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