On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 19:32 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > Martin Sourada wrote: > > > That's not what I meant. They are forcing you to use format they've > > chosen and it does not matter if it's patent encumbered or not, the idea > > is that you are restricting choice and forcing your users to use what > > you think is good for them. > > It does matter whether it is patent encumbered or not. Even if you only > one format to pick and what you have is not patent encumbered, everybody > is free to use it. Remember that Firefox is a cross platform application Yes, that's true. It's less restrictive than patent encumbered codecs (in countries where such patents apply), but still restrictive. > and itself a platform and cannot rely on gstreamer being available. > Bundling gstreamer with Firefox is worse than bundling liboggplay. > Yes bundling gstreamer with Firefox would be nuts. But bundling liboggplay isn't a perfectly good thing either. You should rely on what the host platforms offers (though it's usually easier to do such thing on *nix platforms...) > Supporting one codec natively on all the platforms makes it easier for > websites to rely on what is available consistently. You can bet Apple > which controls WebKit won't be using gstreamer on other platforms which > means you cannot rely on any codec support being available natively. > No, they won't be. They're using whatever framework there is on mac and they'll be using whatever framework is default on windows. It's no different from video intended from download - you rely on the customer to install the needed codecs himself. > a) WebKit is not popular enough to make a difference and support for > codecs is very fragmented (no support in Chrome, differs depending on > the operating system, browser etc) > The support for codecs is not directly in WebKit, which I think is good. The design is more robust this way, and does not include reinventing the wheel. And though WebKit is not as popular now, it's importance in *nix world will surely grow, also it's already used in embeded devices, where firefox is still not an option, and I bet Google Chrome will prove to be a very strong competitor in Windows world. Don't forget the fact that firefox is years already on the scene, while Google Chrome is still a beta version... > b) Linux is not popular enough on desktops to make a difference > And no-one says otherwise. > It takes a popular cross platform FOSS app like Firefox to even stand a > fighting chance. > If you have less to offer than concurrence you have much worse starting position. We should rather focus our efforts on improving FLOSS codecs/formats (which is good that there are people actually working on it; and fighting against software patents) so that it would not be a step back (in terms of quality/features/compression) to switch from say h264 to dirac. Matroska, ogg, vorbis and flac are doing pretty well, but we still don't have a competing video codec(s). Also the support of patent encumbered but open sourced codecs (like x264) is even better than for the FLOSS ones on linux - as someone already said, try to play e.g. mkv with theora in xine... I fear that the only-ogg format and FLOSS codecs support in firefox will be rather a chance for other browsers to stand a fighting chance with firefox than a chance for theora... > Rahul > Martin
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