I do, which is why I am so critical of Mozilla's "solution" to it, which has confused the issue of not being able to ship h.264 support for the reasons you mention with trying to promote a format that (whatever its merits) nobody wants.
Ideally, that's the approach Mozilla would take, too.
Indeed, it would be, but my understanding is that they are unwilling to do so or unable with their current code, due to the dumb (IMHO) decision to pressure people into using Ogg.
I took a quick look at the firefox source, and it looks like they wrote their own media-handling code (implemented with libtheora, etc).
I did a bit more research, and found this[1] bug. Mozilla explicitly rejected using ffmpeg on mostly-ideological grounds. So, I guess there's plenty of blame to go around. They're still bound by software patents, but they could allow their users the ability to choose, and they refused.
... So I guess that means we're now in violent agreement. :)
Suggesting nobody wants Theora/Vorbis is absurd. Clearly someone wants it, as it was created. The important questions are whether it is useful enough to merit inclusion in a browser, and whether it's useful enough to outweigh the downsides. The same questions should be asked about H264.
But it wasn't created for this purpose. It was originally created by On2 to be sold commercially, but nobody bought it because it sucked. They dumped it as royalty-free abandonware, and some free-software partisans picked it up, changed some strings, and released it as Theora.
Nobody wanted it then, nobody wants it now. The dumping could even be seen as a brilliant strategic move to troll the hell out of the market for codecs by building a community of earnest activists yelling at everyone.
The number of people who care about Theora is small, and the number that care about it primarily for non-ideological reasons (i.e. practical reasons) approaches zero. Compared to the number of Firefox users who view video on the web (which is the group whose concerns we're talking about), I feel I'm not being absurd in referring to the former as "nobody".
Clearly someone wants it, as it was created.
This is very presumptive when talking about an open source project.
The important questions are whether it is useful enough to merit inclusion in a browser, and whether it's useful enough to outweigh the downsides.
There are a lot of directions this could go, but let me make clear that I'm not against supporting Ogg Theora. I'm also not insisting that Mozilla include h.264 support in their products. I'm against limiting support to only Theora on ideological grounds, which is what Mozilla has done. That turns it into a question of whether it's useful and advantageous to actively prevent the use of all other codecs.
Given that h.264 is already the most widely used codec on the web (while Theora is among the least) and that YouTube and Vimeo, two of the largest video sites, have already started supporting it (and not Theora) in <video>, I think it's clearly not in the interests of users to block them from using it.
Comments
I'm not sure you understand the problem here.
I do, which is why I am so critical of Mozilla's "solution" to it, which has confused the issue of not being able to ship h.264 support for the reasons you mention with trying to promote a format that (whatever its merits) nobody wants.
Ideally, that's the approach Mozilla would take, too.
Indeed, it would be, but my understanding is that they are unwilling to do so or unable with their current code, due to the dumb (IMHO) decision to pressure people into using Ogg.
I took a quick look at the firefox source, and it looks like they wrote their own media-handling code (implemented with libtheora, etc).
I did a bit more research, and found this[1] bug. Mozilla explicitly rejected using ffmpeg on mostly-ideological grounds. So, I guess there's plenty of blame to go around. They're still bound by software patents, but they could allow their users the ability to choose, and they refused.
... So I guess that means we're now in violent agreement. :)
1) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541494
I appreciate you doing what I was too lazy to do.
Suggesting nobody wants Theora/Vorbis is absurd. Clearly someone wants it, as it was created. The important questions are whether it is useful enough to merit inclusion in a browser, and whether it's useful enough to outweigh the downsides. The same questions should be asked about H264.
But it wasn't created for this purpose. It was originally created by On2 to be sold commercially, but nobody bought it because it sucked. They dumped it as royalty-free abandonware, and some free-software partisans picked it up, changed some strings, and released it as Theora.
Nobody wanted it then, nobody wants it now. The dumping could even be seen as a brilliant strategic move to troll the hell out of the market for codecs by building a community of earnest activists yelling at everyone.
The number of people who care about Theora is small, and the number that care about it primarily for non-ideological reasons (i.e. practical reasons) approaches zero. Compared to the number of Firefox users who view video on the web (which is the group whose concerns we're talking about), I feel I'm not being absurd in referring to the former as "nobody".
Clearly someone wants it, as it was created.
This is very presumptive when talking about an open source project.
The important questions are whether it is useful enough to merit inclusion in a browser, and whether it's useful enough to outweigh the downsides.
There are a lot of directions this could go, but let me make clear that I'm not against supporting Ogg Theora. I'm also not insisting that Mozilla include h.264 support in their products. I'm against limiting support to only Theora on ideological grounds, which is what Mozilla has done. That turns it into a question of whether it's useful and advantageous to actively prevent the use of all other codecs.
Given that h.264 is already the most widely used codec on the web (while Theora is among the least) and that YouTube and Vimeo, two of the largest video sites, have already started supporting it (and not Theora) in <video>, I think it's clearly not in the interests of users to block them from using it.