Comments on: Native Vorbis and Theora support in Mozilla – oh my!!!

By: Hampton

Hampton — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:32:51 +0000

Just FYI, You can find long lists of Ogg/Vorbis and Ogg/Theora media files online, from the Xiph wiki.

By: J5

J5 — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:57:16 +0000

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.

By: koen

koen — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 09:15:14 +0000

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?

By: Firefox closer to supporting open source video codec | InfoWorld | News | 2008-08-01 | By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 23:39:41 +0000

[...] Firefox’s work will streamline the delivery of video to users, wrote a user by the name of J5 on his blog. [...]

By: J5

J5 — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:05:58 +0000

@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.

By: Matthew W. S. Bell

Matthew W. S. Bell — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:52:35 +0000

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.

By: Deus

Deus — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:31:47 +0000

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.

By: bochecha

bochecha — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:47:55 +0000

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) ?

By: J5

J5 — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:47:32 +0000

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.

By: Matthew W. S. Bell

Matthew W. S. Bell — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:33:38 +0000

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?