Apparently the problem with doing something sane like using Gstreamer is that... it's LGPL. Which apparently isn't free enough for them.
This is not correct. The reason GStreamer is not used in Firefox is because the GStreamer backend wasn't finished in time for FF 3.5. Rather than push back the release date, they released an implementation that works for many videos. The GStreamer backend is still under active development, and will eventually be merged to trunk.
leading to the tremendous irony of having video playback vastly slower than Flash.
Using the most recent version of Flash and Firefox, I can play high-definition Theora easily on my laptop, but even medium-resolution H.264 in Flash struggles to achieve real-time decoding. A quick, unscientific sampling of other FF 3.5 users online has indicated to me that many others experience similar performance in both cases.
I don't think you're correct about the gstreamer backend.
Some Mozilla-based projects use Gstreamer (Songbird for one), and I believe they're having discussions about a future collaboration for accessing user's video cameras in the browser but Mozilla don't want to support any old codecs.
Their mission as a non-profit is to support the open web, and promoting royalty-free codecs fits with that mission. They can make a difference by actively choosing not to do stuff, just like at one point in the past they refused to support ActiveX despite having code available. It would have made Firefox a more useful browser at the cost of making the web less open.
Comments
Apparently the problem with doing something sane like using Gstreamer is that... it's LGPL. Which apparently isn't free enough for them.
This is not correct. The reason GStreamer is not used in Firefox is because the GStreamer backend wasn't finished in time for FF 3.5. Rather than push back the release date, they released an implementation that works for many videos. The GStreamer backend is still under active development, and will eventually be merged to trunk.
leading to the tremendous irony of having video playback vastly slower than Flash.
Using the most recent version of Flash and Firefox, I can play high-definition Theora easily on my laptop, but even medium-resolution H.264 in Flash struggles to achieve real-time decoding. A quick, unscientific sampling of other FF 3.5 users online has indicated to me that many others experience similar performance in both cases.
I don't think you're correct about the gstreamer backend.
Some Mozilla-based projects use Gstreamer (Songbird for one), and I believe they're having discussions about a future collaboration for accessing user's video cameras in the browser but Mozilla don't want to support any old codecs.
Their mission as a non-profit is to support the open web, and promoting royalty-free codecs fits with that mission. They can make a difference by actively choosing not to do stuff, just like at one point in the past they refused to support ActiveX despite having code available. It would have made Firefox a more useful browser at the cost of making the web less open.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540 for the progress of the GStreamer <video> backend.
I was confused by this recent comment:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2009-June/002362.html
"We can't ship gstreamer. We don't ship under the LGPL.
That being said, we can link to it on Linux. We would just need something for the Mac and Windows as well."
Though the mentions of Fennec and the fact that some mobile folk have adopted Gstreamer for DSP accelerated decoding might make it useful there too.
Looks like Fennec on Nokia 810 is the first target:
http://iloapp.mikek.dk/blog/developer?Home&post=44