I do know if you build your own Chromium you can use a non neutered library of ffmpeg and play every codec it supports instead of just mp4.

Apple doesn't support Theora in Safari because the iPhone doesn't have a Theora hardware decoder. They bluster a bit about submarine patents, but really, their refusal boils down to the iPhone. If desktop Safari supports Theora and the iPhone doesn't, users will complain. If playing some videos on the iPhone uses the battery faster than advertised, users will complain.

Microsoft, of course, has a long-lasting and well-documented dislike towards open formats. Whether IE9 supports Theora and Vorbis will depend on internal company politics -- "Free Is Bad" vs. "Lets Not Fuck Up IE Again".

No, Apple stated that they don't support Theora "claiming that the lack of known patents on Theora doesn't rule out the threat of submarine patents that could eventually be used against adopters." http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the...

They also said that they have no hardwaredecoder, but this is just an excuse, imo. Video decoding is done by DSPs and DSP are designed to be programmable quite flexible. Apple/Whoever just would have to do that.

All in all, the whole situation is very clear when you look at it with the "patent view" ;)

MS: -has Windows Media Player, WMV, pays MPEG Patent fees anyway -> H.264

Apple: -has Quicktime, pays MPEG Patent fees anyway -> H.264

Mozilla: -no license -> Theora

Opera: -no license -> Theora

Goole: -no Codecs but youtube is in mpeg, but can easily switch to theora -> H.264+theora

MS and Apple have reasons to use the H.264 format: they already pay those fees, have expertise with the format, can "supress" the competition with it. Because MS could build in theora support, but what Mozila can't is to build in h.264 format (without paying). Mozilla can only lose this battle and MS&Apple are quite happy about it. There goes the competition. Typical stupid, "selfish", proprieatry bullshit-decission.

So why should they use Theora? Are we really making ideological arguments for technology decisions now? The way to stop patents from ossifying the tech industry is to stop filing patents. To do this, people like us are going to have to start pushing back in our companies and displaying prior art whenever the subject of patents comes up with corporate lawyers.

Meanwhile, Mozilla is a corporation. They're a big kid making sums with an "m" at the end. They're one of the majority shares of the browser market last time I looked. They're going to have to start to play the game like a real company and stop expecting everyone to softball them. Already they're behind on the technology front; I only see Chrome and Safari on every hacker's screen that _I_ see these days. If they keep expecting the industry they've so eagerly entered to coddle them, then their future prospects are dim at best.

There can be only one majority share by definition.

Before that there were ZERO independent efforts at implementing Theora decoders — there was the original On2 code dump, and a transliteration of that to Java called Cortado (used in an applet player by Wikimedia). There are no independent encoders, just the original code dump and a deshittifying refactoring (v1.1, Thusnelda) that was just released a few months ago.

Before it was tied as an anchor around the necks of the FOSS partisans, Theora was a really awful totally proprietary (in the original sense) codec. It was open sourced because it was never once licensed to a customer, and On2 only pushed one codec at a time (they never improved them, just forked off a new one).

As for the patents, MS has been shipping h.264 decoders with their OSes for a while now (they always left MPEG2 decoding the OEMs to bundle until recently too). Apple actually has patents in the h.264 licensing pool!

FFmpeg has had an independent VP3 and Theora decoder for years. The history goes back to 2003. The source is here: http://git.ffmpeg.org/?p=ffmpeg;a=blob;f=libavcodec/vp3.c

The claim about VP3 never being licensed to a customer is pretty ridiculous. Do you have a source?

I just found that libavcodec implementation today — It looks leagues better than the Xiph implementation, but none of the FOSStard projects I've seen use it — most link directly with liboggplay, or if they're transcoders use ffmpeg to decode the input to feed to libtheora.

That's just the thing: I can't find a source to the contrary. On2 never bragged about licensing VP3 to a customer, just distribution of the decoder through Apple and Real's auto-download mechanisms, and one in-house hosting/consulting deal with TheStreet.com in 2000.

FFmpeg has an independent decoder but for encoding it uses libtheora. The FFmpeg decoder has traditionally been slower than libtheora and didn't implement all of the Theora spec. It implemented VP3 plus the part of the spec that the Theora 1.0 (and earlier) encoders produced, but failed to decode spec-compatible output from the Theora 1.1 encoder (which libtheora 1.0's decoder handles just fine). There has been a lot of development of the FFmpeg decoder recently, so most of these issues are fixed. It's possible that the decoder is faster than libtheora now (as of the last 2-3 months), but I haven't benchmarked it.

Nokia isn't working on a Theora DSP decoder. In fact Nokia along with Apple were among the strongest voices against including Theora as an interoperable baseline codec in HTML5. (It was revealed, but only later, that Nokia are, like Apple, in the MPEG patent pool). Mozilla are writing the software needed for "hardware" decode on the n900 and similar platforms.

If a DSP decoder counts as an independent Theora decoder then there's several other things that would count too. I would have thought the ffmpeg Theora/VP3 decoder would have counted by any measure.

The On2 code was rewritten, even for Theora 1.0. Theora 1.1 was another major rewrite but mostly of the encoder (though that work also made the decoder faster).

While more an omission or curious framing than an incorrect fact it could be suggested that since Theora is BSD licenced then there is little need for anyone to rewrite it. This is unlike, for example, H.264 where there is no liberally licensed reference implementation (and some experts from x264 think that most independent implementations are atrocious since the spec is easy to mess up). So you seem to have portrayed a strength as a weakness here.

You (or someone else round here) have claimed before that VP3 was never licensed to a paying customer and this is why it was released as open source. I don't think this even makes logical sense, but moreover I believe it to be entirely untrue. Do you have a source for this surprising claim? (The official On2 line from the guy who suggested it is that they open sourced VP3 to "scorch the earth" for competitors as they moved onto the next generation codec)

On2 backported changes introduced in VP6-8 and VP6 improved measurably as a result.

Microsoft only introduced H.264 decoders in Windows 7.

Microsoft are also MPEG patent pool members.

Thanks for pointing out the ffmpeg VP3 decoder, which appears to have SSE2 optimizations and everything — yet another reason why Mozilla should be linking with libavcodec or GStreamer :)

I remember that the original libtheora alpha release was just the On2 BSD-licensed code dump rearranged with the copyright strings changed and working makefiles, but I can't find the original On2 tarball anywhere to confirm that. I just did some spelunking into their old SVN repo, the first few commits seem to be him checkpointing as he's working his way through munging the original files. The alphas just add library glue and their parochial container format fuckedness. The library infrastructure changes a lot more towards 1.0 but it doesn't look like any of the real codec implementation changes at all. http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/theora-old/

There being nothing absolutely forcing independent rewrites just means everyone sticks with one really shitty implementation they don't understand very well, instead of there being a whole spectrum of implementations competing with one another and calling them on their shit — that's how you get implementations like x264. DarkShikari has sassed the crappy commercial h.264 implementors, but he's got vitriol for the single-implementation proprietary codecs.

I'd love to see if someone can find anyone that really used VP3 pre-Theora, because I can't. There's announcements about them making the decoder available through various channels, and then they open-source it a year after 3.2 was shipped. The only thing I can find is this press release touting On2's use of it on a dot-bomb contract: http://www.on2.com/index.php?id=486&news_id=399

VP4 and VP5 fared only a little better, getting distributed in Winamp and Realplayer and getting shelved after a year. VP6 made them huge piles of money after it was bundled in Flash. VP7 got used for Skype's video chat. VP8 appears to complete the circle, with nobody using it that I can find.

Windows 7 was released a year ago. MS is shipping IE9 for Vista, so all those users will probably get the DirectShow codec. I think if you get it if you install the Zune software (it's always been supported on the hardware), or the Media Center stuff from the last several years. The Xbox 360 has shipped it since 2007.

I knew Microsoft were MPEGLA members (they have a huge stake in the VC-1 pool, after all), but I hadn't noticed that they have a big stake in the AVC/h.264 pool as well (Apple has one patent in it).

In the meantime though they have one of the few mobile systems where you can add your own system level code to support video and audio codecs of your choice so it's not all bad.

So, dirac it shall be then?

edit: Also you mention technical reason. My reasoning still is: This is not about technical reasons it is a pure political decision to get rid of competition in a shameless way. You don't want to tell me that two of the biggest software companies in the world which did their own codecs (quicktime, wmv) arent capable of shipping a decent theora decoder in their browsers? It's just a stupid manager decision in the likes of "haha, mozilla can't/won't pay mpeg fees, we'll use that".

Dirac is terrific, but it'll be another few years before it's ready; and it'll be much longer before the available bandwidth and demand for quality exists — it'll pick up among people pirating 1080p video, but it doesn't scale down enough for the youtubes of the world.

QuickTime is not a codec and never has been, it's a container, which happens to have been standardized as the MPEG4 container, because it doesn't suck ass like everything else (save Matroska). WMV is mostly a container too — they had a good 'proprietary' WMV codec called VC-1, but they got pwned with submarine patents after they lobbied it into the HD standards war.

It is pretty dangerous to allow H.264 to become widespread here. It would represent a serious barrier to entry for upstart browser vendors. This is bad.

We want to invite as much competition as possible. It's true that if you only account for Mozilla, it's not that big of a deal, because at the end of the day they can afford to pay some licensing fees if they have to. It is a big deal for something like Midori or Epiphany or Konqueror or any other such projects because their usability will be strongly diminished by an inability to play online video. This is a bad thing.

I don't own a smartphone; if I did, it would never ever be an iPhone. I do own a macintosh laptop, but run Linux on it.

The reason I think the submarine patent is fake is that submarine patents are a risk for H.264 as well. MPEG LA are laying low until H.264 is widespread and they can really apply the thumbscrews; who know how many dozens of other companies are using the same strategy, biding their time until payday?