Even if you have some sort of personal vendetta against the xiph crew and want to encode just once, using the <video> tag (with fallback to using a flash player to render your h.264 file) has plenty of benefits, so any perceived or real shortcomings of Ogg Theora aren't too relevant to danger that the <video> tag presents to flash.
So, why would you double-encode: 1. (MAJOR): Because you're going to piss off firefox users. Firefox has taken a stand and will not, as far as I understand, run <video> tags unless there's an ogg theora source in there. 2. (ARGUABLE): Licence-free means its much easier to gain some ubiquity; you're essentially future-proofing your content. Whether this matters to you, or if its even a sound argument is a complex issue that's being debated all over the interwebs and is probably not too relevant for this forum. However, just reason #1 (no firefox) is more than enough to spend the extra harddisk space. harddisk space is at about 50 bucks a terabyte these days. Unless you're youtube or vimeo, I'm having a hard time seeing how 'I wanna save space' is going to fly as an argument. Maybe the encode CPU time, where, last time I checked, Ogg Theora is quite a bit slower. A lot of the patents Ogg Theora has to swerve around involve efficient encoding tricks. That's not relevant for static content, though. Submarine patents: Yes, that's a problem, but note that Opera HAS gone for it, and they are a company as well. If there are submarine patents out there, they are expiring, and the longer you wait to come forward, the less legal standing you have. It becomes kind of hard to honestly claim in front of a judge that you had no clue all this stuff was happening, and (IANAL!) there's some onus on the patent owner to defend the patent when infractions are noticed. That's not too relevant in a legal culture where tossing enough greenbacks on the scales of Lady Justice will tip em, of course. quality-per-bit: Ogg Theora is very close. Google doesn't close their body and html tags on their pages because browsers can handle it and it saves them 8 bytes per transfer. Sounds ridiculous until you realize the crazy amount of traffic google's servers have to handle, so every bit counts for them. That's a _very_ niche argument for everybody else, though. Bandwidth isn't exactly going to bankrupt you, these days. It's not Ogg's fault: They can't use certain tricks because there are some bullshit patents on common techniques that they nevertheless avoid for lack of legal funds and a solid dedication to playing it as safe as they possibly can. Long story short, though: Okay, then don't encode ogg. The <video> tag is still going to put a serious dent in actual flash usage. Especially on the fastest growing segments of the market, users will get annoyed at lack of <video> tag based sources (netbooks and phones, which run with non-windows OSes and have either no flash player or a very sucky one, and Mac OS X, which as mentioned has a flash player that eats CPU for no good reason). I'm really interested in how google is going to roll with this. They played ball with Apple and released an API for them to get at the underlying sources (that's what powers the iPhone YouTube app - obviously not a flash player). This means there's a 640x480 non- streaming h.264 copy (or that's the actual source of all youtube videos, I haven't checked, and it doesn't matter) for ALL youtube videos. Why NOT stick that in a <video> tag that falls back to a flash player? Google goes out of their way to support HTML5 and promote the vanilla web as the app platform of the future. I'd be confused if they don't add <video> tags to youtube soon. Joe Data wrote: > Sure, you could "bundle Ogg Theora and H.264", but what's the > benefit? It seems that there are three reasons against using Ogg > Theora (see the email announcement at > http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020620.html): > - no hardware video decoding support (cited by Apple) > - "Ogg Theora's quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume > handled by YouTube" (cited by Google) > - uncertainty over whether "submarine patents" will threaten Ogg > (cited by Apple) > > The last issue may or may not be real, since Apple has a vested > interest in pushing iTunes and Quicktime. > > Anyway, if you encode your video to H.264, you can display it with > Flash on all computers and "natively" on the iPhone and don't worry > about these issues above. So again, what's the benefit to add Ogg > Theora? Sure, you can get the immaterial benefit of "we push open > source video", but I don't think the added expense will be worth it > for many businesses. > > On Jul 4, 7:41 pm, Reinier Zwitserloot <[email protected]> wrote: > > Not entirely. > > > > if you offer just flash, you create some annoyances for your users: > > > > - It won't work on the iPhone (major reason) > > - On non-windows machines, it'll light up one CPU core, which means > > notebook mac and linux users will burn through the battery. > > - There's no useful right click context menu (e.g. no 'mute' in > > there. There is <video> tags. > > > > So, what I'm about to describe is not just 'to be more standards > > compatible', which is good, because 'just being more standards > > compatible' never made anybody do anything. > > > > Here's what you do: > > > > You encode your video BOTH to Ogg Theora AND h.264 via the MP4 > > container at 640x480 without streaming (so that its iPhone > > compatible), and then: > > > > follow the instructions athttp://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody > > > > This gets you a nice fallback, where the <video> tag is used offering > > both ogg and h.264, which covers Safari, Firefox 3.5+, Opera10, and > > Safari iPhone, as well as flash as a fallback, which covers older > > versions and IE. It then falls back further, to a download link. > > > > As its all nicely bundled up, the effort to do this is minimal, and > > hosting your own video has always been quite an endeavour (you need to > > figure out how to encode and all that - that's why so many people just > > embed a youtube video!), so I doubt the technical difficulty of doing > > this is going to stop people from adding video tag powered videos to > > their websites. > > > > On Jul 4, 4:20 pm, Karsten Silz <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > > Hi, > > > > > Some people thought that the upcoming HTLM 5 with standard audio and > > > video tags would spell the end of Flash (and Silverlight and JavaFX). > > > I never thought it would because these plug-ins offer much more than > > > just video and audio. > > > > > However, it seems now that there will be no standard audio and video > > > codecs in HTML 5, which means that unless a de-facto standard emerges > > > somewhere down the line, Flash with H.264 video will continue to > > > deliver video to the browser masses. For more details, > > > see:http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/02/184251/Browser-Vendors-Force-... > > > > > In somewhat related news, XHTML 2 seems to have been canceled, making > > > HTML 5 the only new HTML version going > > > forward:http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1447237/XHTML-2-Cancelled > > > > > --- > > > Karsten Silz --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
