On Feb 9, 10:45 am, Karsten Silz <[email protected]> wrote:
> Codecs are a different matter: Oracle can't open source them because
> they license them from other companies and pay for that.  Now you
> could use open source codecs for audio/video, but the main problem is
> two-fold:

BTW Sun's biggest blunder in 2008-2009 was NOT acquiring On2, before
Google did. Even the cash-strapped Sun could have paid $100M for On2
(owners of the needed codecs), probably a better ROI than the $1B paid
for MySQL (that almost made Sun bankrupt by blocking thre acquisition
from Oracle)...

The video codec issue does indeed suck. But it's not that critical for
JavaFX. If Sun|Oracle offers a good (proprietary) build of FX for all
major desktop and mobile platforms, and if they release as much stuff
as possible under a free license, people who prefer to run a "purely
free" platform (a small minority - can't even have a decent video
driver for Linux) will miss the fun of some video-centric FX apps; but
they would run without any problem >90% of the apps I expect to be
written in JavaFX: "common" desktop apps (using FX as a replacement
for Swing), games, etc.

A+
Osvaldo

> - On Netbooks and mobile devices you need hardware acceleration at
> least for video to get decent playback.  H.264 has that now (e.g.,
> iPhone) or soon (e.g., Flash Player 10.1).
> - With Flash, Silverlight, the iPhone and Blu-Ray all supporting H.
> 264, it has become the de-facto video codec.  It will be hard to
> convince content owners otherwise.
>
> This battle over H.264 (comes with patents and royalties for certain
> uses) has already stalled the HTML 5 <video> / <audio> tags - no
> mandatory format is defined (http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/
> 2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars).  But just a
> couple of days ago, H.264 declared to be royalty-free for internet
> video streaming until the end of 2016 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/
> 2010/02/04/mpeg_la_h_264_codec_licence/), so I think it will remain
> the dominant codec.

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