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Mozilla's director of research Andreas Gal has proposed enablingmobile H.264 video decoding via hardware or the underlyingoperating system, signaling the end to the group's war on theApple-led H.264 video codec. The move is necessitated by the overall lack of support forGoogle's WebM video codec, which Mozilla and Google hoped wouldreplace H.264, the technology backed by Apple, Microsoft, Nokia andother commercial vendors. Mozilla's war on H.264 has gone on for nearly three years, but nowthe company's leading developers have admitted, "we lost." The Ogg Theora war on H.264 Beginning in mid-2009, Mozilla and browser developer Opera tried to dictate the use of the freeware "Ogg Theora" codec as the official way topresent video on the web using the emerging HTML5 specification, inhopes that it would prevent the ISO's MPEG H.264 standard frombecoming the standard for web video. For years prior to the Ogg Theora debate, Apple had aggressivelypushed H.264 in iTunes as the most technically sophisticated,efficient way to deliver video, essentially standing on theshoulders of the industry giants who had each contributed variouscomponents of the standard to become state of the art in videocompression. While H.264 is an open standard, it is not free. It is based upon apool of video compression and related technology patentscontributed by various companies in exchange for "Fair, Reasonableand Nondiscriminatory" licensing fees. Mozilla, Opera and otherfree and open source advocates opposed the use of any technologythat might require licensing fees to produce or distribute webcontent. Commercial hardware developers, led by Apple and Nokia, opposed anyshift toward Ogg Theora in H.264, noting that H.264 was far aheadof the older Ogg Theora video technology in technicalsophistication, and that hardware decoding was already wellestablished in place to accelerate H.264, particularly in mobiledevices. Replacing H.264 with Ogg Theora to placate Mozilla and Opera'sinsistence upon cost-free video encoding for the web would havebroken the ability of millions of smartphones, iPods, netbooks andother mobile devices to efficiently play back video. Additionally,Google noted at the time that Ogg Theora was not powerful enough toserve the billions of video streams it was delivering via itsYouTube service. The Ogg Theora war on H.264 ended when HTML5 working group membersagreed that rather than defining Ogg Theora or H.264 or anythingelse as the "baseline" codec for video served via the HTML5 videotag, the decision should be left to the market and to the votes ofweb users and Internet broadcasters to decide. This decision paralleled how HTML has always worked with everyother type of media file; there is no baseline graphic or audioformat, for example; instead, web publishers decide for themselveswhether to use GIF, JPEG, or PNG graphics formats and whether touse MP3, AAC, or raw WAV audio files. Modern browsers support themall. The WebM war on H.264 At the end of 2010, the war on H.264 was reignited, this time byGoogle. After having converted its massive library of YouTubevideos to H.264 in a partnership with Apple to shift web videosfrom the constraints of Adobe Flash and make open video viewable ondevices that lacked the ability to run Flash, Google decided to buyOn2's VP8 (a newer generation of the VP3 codec Ogg Theora was basedupon) and release it as a "free" codec named WebM. Because WebM was technically capable of serving YouTube videos,Google now hoped to join Mozilla and Opera in turning back supportfor H.264 video on the web and replacing the H.264 codec with afree alternative it claimed to be unencumbered by patent claims. This strategy shared some similarity to Apple's war on Adobe Flashusing the free and open HTML5, which Apple successfully pursuedover the five years following the release of the original iPhone. However, WebM was "unencumbered" by patents only in the sense thatGoogle didn't plan to charge royalties for its use itself. It wasstill based on technologies that the MPEG Licensing Authorityclaimed to own, making it no less "encumbered" than H.264.Microsoft had earlier learned the same lesson when its own WindowsMedia Video (aka VC-1) codec was found to be infringing a varietyof technologies already patented by MPEG members who had pooledtheir expertise to create H.264. Creating an illegitimate, infringing copy of H.264 is no morelegally legitimate than simply implementing H.264 and failing topay licensing fees. However, Google was emboldened by having doneessentially the same thing to JavaME in order to create Android,and having suffered no consequences for it. So it began a campaignto derail the adoption of H.264 in HTML5 and aggressively push WebM as its substitute atthe beginning of 2011. A year later, Google's WebM hasn't gained any more traction thanGoogle Wave, Google Buzz, Google TV or Android 3.0 Honeycombtablets. In part, this is because H.264 is the only way to servevideos to Apple's iOS devices, a factor that also helped to robFlash of critical mass among mobile devices. However, Google also never removed H.264 support from its ownChrome browser as it had promised to do. And even among otherbrowsers that had effectively made WebM the only default way topresent HTML5 video (including Mozilla's Firefox and the Operabrowser), there was still a fallback in place to use Adobe Flash. That meant video content creators could reach all audiences usingH.264, and simply route around the idealogical position of Mozilla,Opera and now Google by wrapping their videos with Flash. There wasno exclusive audience that could only be reached by WebM, andtherefore no real advantage to using it. However, there is a big advantage to using H.264: support forefficient hardware acceleration exists for it on all modern mobiledevices. Mozilla's new softening stance on the issue seeks to allowthis underlying hardware support (or the operating system, such asWindows Phone 7 or Android) to perform the H.264 decoding on behalfof the browser. The war on H.264 is over: "We lost," says Mozilla Gal announced plans to add a feature that "adds hardware-accelerated audio/videodecoding support to [Mozilla's] Gecko [browser engine] using systemdecoders already present on the system," including"hardware-accelerated decoders for good battery life (andperformance)." He noted, "We will support decoding any video/audio format that issupported by existing decoders present on the system, includingH.264 and MP3. There is really no justification to stop our usersfrom using system decoders already on the device, so we will notfilter any formats." The mechanism will apply both to Mozilla's own "Boot2Gecko (B2G)"mobile operating system as well as Android, although Gal statedthat "on Android we might have to add a second video path usingoverlays which would only work with a small subset of CSS sinceextracting video frames isn't supported on all versions of Android(and all devices). "I don't think this bug significantly changes our position on openvideo," he wrote. "We will continue to promote and support opencodecs, but when and where existing codecs are already installedand licensed on devices we will make use of them in order toprovide people with the best possible experience." Gal also notedplans to add similar technology to the desktop version of Firefox,allowing the host operating system or available hardware to rendervideo or audio as needed. Adding such an option to Firefox for Windows would mean Windows 7users could render H.264 but the installed base of Windows XP couldnot, unless Mozilla actually bundled H.264 codecs with its browser.This additional complexity is pushing Mozilla to focus first onadding the ability to render H.264 to mobile devices, somethingthat would help Firefox on Android, which lacks the ability torender H.264, the format most web videos now use. Noting the necessity of supporting H.264, Mozilla's Open SourceEvangelist Christopher Blizzard noted, "We've only seen [WebM]format adoption on YouTube. Basically everyone else uses H.264 &Flash. There are occasional exceptions, but it's not getting betterwith time." Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's product director for the Firefox added,"We're talking with major video sites and they're saying 'no' toWebM. The costs of transcoding huge libraries just doesn't makesense to them. "Firefox on Desktop is experiencing these same 'significantdeficiencies' and the tide is not turning in any appreciable way.All that's happening while we wait is that Web developers areembracing other browsers and their primary targets. "What I fear people aren't getting here is that Gecko is the _only_mainstream browser that doesn't support h.264. We lost. It's notlike we're at some tipping point and it's 3 of 4 browsers on theside of royalty free codecs with the forth about to agree. Thingshave tipped the other way and to not realize that and continue tohold out for a change that will not happen does little but cost ususers and developer mindshare. "It's time to bite that particular bullet and deliver h.264+AAC(and probably mp3) in Firefox -- across all platforms and devices." Android powerless to push WebM over H.264 in the way iOS pushedHTML5 over Flash This is a turnaround of the situation Google intended to create instarving iOS devices of H.264 content by leveraging Adobe Flash,which in 2010 became exclusively available for Android (shortlybefore Adobe gave up on Flash for mobile devices in recognitionthat its War on Apple wasn't going to work out). If Android could play both Flash videos and WebM, Google expectedto be able to either force Apple to adopt Flash or WebM. Instead,Google is rethinking its position on H.264, bundling the legallygrey ffmpeg H.264 decoder with Chrome, and bundling an ApacheLicense 2.0 implementation of H.264 with Android. Even Mozilla, representing the ideological left flank of itspartners, is throwing its support behind H.264 out of necessity.And so, another war is over: H.264 first defeated Microsoft's VC-1in HD-DVD , defeated proprietary codecs used by Flash , and has now defeated Google's attempts to replace it with its ownWebM. The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as Hyundai AC Condenser Manufacturer , China Auto Air Conditioning Evaporator, and more. For more , please visit Honda Condenser today!
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