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Comment by 9999 | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that Mozilla has already moved to support h.264 by using the host OS support for h.264:

http://www.webmonkey.com/2013/01/mozilla-brings-native-h-264...

Their opposition to H264 and MP3 was always more about political grandstanding than anything to do with them having to pay money.

They gave in on the MP3 issue too: http://stackoverflow.com/a/12203792

Update October 2012: Wooohooo! Brendan Eich just announced on his blog that work for MP3 and H264 support in Firefox is underway. You can track the work on BugZilla: Support H.264/AAC/MP3 video/audio playback on desktop Firefox

Update February 2013: After much heavy lifting from Firefox developer Chris Pearce, this patch flips the switch to enable MP3, MP4, H.264, and AAC playback by default in HTML5 <audio> and <video> elements when running on Windows 7 and later. We should see some native web MP3 support in the next stable FF release.

Update April 2013: Woohooo! The latest stable Firefox has experimental support for MP3. To turn it on, type about:config in Firefox, find media.windows-media-foundation.enabled and set it to true. Restart Firefox, and you're all set; go to a site with HTML5 audio (e.g. my radio site) and you'll see Firefox is indeed playing the native MP3 and not resorting to a Flash fallback.

Update May 2013: At last! Firefox 21 was released today, and it includes native HTML5 MP3 support on Windows. I just verified it supports native MP3 audio out-of-the-box, provided your operating system supports it. I tested on Windows 8, but I believe this will automatically work on Windows 7 and Vista.

Such opposition is reasonable. Someone has to fight against closed codecs. But fighting alone is hard. Google pretended to be the "white knight" when they promised that they'll drop H.264 support from Chrome, but they deserted the battle and didn't keep the promise. They could really influence the industry by dropping H.264 support from Youtube, but they don't have guts to do it since it's quite disruptive.

I'm positive that anyone who misuses the word "closed" to refer to patent encumbrance has never had to suffer through working with actual by-definition closed codecs.

You should have enough information from the context, to distinguish closed as "no known specs", from closed as "not free to use". May be the term non free / free (as liberated) codec is more descriptive, but closed/open will do as well.

That makes two of us, so I rooted out an official source:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=QA/H264-AAC-MP3_sup...

Looks like the blog is incorrect.

I'm curious if part of the H264 move has anything to do with FireFox OS and the plethora of mobile chipsets with hardware acceleration.

Yes it does. Mozilla couldn't avoid using H.264 in Firefox OS because VPx hardware decoding isn't widespread yet (though it catches up in the newest SoCs). But it uses the capability of the underlying system. I don't think Mozilla licenses anything from MPEG-LA.

Newest SoCs as in we are already on second generation with support? OMAP4 and Tegra2 supported it years back.

Today, almost all SoCs support it, from Exynos to Rockchip. Notable SoCs that do not support VP8 are Apple's Ax. Not that it is a surprise.

Availability in SoCs is paired by actual deployment of those SoCs to end user devices. The majority of currently available end user devices don't have hardware VP8 decoding yet. As time goes by and newer SoCs push out older ones this will improve, but we aren't there yet.

... I missed that memo.

Windows 7 only h264 support

what the f... i... am Utterly speechless.

Mozilla. The only company I knew had my back. What on earth happened?!

The world got a bit darker today for me.

Windows 7, 8, Firefox OS, Firefox for Android are working as we speak on release.

gstreamer is working on Linux and Mac, but not built by default _yet_, it should be ready in a couple weeks or something.

We decided to release the support for mp3/h264 as we implemented them, rather than waiting for all the platforms to have the support.

Supporting Android and Firefox OS, then Windows (in that order) is a simple matter of prioritization and human resources. Most of our users use Windows, so it kind of made sense to have released support for Windows first.

I can point you to builds of Firefox for Linux/Mac with gstreamer enabled if you want to test something and don't want to compile it yourself, username at mozilla dot com.

My issues are three fold: that Mozilla is propagating proprietary standards, that it is selectively implementing per platform on a majority basis, and that by doing this it is further fragmenting the web.

My issue was not whether it actually works or not on a smattering of platforms. I believe you there. Though I appreciate the response.

Why in the world would they use gstreamer on Mac?

Because they were already implementing gstreamer support for Linux, and gstreamer has a high-quality back-end for OS X's apparently awkward audio APIs that I guess Mozilla didn't want to reimplement from scratch.

Thanks for that information. I've corrected this and also credited you and included the link.

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