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View Full Version : What do you think about Mozilla supporting h.264?



lovinglinux
March 20th, 2012, 07:21 AM
There has been a lot of talk this week, about the fact that Mozilla decided to support h.264. The move is mostly because of the mobile market and Mozilla will initially target the mobile Firefox version and Boot2Gecko. However porting such support for desktop is on the table as well.

The blog post from Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation:

http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/03/18/video-user-experience-and-our-mission/1234/

A couple of articles discussing the issues of such move:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/idealism-vs-pragmatism-mozilla-debates-supporting-h264-video-playback.ars

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/03/mozilla-firefox-needs-h264-support-to-survive-shift-to-mobile.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

vasa1
March 20th, 2012, 08:23 AM
It seems they aren't too happy about the decision but felt forced to do so because of "market" forces and Google not its bit.

chipbuster
March 20th, 2012, 08:25 AM
I don't like it at all, but there's really not much else to be done. Google seems to have abandoned WebM for market share on Chrome (have you seen how many HTML5 videos have WebM versions? Answer is basically none).

rg4w
March 20th, 2012, 02:11 PM
Too bad they have to spend their money on those licensing fees, but I can understand the decision.

How much will they be paying?

kaldor
March 20th, 2012, 03:07 PM
Shame that WebM never took off. I guess this was inevitable anyway.

I didn't do much reading into it, so could someone nutshell what this will mean for the licensing of Firefox?

gradinaruvasile
March 20th, 2012, 03:10 PM
Shame that WebM never took off. I guess this was inevitable anyway.

I didn't do much reading into it, so could someone nutshell what this will mean for the licensing of Firefox?

Probably it wont change as the support wont be built into the browser, it will be supported through external codecs.

screaminj3sus
March 20th, 2012, 06:10 PM
Webm just didn't take off. Google simply bluffed, saying they'd remove it from chrome, and never did, leaving firefox in the cold. h.264 support is pretty inevitable or they will just be left behind.

Seems simple enough to me to just use the system decoders for this. Win7 and OSX can do h.264 fine out of the box, and they could use gstreamer on linux if the appropriate gstreamer plugin is detected.

kaldor
March 20th, 2012, 07:00 PM
Ah, if this is the case then that's pretty good. Weird that it didn't happen sooner.

Lucradia
March 20th, 2012, 08:00 PM
Webm just didn't take off. Google simply bluffed, saying they'd remove it from chrome, and never did, leaving firefox in the cold. h.264 support is pretty inevitable or they will just be left behind.

Seems simple enough to me to just use the system decoders for this. Win7 and OSX can do h.264 fine out of the box, and they could use gstreamer on linux if the appropriate gstreamer plugin is detected.

x264? >_> That's not a gstreamer plugin. (Nor does it give linux chrome h264 support.)

Npl
March 20th, 2012, 08:34 PM
common sense to use the available OS codecs, thats what they are there for. Not doing it is rather poor propaganda, especially since WebM was little more than a PR Stunt for google.

Lucradia
March 20th, 2012, 09:34 PM
common sense to use the available OS codecs, thats what they are there for. Not doing it is rather poor propaganda, especially since WebM was little more than a PR Stunt for google.

By default, Linux doesn't come with h264 support. However, even after installing the necessary h264 codecs, chrome will still not adhere and play h264 content. I'm not sure why this is though.

Also, doesn't h.264 use YUV? If so, I've had nothing but trouble with that.