Wanted to mention BLIP.tv – that allows hosting, uploading, and downloading of files encoded with Ogg/Vorbis and Ogg/Theora. (Funny, blip may refer to the Max Headroom’s blipverts, coincidently the same show where the term Theora originates.) Also, the Xiph.org wiki has long lists of examples where there is Ogg media content online. I linked to the wiki above.

I will certainly say I like that Apple and many other players *are* standardizing on AVC (H.264) and AAC, which are published standards and darn good codecs. That’s a *huge* improvement from the old days where everybody was pushing a different proprietary codec-of-the-day. But the patent issues remain, so unless the patent pool holders release the licensing in an open-source-friendly way (or software patents are struck down in relevant jurisdictions) it’s still not free enough to be The One Base Standard that works everywhere.

H.264 decoders and encoders can’t be cleanly shipped with free-software desktops, and minor content producers and software developers can get hit with nasty surprises if and when someone actually comes to collect. (Yes, there’s widespread “civil disobedience”, but that doesn’t mean people won’t get caught at it.)

Vorbis and Theora (especially when that new encoder’s ready!) are both “good enough” and “free enough” to at least serve as a minimum baseline. The main boogeyman Apple and others trot out to not support them is potential legal liability from submarine patents — a risk that exists for AVC/AAC too but is mitigated by already having a large patent-holder pool sitting on it ready for the mutually-assured-destruction battle.

Hopefully something’ll give on this eventually; I’m certainly *very* happy to see Mozilla throwing in for Ogg being safe to ship by default, but Mozilla being Mozilla that’s not a total surprise ;)

as usual, the FUD-meisters cant even get the most basic facts correct!

(1) quicktime is NOT a codec! … it is a container format (and a media architecture).

(2) the quicktime MOV container format is not ‘proprietary’: it is the official basis for the mpeg4 file format.

(3) quicktime does/can/will support any & every codec on the planet that ISV’s want to implement – apple plays no favorites – third-parties are free to create plugins for any almost every aspect of the quicktime architecture without any licenses or royalties.

(4) apple does not ship its own proprietary codecs with quicktime for web streaming (and therefore has no axe to grind ‘blocking’ foss codecs being deployed in its browsers) … it is 100% committed to h.264 (which is from ITU).

it always amazes me to see which side – the mediocrities from microsoft or the fooltards from foss – is more technically inept when it comes to discussions of anything apple-related.

ps: and just for the record, apple’s web browser platform (webkit) is not only based on opensource (khtml) … it is now the de facto ‘industry standard’ for mobiles: webkit powers the iphone, all nokia (going forward), the google android … as well as dominating desktop RIA like adobe’s flex/air. The combination of the #1 mobile browser (based on opensource) and a freely extensible media architecture (which uses the official h264 codec) make apple the paragon defender of the open web, not some scheming corporate dastard scheming a way to impede the progress of open video on the web.

note: by comparison with apple’s web browser, Ffox (which only barely double apple’s desktop browser share) is planning to have a mobile browser some day; Opera has a (sweet) mobile browser but doesnt have much distribution; palm is DOA; winmob is MIA; and blackberry doesnt have its own browser technology, so it is not a long-term contender for web/media.

Through some crafty javascript you can autodetect the playback methods a client supports and then use the “best” available, using native support if it’s there and falling back to other plugins or Java if it’s not. The OggHandler extension for MediaWiki does this.

But getting the detection and selection right is tricky. A lot of web developers won’t do it. … and then there are Java’s performance problems, and the fact that while Java is still widely supported it’s probably on a decline. But most importantly, slipping in Theora support via Java doesn’t do so much to set the de facto standard in the right direction. The web need Video that Just Works. The web needs it to be royalty-free and unencumbered. .. and it needs to perform fairly well and be well integrated. To get there we need native support.

But it’s good to know that tools like Cortado exist that help us bridge the gap while we wait for all the clients to catch up.

Of course, the companies who own the patents on the proprietary codecs aren’t foolish: they manage the pricing, often providing “the first hit” at no cost, and they modulate their enforcement so that the cost for a single organization to switch to a free format is greater than the cost of paying the piper. But the long-term costs to the public as a whole, both directly from licensing costs and indirectly from incompatibility, are enormous. So we really should applaud the Mozilla Foundation for taking this bold step.

It’s an especially important problem for people making freely-licensed content and free software: they can’t afford the tax, and often their purpose precludes leaving the people who use their content subject to paying the fees instead. So this move is really important to projects like Wikipedia.

If you’re grabbing a Firefox nightly, be sure to grab a 3.1a2pre nightly, the older a1 doesn’t have the Ogg support.

It should also be noted that the recent improvements to Theora haven’t yet made it into the mainline Theora encoder. They are part of a work-in-progress rewrite of the Theora encoder called Thusnelda. Thusnelda is a major improvement on the Theora encoder, which already out-performed prior generation video encoders fairly well, and it’s still getting better.

Since Apple proposed the video tag and implemented it first, I don’t think it’s going to be much of an issue for Safari users.