their money where there mouth is and challenge bigger proprietary players is something to be praised. Hopefully webkit will get there someday but the truth is Apple, the biggest distributor of WebKit and most likely one of the biggest contributors has actively campaigned against open video codecs and is more of a threat in this space. The truth is WebKit is only a rendering engine and Safari is the complete browser which has the mindshare in terms of browsers that use WebKit. At this point this means it does more harm then good to the health of an open web.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Just FYI, You can find long lists of Ogg/Vorbis and Ogg/Theora media files online, from the Xiph wiki.