Thanks to the hard work of Chris Double, Robert O’Callahan, Johnny Stenback, and many others the <video> and <audio> tags along with native support for Theora video and Vorbis audio are currently enabled in the Firefox nightly builds.   This will ship in Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 coming later this year.

This is not new news but I did want to provide my perspective on why this is important.

If you read the HTML1.0 specification from 1993 carefully you’ll notice it doesn’t specify the image format even though there are dozens of them. GIF is excellent for logos, line drawings, etc but is limited to 256 colors and is thus non-ideal for photos.  JPEG is lossy-compressed and thus great for photos but less suitable for vector art and drawings.   PNG came later to work around some issues in GIF and wasn’t fully and properly supported in Internet Explorer until version 7.  Before PNG was fully natively supported in all browsers there were many plug-ins to fill the gap.

A patent encumbered technology (GIF) critical to the web was replaced by a truly open and free format (PNG) first through plug-ins and then quickly after natively in browsers.  The HTML specifications did not specify a particular image format but a few became ubiquitous through common usage.

This is where I believe we are going with <video> and <audio> tags.  Right now hundreds of millions of users can view videos in their web browsers, but it requires one of several proprietary plug-ins which support proprietary formats to play.   This means if you build a website with flash/silverlight/WMV  video it will not work on millions of iPhones and other mobile browsers.  It may or may not work on Linux.  Getting it to work requires lawyers, money, and business agreements between multiple parties.

By shipping HTML5 <video> and <audio> with royalty free open source formats in Firefox we hope to make these formats ubiquitous through common usage.  Royalty free open source formats will allow all web-browser makers to enable native video and audio playback on all platforms, devices, and environments, without restrictions.  They will allow all open source products to embed native video and audio playback without fear.   They will allow web authors to use audio and video freely in their websites without worrying about whether a particular platform has a particular version of a particular plug-in installed.  As an end-user we soon won’t have to worry about whether we can watch video content from a particular website on our new phone, tablet, or PC because all systems can support open video standards.  Perhaps I’ll be able to watch the 2010 Olympics on my mobile phone.

True ubiquitous access to content.   This is the world we want.

There’s not much content encoded in Theora/Vorbis at this time - what’s the point?

Ten years ago there wasn’t any content in H.264 but it is fairly common now.  Until Flash video became common there wasn’t a ton of video content encoded in VP6.   New content is created all the time and transcoding to Theora/Vorbis is quite simple.   Shortly after Firefox 3.1 ships there will be almost 200M desktops capable of playing this kind of video.  Content should follow quickly.

I can already watch video using Flash, Quicktime, Sliverlight, etc so what’s the point?

Having native video/audio support as part of HTML5 along with open source and royalty free formats means that every browser vendor, device, etc can support this format.  If adopted widely it means that web authors will soon be able to use one format to target all devices.  As a native web technology video can now be intermixed with all other advancements in the web as seen here.

Doesn’t Theora kill battery life and/or eat CPU time?

Many systems today ship with some form of hardware acceleration for H.264, MPEG-2, and other formats which reduces their CPU usage and thus battery usage.   With adoption of the format we expect Theora to benefit from similar hardware acceleration in the near future.  In the meantime HD video at 5-6MBp playes smooth on modern system without any hardware assistance.

Doesn’t the video quality of Theora suck?

It is very watchable and getting better all the time with work such as this.

Are there any legal issues?

We’ve done a careful legal analysis of all known issues and to the best of our knowledge Theora and Vorbis do not pose any patent risks. They’ve been around for a while with no issues; however, there is always the risk of what folks call submarine patents but this risk occurs for every software developer writing any kind of software.  There’s also always a risk someone asserts a claim, which doesn’t necessarily mean that the claim has any merit.  We believe there are no issues, but if push comes to shove we can: i) evaluate any claim and determine if its meritorious; ii) use the power of the web to gather relevant prior art to demonstrate invalidity; and iii) remove or disable the functionality quickly if necessary as a last resort.

What about HD?

Theora can play and encode HD content.  Based on current implementations the video quality is not as good as H.264 but much can be improved.  In addition we’ve been talking to the fine folks behind Dirac and I’ve seen some very impressive looking 720P videos encoded in Dirac.   The good news is once we get the basic video/audio infrastructure into Firefox adding new codecs/formats will be relatively straightforward.  This is just the starting point to get baseline video capabilities ubiquitous.

Why didn’t you just license H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, or <insert favorite codec here>?

We looked very carefully at this option and we could have very well done this for all “Official” Firefox binary releases at significant monetary cost to us.  But this had several issues:

• It would require the inclusion of close-sourced code into Firefox.
• Any derivatives of Firefox or Mozilla code would *not* be able to ship it.
• No other open source project would be able to use it.

This would solve the problem solely for Firefox users. We are more interested in solving the problem for the entire web.

Why not just use native Directshow/Quicktime/GStreamer on each platform?

We are working on this as well as you can see here, here, and here.  However, this approach has two major limitations: a) codec support varies dramatically from platform to platform and b) this does nothing for phones or other systems.  We wanted a baseline format that all web authors can count on in all environments.

This is awesome, how do I help?

Download a Firefox nightly build here and test it out here or on Wikimedia Commons.  Produce native content in Theora/Vorbis.   Help transcode other formats to Theora.  Tell your friends.

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My FF3.1a2pre nightly build offered me a very nice surprise today : the new tab switcher (the one you start with ctrl-tab). Works only if you have at least 3 tabs. Superb ! I noticed two problems:

• when I did reset a tab to about:blank, the thumbnail was not updated
• the switcher is centered wrt the screen and not wrt the browser window ; really feels weird on a very large screen ; the latter is probably better.

But overall, WOW. Congrats to the author !

Imagine being able to open any Web page on your server in OpenOffice.org, edit it, and save the changes back to the server by pressing the Save button. It may sound too good to be true, but that's exactly what the ODF@WWW project is set to achieve.

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Now where does this screw go?