One of the many cool things that Firefox 3.5 will bring is Open Video. What is it? It's native video in the browser using the HTML 5 video element, combined with the non-proprietary Ogg Theora codec. This means that now video is able to become a first class citizen on the Web (it's native, you don't have to resort to an external plug-in) and thanks to Ogg Theora, you can play video using free software, without paying a fee for using a patent-encumbered format subject to royalties.
This is very cool news, but the skeptics will certainly complain that we're facing a chicken and egg situation: Browser vendors won't put Ogg Theora in their products until there is significant content in this format, while video publishers won't use the format until enough browsers support it.
Well, we're doing our part at Mozilla, and thanks to the upcoming Firefox 3.5 release, we should soon see close to 300 million people with an Ogg Theora-enabled browser.
But what about content? That's the real scoop for today! Dailymotion.com is publishing 300'000 of its most popular videos in Ogg Theora, using the HTML 5 video element. This comes on top of very cool Websites such as Wikipedia and Internet Archive, who are doing similar things.
Of course, Open Video is not yet mainstream, but we have a beginning of an egg, and a young chicken 
. The future is brighter than ever for Open video! I'd like to personally thank Sébastien Adgnot, Web developer at Dailymotion for calling me after he had read an article on my blog about Open Video. This is how it all got started! Also a great thanks to the Dailymotion exec team, including Sylvain Brosset, for supporting this idea that looked a bit funky at first sight. Hat tip to Chris Blizzard (just because I can and Paul Rouget for helping with most of the tech stuff behind the scene...
A few links if you want to learn more about this:
- Dailymotion's HTML5 Video Player Demos
- OpenVideo.Dailymotion.com
- Chris Blizzard's post: dailymotion and open video
- Open Video Conference, June 18, 19, 2009, New York City.
- Upcoming improvement of Theora encoders.
22 réactions
1 De chewey - 28/05/2009, 13:56
More or less related: What about Dirac? There doesn't seem to be a bug for it yet... my bugzilla-fu is generally very weak though.
2 De krapo - 28/05/2009, 14:11
I think open video on the web is just great news, the demos i have seen are amazing. But will it provide sharing functionnalities the way websites like youtube or dailymotion do? If it doesn't, the best way to spread one's video would unfortunately remain these proprietary platforms...
3 De Quxxy - 28/05/2009, 14:18
It's just a pity the egg's a little rotten. Most of the controls appear to be broken and the three dot loading logo won't go away. Worst of all, you can't seek and the video isn't being cached.
Open video has some catching up to do.
4 De Peter Gasston - 28/05/2009, 15:01
DailyMotion seem to be browser sniffing for Firefox; I visited in Safari 4 Beta, which has Video support, and it told me the demo only works in Firefox!
5 De Paul - 28/05/2009, 16:02
@chewey Dirac will be supported since it's part of libogg. Maybe for the next Firefox release..
@Quxxy Can you please give me more details about your browser ?
6 De Christopher Blizzard - 28/05/2009, 16:21
@chewey Dirac isn't part of the upstream ogg stuff so we're not shipping it. But it will be soon and we'll look at it once it is.
@krapo The dailymotion site does have an <object> tag-based embedding mechanism so it should work.
@Quxxy Is that on a particular video? I've had good luck here with the release candidate builds.
7 De Gen Kanai - 28/05/2009, 16:23
Tristan, don't forget to thank Chris "doublec" Double and Robert O'Callahan and the Kiwi Mozillians who actually did the hard work to implement the functionality
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2009/0...
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/...
8 De Yann Dìnendal - 28/05/2009, 16:32
I don't have these problems, Quxxy... I can seek forward/backward in the video.
It's great that it looks a lot like the Dailymotion flash player!
9 De nyamsprod - 28/05/2009, 16:33
@Quxxy It's just the beginning, don't just throw it away because there are still some imperfections. I was able to do something I think pretty decent just by reading the specs on the Mozilla and the Webkit websites. Just take a look : http://nyams.planbweb.com/test/jspl... The challenge is for us developpers to find ways to integrate theses new tags in a more user friendly way. For the rest it's up to us to adopt or to reject the whole thing.
10 De Bob - 28/05/2009, 16:35
Behind the scenes, this might be a good way to reduce IE's market shares, because I guess it won't support HTML5 soon.
Still, I am a bit worried about Webkit/Safari's implementation of <video> : They tend to prefer the use of .mov videos on their demo ( http://webkit.org/blog/140/html5-me... ) and they do not support OGG by default (installation of XiphQt is required on MacOS)
11 De Mayel - 28/05/2009, 17:43
What's missing is full-screen mode. I hope FF will implement it.
Fullscreen (but within the browser window) is possible using JS, here are some bookmarklets :
http://lelab.tv/player/js_fullscree...
12 De XioNoX - 28/05/2009, 18:27
It looks like Youtube is also interested in Open Video : http://www.youtube.com/html5
13 De chewey - 28/05/2009, 22:34
@Paul, Christopher: That's wonderful news!
I've been playing around a bit with Dirac and Schroedinger recently, and liked the results very much. I've also been lobbying for open codecs in a couple of interesting places: There's a very good chance the new media branch of a major German TV station will use <video> as soon as it works with Dirac.
14 De boutteau - 29/05/2009, 00:49
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p... fonctionne avec la dernière alpha de chrome de même que http://labs.silverorange.com/files/...
Je pense que cela fonctionne aussi avec les dernières béta de Safari et Opera, seul Microsoft ne suit pas.
Cela fonctionnera bientôt sur safari iPhone et Chrome Android.
15 De pd - 29/05/2009, 09:18
Skeptics or realists?
Can you please point me to a URL where I can download a free GUI-based Ogg Theora encoder for Windows?
I doubt it, because no such thing seems to exist!
Is it possible someone could utilise the liboggplay support in XULRunner to write a decent encoder app?
16 De pd - 29/05/2009, 09:52
@XioNoX
I think you'll find SpewTube are looking at implementing canvas or SVG, hence the blurb: "This is a demo that demonstrates the potential of rendering 3D graphics in the browser".
Re full screen they've already ruled it out, grrrrrrr. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_b...
@Bob
IE market share will be reduced by Ogg support in even 30% of browsers? What are you smoking? There are reasons that Flash dominates this field: easy encoder software, full toolchain support (Flash application, 90+% browser share).
Until someone can replace that, nothing will change as is proven by the lack of any explanation in the Dailymotion press release regarding what they are going to serve up to IE users.
How many organisations will take this approach:
1. Encode for Ogg
2. Encode for Flash, doubling your data storage burden
3. Build 'player' for Ogg (yes there will still be scripting needed for nice controls etc)
4. Build 'player' for Flash (and break standards)
5.
If (user_agent == 'ie') {
} else {
Serve Ogg player, content
}
17 De Flo - 29/05/2009, 10:39
@pd: VLC is able to encode videos in Ogg/Theora, http://www.videolan.org
18 De Benoit - 29/05/2009, 10:49
@pd: just use VLC, or MediaCoder.
19 De pd - 29/05/2009, 16:07
The chicken (Microsoft) has already laid the egg (H.264 codec bundled into Win7 by default) and now a smart, innovative browser is eating the eggs so kindly provided by the chicken:
"Chrome will support H.264 video and AAC audio as well as Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio format. "
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/so...
x264 for other platforms.
As previously argued, this is a no-brainer that only the Mozilla world doesn't understand.
Unless I'm mistaken, all Flash-based "HD" content is already coded in *264. If Firefox followed Chrome's lead (again) then come 2010, in a more Win7 world, Firefox, Chrome and IE would all support the same codec - surely increasing the chance that HTML5 will be used as the 'player' - whilst for craptacular IE, which may never support HTML5 because of SilverLight obstinance, the same content a user encodes in *264 for HTML5/Chrome and HTML5/Firefox can be used with Flash/IE! This will save content producers a lot of pain in the arse and thus increase adoption of HTML5 whilst highlight Microsoft's embarrassing lack of support.
Would this take much work? NO! Chris Double had the Firefox HTML5 video backend supporting DirectShow so well that he was able to compile a build that did so:
http://pearce.org.nz/firefox-direct...
test the build with this page:
http://pearce.org.nz/player/
For other platforms, Apple already support h264 in QuickTime since version seven:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tech...
and I expect getting a GStreamer interface to x264 should not be rocket science so Linux would be covered.
It is this kind of decision making that drives me mad about Firefox. Where there is a clear solution to the point that a build has already been created, Mozilla still cannot see the forest from the trees.
Sooner or later Mozilla is going to have to offer cutting edge features to crack the IE dominance and fend of Chrome. It cannot keep relying on extension authors. Mozilla seems incapable of doing that. Mozilla is already way behind in multi-process support (not due for at least a year) and is now behind Chrome in HTML5 video stakes.
Please stop using excuses like the title of this article and get the job done as it should be. You want to bring "Open Video" to the web? "Open" up your damn video back-end to more codecs!
20 De Yannick - 29/05/2009, 22:53
Good news! The bad part is that the page is "optimized for Firefox 3.5 beta".
For instance Midori, which uses webkit, can play the video if you make it identify itself as Firefox beta.
To encode a video in Ogg/Theora, there's also the very good HandBrake (http://handbrake.fr).
21 De Tristan - 30/05/2009, 10:28
@PD : from the tone of your comment, I can sense that you are indeed mad.
There are a couple of things that you seem not to understand, and I'll try to explain them:
You wrote "It is this kind of decision making that drives me mad about Firefox".
It's not decision making issues, it's much needed time to properly implement things so that they don't break in the hands of our 300 million users. The good news is that your anger can motivate you to come and help Mozilla move forward faster. Please contact Chris Double directly and open a Bugzilla account. You'll understand that in short, we're not dumb, but we'd be glad to have your help.
22 De Chris Double - 31/05/2009, 11:44
pd, just for clarification it was Chris Pearce that did the DirectShow implementation, not me. I did the GStreamer and Ogg backends.
Supporting H.264 is an issue due to the patent licensing requirement. We want to provide source that people can download and do their own builds based on this code. We cannot get an H.264 license that also applies to all downstream users of the code. Even Google is hitting this issue with Chrome:
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/w...
I hope that this can all be resolved. In a perfect world we'd be supporting H.264 and Theora too. Vent your frustrations at the active barrier to projects like us supporting H.264 - the patent license holders. You can start with mpegla http://www.mpegla.com/ .