I don't know if you poke around TestTube much - http://www.youtube.com/testtube - but they've rolled out experimental support for HTML5 playback of videos. This is cool because it bypasses the necessity for Adobe Flash.
If you have Google Chrome, or are using Safari on the Mac, you can try it out:
http://www.youtube.com/html5
What you'll want to do is click on the "Join the HTML5 beta" link, then surf to a video without ads. If it's working, you should see an HTML5 logo, then playback of your video. When you're done checking it out, go back to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and click "Leave the HTML5 beta" link.
Now - here's the interesting part for us. (And, the boo hiss part)
Firefox 3.5 and later versions include HTML5 video playback support. This might make compiling Firefox 3.5/3.6 a higher priority for us. However - there's a problem here.
They only have support for Ogg Theora format video, not H.264.
And - YouTube only uses H.264 & FLV - not Ogg Theora.
There's a good explanation of their reasoning here:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/arch ... dom_a.html
Basically, it boils down to the old "Completely open source browser" argument - just like the Fedora & Debian philosophies. I'm fine with that - there's a certain intellectual purity about that kind of viewpoint that's kind of appealing.
However - this stood out:
Mozilla should pick up and use H.264 codecs that are already installed on the user's system.
I've previously written about a variety of reasons this would be a bad idea, especially on Windows. Really there are two main issues:
1. Most users with Windows Vista and earlier do not have an H.264 codec installed. So for the majority of our users, this doesn't solve any problem.
2. It pushes the software freedom issues from the browser (where we have leverage to possibly change the codec situation) to the platform (where there is no such leverage). You still can't have a completely free software Web client stack.
But I could just download gst-plugins-ugly and I'd be OK.
That's a selfish attitude. Everyone should be able to browse the Web with a free software stack without having to jump through arcane hoops to download and install software (whose use is legally questionable).
Thus - the "boo hiss" part. We're a much smaller market than x86 Linux - but we have no other alternative. They're relying on the fact that if Firefox can't use HTML5 due to H.264, they can fall back to Adobe Flash plugin - then somehow convince YouTube to add Ogg Theora support if they want to get rid of Flash once and for all.
Instead, since YouTube is owned by Google, and Chrome supports HTML5 H.264, nothing will change at all except that Firefox users won't have this option. And, since the support is built into the browser and not a plugin or codec, they won't be able to add the option.
Really short sighted on Firefox's part, IMHO. Epic FAIL.
Cheers,
Paul