Daring Fireball: Mozilla, Video, and Mobile Computing | Hacker News Reader

Daring Fireball: Mozilla, Video, and Mobile Computing

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18 pointsbarredo36 comments

Put another way, “open and better” is a recipe for success; “open but worse” is a recipe for obscurity.

This is equivalent to: "better" is a recipe for success; "worse" is a recipe for obscurity. Openness is irrelevant.

No, it's not. Given the choice between "better" and "worse", you (and Mozilla) would always choose "better". However, if the options are "closed and better" and "open but worse", you might choose the latter.

Openness isn't irrelevant; it's Mozilla's reason for choosing "worse".

That's kind of a confused response. Openness is irrelevant to whether users will adopt something, even if it's relevant to Mozilla. In other words, Mozilla cares about irrelevant factors.

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One or more examples would help.

All the talk of h264 and not one word about AAC? h264 license is actually very affordable for small companies (free for less than 100,000 users) and large. (capped fee per year) AAC is less friendly.

"Maximum Annual Payment $32,000 per PC Software Product"

http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/AAC_fees.cfm

This sounds dirt cheap.

It is just more complicated. What count as a product? Is it per platform, per version? Is what you are building an enabling software?

Also, notice that there is no free provision for low volume, or internet broadcast.

Can anyone think of a case in recent memory where the fear mongering over a proprietary, wisely used, web format lived up to the doom & gloom predictions? Seems like it usually turns out fine in the end or, over time, a more open solution wins out on technical merits and better/cheaper accessibility of encoders. In 2010 I still see animated GIFS on a fairly regular basis, MP3s, even RealMedia which thankfully VLC plays well. I don't think it's a bad thing Mozilla is trying to make a point here about open formats but they shouldn't take it too far or they risk really hurting the web by committing market share suicide and limiting the diversity of commonly used browsers.

"between 2002 and 2004 Forgent was able to obtain about US$105 million by licensing their [JPEG] patent to some 30 companies." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Patent_issues) Sounds pretty gloomy to me, yet regular people never noticed.

You hear this "open is only better if it's technically better" argument all the time but any popular, open tech I can think of either was or is worse than the alternative.

At what point did Gecko become better than IE? Where would we be without the people who worked on it then? When the technically superior alternative was left to rot because it suited the owner's business reasons.

KHTML? Webkit? Wikipedia? Linux? MySQL? LLVM?

I'm honestly struggling to think of one that was better straight out the gate. Even if I think of one it probably built on one that wasn't.

There was a time when Gecko wasn't a very good rendering engine. And that was a time when practically nobody used Gecko-based browsers; it didn't really take off until it started to surpass IE.

The useful analogy here is that Gecko had all sorts of room to improve and ultimately beat IE, but Theora seems to have little or no room to improve to the point where it'd match or beat H.264. Which means Theora will likely always be a fringe codec, just as Gecko used to be a fringe browser engine.

The Theora/VP3 code cannot be substantially improved without breaking backwards compatibility. While there are some gains to be made with better encoders, some of the choices, such as small fixed block-size, permanently hobble the codec.

There are those far more qualified than I to go into the technical details (I think there was an article by one of the FFMPEG devs), but the situation is not analogous to early versions of Webkit, Linux or Mozilla.

This is not a situation where it can substantially improve over time, which is one of the major advantages of an Open Format.

What is stopping them from revving the spec and breaking compatability?

Is it all those hardware implementations? Clearly not. And existing content would still play just newly encoded material wouldn't play on old encoders. Very similar to H.264 profiles, where Main and High profiles won't play on iPhones.

I would suggest they haven't done this yet because they are making rapid progress without having the need do so. The longer they leave it the more they can improve when they break either by taking advantage of more expired patents or just more experience.

If the argument is that Theora can't be revved (for some unspecified reason) and that limits progress then that argument should be made so it can be challenged. It does not follow directly from anything said in the article.

What is stopping them from revving the spec and breaking compatability?

Basically that's Dirac, except they started from scratch rather than improve incrementally from Theora. There was also Sun OMS Video (which has probably been canceled) that attempted to incrementally improve H.261 in a patent-free way.

“Open is only better if it's technically better” is not the argument Gruber made. Open has only a chance to be successful if it’s at least as good or better than the alternatives. That’s the argument, and that’s not the same.

Could you explain the difference? Cos I just listed several open thing that succeded despite being worse than the alternatives.

Anything – especially if created in the open – will always be inferior in the beginning. That’s just how it is and not the least bit surprising. Gruber makes the argument that open things which made it were – at the point were they started to gain traction – as good or better than the closed alternatives.

Consumers and companies will use open technologies if there are no (cheap, available, fitting) closed alternatives or if the open stuff is as good or better than the closed stuff. They won’t use open technologies just for openness sake. That’s the gist of the argument.

As the parent said, e.g. MySQL and Linux weren't as good or better than the closed alternatives when they gained traction. They were however cheaper, and open often has the quality of cheaper, since it's often simply free. Cheaper often wins over better. Hell, MySQL still isn't as good at the big closed databases.

And this applies to HTML5 video: Theora is cheaper than h264. So Gruber's argument doesn't seem to hold.

You are defining "good" as "feature rich", which are different concepts.

For example, MySQL wasn't and isn't as feature rich as the big closed databases, but it solved many problems as well as they did, and in many cases with less overhead (learning curve, administration, hardware requirements). So, in a way it was better than the alternatives, and that's why it gained traction.

Compare to H.264 vs. Theora. Theora is just an alternative, it doesn't solve any problems better, it is just "open", which most people don't care about.

> MySQL and Linux weren't as good or better than the closed alternatives when they gained traction

I don't recall either gaining any traction until they were better in some way, either for developers or implementors. In some cases just being "open" makes it better, but that's only true if the project is going to be adopted in some way, like Apple using KHTML for WebKit.

In the case of Theora, nobody wants to adopt it as a long term project, they just want to implement video for their users. From that perspective, H.264 is better (I'm a layman here, but as I understand it the quality is better and the file sizes are significantly smaller, but correct me if I'm wrong).

It would certainly be better if they all got together on Theora much like they have on WebKit, but it seems ongoing development can't have the same level of improvement on a video codec that it can on a rendering engine, at least that's my perspective on it.

It depends on where you define traction to have occurred. In the classic "crossing the chasm" terminology. A "good enough" solution that is open can attract early adopters and these same early adopters can become evangelists, developers who improve the open product, or developers who use the open product to create additional products (and sometimes show others how they did this in a devel/evangelism hybrid.) The improvements in awareness, product quality, and product ecosystem that come from all three of those variants of the early adopter are what gets the product into the mainstream and it is usually not until progress has been made on all three fronts that anyone claims that a product is "getting traction."

The lack of an alternative choice will push a lot of people into the early adopter space for some product niches, which can lead to a fast elevator ride into mainstream usage for some products (c.f. MySQL, Linux, etc.) This is not the case with video codecs. The field is technically rigorous so only a few have the chops to contribute code, the alternatives (h.264) are currently better and widely available so few have much to gain by building the Theora ecosystem, which really only leaves the evangelists who are interested in the product as a mission rather than as a tool. This group is unlikely to gain significant traction with the mainstream computing audience.

> I don't recall either gaining any traction until they were better in some way, either for developers or implementors.

No, when they got traction was before they were better, but after they were good enough, which means you could run your business on cheap Intel/AMD hardware.

Ah, but that means they were better in some way relevant to business needs, and good enough elsewhere.

Theora is better in terms of cost, but that apparently isn't enough of an advantage to counter the technical shortcomings.

No, they were not better than the closed source alternatives for most businesses. They were cheaper. Cheaper trumps better often. Cheaper drove adoption.

I'm defining "cheaper" as one of many factors that go into deciding if one thing is better than another, I'm not speaking purely from a technical/feature standpoint.

Theora is cheaper in some cases, but usually all codecs appear "free". Apple and MS have already paid the H.264 license fees (for other reasons), so the incremental cost to support it in the browser is zero. Likewise, most people treat encoding and streaming as free even if they're legally supposed to pay.

MySQL would never have caught on if every new computer made came with an already licensed version of a better and faster database. MySQL was "better" because it was accessible. h.264 is already accessible, it's built into every new smartphone and computer.

Gruber ignores costs, that’s right. Probably should have mentioned those somewhere in his argument.

But, just so to make that clear, cost does of course not win by default. If something is bad enough, paying for the alternative could be the better thing to do.

Gruber ignoring cost when it's often one of the strongest benefits that fall out of openness strikes me as disingenuous.

And yeah, cheap doesn't always win if it really sucks. You could make an argument that Theora sucks that bad, especially when you consider the lack of hardware decoders. But that isn't Gruber's argument at all. His analysis here is really off base.

Price is just another criteria used to evaluate what's "good", but it is not an independent factor. The importance of price varies along with everything else.

He forgot to add cost into the factor.

He claims Mozilla only have a mobile browser on Maemo. Which is both untrue, as they've got builds for WinMo and Android, and a bit cheeky for an Apple pundit since it's Apple that is the main blocker for that happening on their platform.

(Mozilla claim they do better on Javascript benchmarks than the bundled Android browser, which is surprising).

He forgot the Wikipedia factor: Wikipedia probably won't be using H.264 anytime soon, and it's one of the top sites in terms of traffic.

Currently, Wikipedia is 95% text and 5% images, with negligible amounts of audio and video served up with a cumbersome almost broken Java thing. Barring substantial changes, I’d go so far as to say Wikipedia’s audio and video are irrelevant to users and browser vendors.

If you're getting the Java thing it means your browser doesn't have native Theora support. You should upgrade or install an appropriate plugin.

(They've also done a lot of work to improve the Java fallback but it's not gone live yet).

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