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W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5

By Michael Calore June 30th, 2009 Categories: Multimedia, Web Basics

The stewards of the web have removed the sections of the HTML 5 draft specification that would recommend web browsers support audio and video playback using a specific codec.

Ian Hickson, one of the primary authors of the HTML 5 draft at the Worldwide Web Consortium, made the announcement on the WHATWG mailing list Tuesday after fielding hundreds of e-mails’ worth of community comments over the past year and a half. Hickson cites the inability to reach a consensus on which codec should be implemented across all browsers as the primary reason for the decision.

The setback is sure to put a freeze on the main promise of open video and audio support in HTML 5 — the broad implementation of a single, plug-in free media playback environment in the next generation of web browsers, enabling people to watch movies and listen to songs inside the browser without having to download any additional software.

Hickson’s post, in part:

After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately, on the situation regarding codecs for <video> and <audio> in HTML 5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship.

I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML 5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined, as has in the past been done with other features like <img> and image formats, <embed> and plugin APIs, or Web fonts and font formats.

The current situation is as follows:

  • Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used by Safari), citing lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent landscape.
  • Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora’s quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.
  • Opera refuses to implement H.264, citing the obscene cost of the relevant patent licenses.
  • Mozilla refuses to implement H.264, as they would not be able to obtain a license that covers their downstream distributors.
  • Microsoft has not commented on their intent to support <video> at all.

(Sorry if I’ve mischaracterised any positions above; the positions are relatively subtle and so it’s likely that I have oversimplified matters.)

I considered requiring Ogg Theora support in the spec, since we do have three implementations that are willing to implement it, but it wouldn’t help get us true interoperability, since the people who are willing to implement it are willing to do so regardless of the spec, and the people who aren’t are not going to be swayed by what the spec says.

Things are stuck in a stalemate, and, since the web’s main governing body is choosing to play it neutral and not push any vendors into support for one codec over the other, it’s unlikely there will be a quick resolution.

Others inside and outside the WHATWG have begun voicing their opinions.

Silvia Pfeiffer, an W3C invited expert and a member of Xiph.org, the non-profit group that oversees development of the Ogg media container, takes issue with Hickson’s last point, arguing that a strict requirement is a good thing:

Inclusion of a required baseline codec into a standard speaks more loudly than you may think. It provides confidence — confidence that an informed choice has been made as to the best solution in a given situation. Confidence to web developers, confidence to hosting providers, confidence also (but less so, since they are gatekeepers in this situation) to browser vendors.

In my opinion, including a baseline codec requirement into a W3C specification that is not supported by all Browser Vendors is much preferable over an unclear situation, where people are forced to gather their own information about a given situation and make a decision on what to choose based on potentially very egoistic and single-sided reasons/recommendations.

In fact, it is a tradition of HTML to have specifications that are only supported by a limited set of Browser Vendors and only over time increasingly supported by all — e.g. how long did it take for all browser vendors to accept CSS2, and many of the smaller features of HTML4 such as fixed positioning…

Sam Kuper, an open standards advocate and another W3C invited expert, backs up her argument:

Waiting for all vendors to support the specified codec would be like waiting for them all to be Acid3 compliant. Better to specify how browsers should behave (especially if it’s how most of them will behave), and let the stragglers pick up the slack in their own time under consumer pressure.

David Singer, a QuickTime engineer and Apple employee, also voiced his opinion, speaking on behalf of his team at Apple:

I just wanted to say that we’re not happy with the situation. We continue to monitor it, to take what action we can, and we continue to hope that we will, at some time, find a solution that reaches consensus.

It’s ironic that the announcement comes the same day as the release of the new version of Firefox, the second-most popular browser (behind Internet Explorer) which now ships with full native support for media playback using the Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis codecs.

As for the future of video codecs on the web, Hickson sees a few possible outcomes, “all of which will take several years”:

1. Ogg Theora encoders continue to improve. Off-the-shelf hardware Ogg Theora decoder chips become available. Google ships support for the codec for long enough without getting sued that Apple’s concern regarding submarine patents is reduced. => Theora becomes the de facto codec for the Web.

2. The remaining H.264 baseline patents owned by companies who are not willing to license them royalty-free expire, leading to H.264 support being available without license fees. => H.264 becomes the de facto codec for the Web.

When either of these happen, I will reconsider updating HTML5 accordingly.

Of course, the debate runs much deeper than what I’ve cited here. Follow along by reading the mailing list archives, which are available to the public.

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FriendFeed Adds File Sharing, Including Support for MP3s

By Michael Calore June 24th, 2009 Categories: Multimedia

The lifestreaming site FriendFeed has rolled out a new feature that lets users post almost any file to the site, including MP3s.

Users can now post PDFs, text files or MP3s to their accounts, sharing them with specific individuals, private groups within FriendFeed or with the internet at large. Any uploaded file, including the MP3s, can also be downloaded by anyone who’s able to see the page.

You’ve been able to post photos to FriendFeed for a while. The upload dialog even included a little Ajax-powered upload progress bar. The new uploads use the same interface, or you can mail the file to the site’s standard posting address at share@friendfeed.com.

Once uploaded, MP3s appear wrapped inside a simple player with a volume slider and the usual controls. Here’s an example.

There’s a per-user limit of 3 uploads per day for MP3s, though there doesn’t appear to be a limit of PDFs or other kinds of files. According to user chatter on FriendFeed, there does appear to be a limit on file sizes, but that information remains undisclosed. Also, the player widget only works if you upload MP3s, not AIFFs, WAVs or ACCs. If you run into any other interesting barriers, let us know in the comments.

FriendFeed’s addition of MP3 sharing features expands its scope a bit. It’s an advancement that’s sure to draw in some new users looking for an easy way to post a quick song and get a public URL, complete with an embedded player, that can be accessed by anyone.

Of course, it will also be attractive to those of us who use FriendFeed for collaboration and real work (we use it as our daily back-channel here at Monkey Bites, as do the Epicenter writers — Mr. W. T. Monkey even has his own feed), but the MP3 sharing is super cool and the real killer feature here.

Note: Also check out additional coverage on Wired’s Epicenter blog.

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How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web

By Michael Calore June 18th, 2009 Categories: Multimedia, Software & Tools

The underlying language used to build web pages is being substantially re-written for the first time in a decade.

The W3C, the web’s primary standards body, is revising HTML with an eye on improving the performance and capabilities of rich, browser-based applications. One of the great promises of HTML 5, the emerging standard, is that content creators will be able to embed video and audio files on web pages with the same simplicity and ease as images and links.

The tools being used to power this behavior are the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs maintained by the non-profit Xiph.org. Currently, most video and audio on the web is presented using either Adobe’s Flash Player, Microsoft’s Silverlight or Apple’s QuickTime. These are proprietary technologies, which means they come with various restrictions — licenses, patents and fees — attached.

Ogg, being open-source and patent-free, has no fees and very few use restrictions. Ogg has been around for a while. It was beaten out by MP3 in the Napster days as the audio format of choice, and has remained obscure ever since. It’s also gotten a bad reputation because of poor quality and large file sizes compared to competing tools like h.264, which is used by both Quicktime and Flash, and will be used in the next release of Silverlight.

However, in the past year, the quality issues dogging Ogg have been largely solved thanks to the increased interest and involvement of developers who want to see support for open video on the web become a reality.

At a recent developer conference, Google showed off how it was building Ogg support directly into its Chrome browser to handle video playback without using any plug-ins. Mozilla’s Jay Sullivan was then invited on stage, where he announced the next version of Firefox would also include built-in Ogg support, all part of a grand plan among browser makers to, in Sullivan’s words, free video from “plug-in prison.”

Webmonkey got a chance to sit down with Mozilla director of Firefox Mike Beltzner and Mozilla director of platform engineering Damon Sicore to talk about web video in Firefox 3.5, the next version of their company’s browser, which is due at the end of June.

We asked Mozilla how its full-force adoption of open video standards will free video from the so-called “plug-in prison,” and why it’s attempting to do so even though the browser used by some 60% of web surfers, Internet Explorer 8, doesn’t support any of the standards that make this scenario possible. [Clarification: As reader “redvine” points out in the comments, Theora plug-ins do exist for IE8 and IE7. There is no native support for Ogg or for the <video> tag in IE8.]

During our chat, Beltzner and Sicore showed us some demos, all of which are linked to below. Also check out the open video test site at DailyMotion and YouTube’s open video demo, both of which are discussed below. You can view these demos if you’re using any browser that supports native Ogg playback: Firefox 3.5 (the recent betas and the first release candidate) and the latest releases of Google Chrome and Opera. Remember, IE won’t work without plug-ins. Neither will Safari 4 on Mac OSX — the <video> tag is supported, but you’ll need to add Ogg support to Quicktime using the Xiph Quicktime plugin.

Webmonkey: What’s the state of open video support in Firefox 3.5 right now?

Mike Beltzner: We’re not just shipping with support for the HTML 5 video tag, we’re actually also shipping the Ogg Theora codec. Which means with no plug-in, you can watch any video that is encoded using Ogg Theora.

[Beltzner shows a demo of a movie trailer playing in the browser. Pretty straightforward. But unlike a Flash embed, I can increase the page text size with a hot key, and the video sizes up, too. I can also right-click on the video and choose “Save As…” to save the video locally. I view source, and I see the video is embedded in the page with a <video> tag, just like an image. The player controls are all JavaScript. He switches the player code and introduces a little zoom slider in the corner. It uses CSS — I drag it and it resizes the video.]

Webmonkey: The video is nice and sharp.

Beltzner: We’re really proud of the overall playback quality. A year ago when we started looking at this, I would not have been able to sit here and tell you this is going to be competitive with the web video codecs we see today.

Recently, Chris DiBona, who works at YouTube, said on a mailing list, YouTube is really interested in Ogg, but the problem now is the bitrate is just not competitive, the files are too large. He said “it will break the internet if we switched to Ogg.”

The guys we’re working with at Xiph ran a comparison using the exact same bitrate between YouTube’s encoder and Ogg’s encoder. The sharpness is largely the same, and just a little bit sharper in Ogg. Also, I wrote a post showing that if you use the YouTube high-quality encoder at the same bitrate, Ogg is noticeably sharper.

This is the product of one year of open-source investment in the Ogg codec. I’m super excited about the work that’s gone into it.

Webmonkey: How do you see these factors — the HTML 5 video tag, putting the Ogg codecs right into the browser, presentation techniques that mimic the plug-in player experience — affecting video on the web? What’s it going to change in six months? Or six years?

Beltzner: In six months, you’re going to see more sites like DailyMotion doing things where they detect that the browser supports Ogg and the video tag, and in that case, they’re going to give those users an Ogg-and-video-tag experience.

I think you’ll see content sites doing this because they’ll have the ability to re-encode their entire video libraries without having to pay any licensing fees. The Ogg Theora encoders are completely license-free and patent-proof. They don’t need to worry about which player you’ve got. They also don’t need to worry about which hardware you’ve got. Ogg Theora will run on Windows, Mac and Linux, or any embedded device or mobile device built on the Linux platform.

In six months, that’s what you’re going to see — content sites that are making their first tentative steps into open video, and also people on the bleeding edge starting to do really interactive stuff.

[Beltzner shows two more demos, one using JavaScript and CSS to perform content injection on a looping video, and one which overlays CSS filters onto a video.]

This is really representative of what we think video on the web is going to start to look like — truly interactive stuff where you’re doing client-side manipulation.

Webmonkey: And in six years?

Beltzner: Six years from now, I think you’ll see Ogg video will have taken over the way that PNG has taken over from GIF.

PNG was created for many of the same reasons we’re doing this — graphics were using a licensed encoder which was causing problems for content creators and problems for people who wanted to embed GIF and JPEG viewers onto devices. So, the PNG encoder was created to serve as a patent-unencumbered, unrestricted license way of encoding and unencoding image data. And that is exactly the same thing we’re trying to do with open video.

Also, along the lines of Jay Sullivan’s comment about “freeing video from plug-in prison,” it’s important to note that a lot of cool things have been done with Flash Player in the past, but they’re one-sided. Now, if you see somebody doing something cool in an open video player or an audio player, you can see the code with one click. It’s all JavaScript, CSS and HTML. It works with View Source in the browser, and you can learn from it. So we’ll see more innovation that way.

Webmonkey: One of the major stumbling blocks here is support across all the browsers [Microsoft IE8 and Safari 4 lack native Ogg support]. Do you think everyone is going to eventually play ball? Is this something you’re not really worried about, or is this something you think about every day?

Beltzner: We’re not actively concerned about it. We care more about the content creation sites because that’s why people are using video now. They’re not using it because they have certain players in their computers, they’re using it because they want to get at the videos that are on the web. So I think as long as we continue to make it easier for people to do fun things with video online, people will do it in the formats that are easiest for them to use. And that’s how we’re going to spread it across the web.

Damon Sicore: The key part is just having the client available that can play the videos. If 22.5% of the internet can do that, then it’s a huge step forward.

Webmonkey: What about Theora’s use on set-top video boxes? [For example, Boxee uses a browser based on Mozilla’s code to display web video.] Are there any limitations for playing back things like 1080i or 1080p fullscreen HD video?

Beltzner: The codec supports all those things. Right now, it’s more heavily optimized for the type of video you’re going to find on the web, but those targets — full 1080p — are in sight. Again, a year ago, if you played an Ogg video at 1080p, your fans would start to spin and your computer would get really hot. That’s no longer the case. At 1080p, Ogg still doesn’t have the same performance as h.264, but it’s closing in really quickly.

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Where 2.0: Video Tracks a Year of Edits on OpenStreetMap

By Michael Calore May 21st, 2009 Categories: Events, Multimedia

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

This video animates an entire year’s worth of edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project. OSM is a public and open database of maps encompassing the whole world — think of it as an open, free version of Google Earth.

Edits are made, wiki-style, by contributors around the globe. Each white flash in this video represents a new edit being made to the database during 2008.

From the OSM site:

Some edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official data.

There are some astonishing moments, like when a massive data dump fills in almost the entirety of India, or when a huge blotches of white suddenly appear in Eastern Europe and in North America.

The animation was created by Itoworld, and is licensed under the Creative Commons.

Other Where 2.0 Coverage:


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Historical Map Mashups Turn Cities Into Glass Onions of Time

By Michael Calore May 21st, 2009 Categories: Multimedia, Visual Design

The image above looks like a bit of a mess, but that’s only because it’s two maps of lower Manhattan layered on top of one another — an 1891 street map overlaid by a 2006 map of the NYC Subway system.

The screenshot is taken from Hypercities, a MacArthur-funded project to help create these kinds of historical analysis tools. Currently, the site has 39 maps of New York City made between 1766 and 2009, all of which have been aligned using open-source software tools so their transparencies can be adjusted. You can juxtapose any number of maps you’d like — ranging from a map of government buildings made around the time of Washington’s inauguration to 1990s demographic maps marking ethnicity and income — effectively letting you peel New York City like a giant onion, exposing layers of history as you go.

Old maps are dug up and scanned, then specific points are plotted against known lat-long data from OpenStreetMap and other open geodatabases. The older maps are then “rubber sheeted,” or stretched to be match modern geo-data. Lastly, the maps are tiled and fed into a database that make this sort of front-end mashup possible.

Hypercities also has time-layered views of Los Angeles, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Cairo, a historical site in Peru and a few other world cities.

Hypercities is just one such project. Cartifact is also doing something similar. Both were part of a presentation Thursday at the Where 2.0 Conference by Michal Migurski of Stamen Design, the small firm responsible for Digg’s data visualizations and the infamous Oakland Crimespotting map mashup.

Also be sure to check out Migurski’s own project called Old Oakland. He overlaid historical maps of Oakland using a scanner, Photoshop, and getlatlon.com, a site created by Simon Willison that gives you latitude and longitude coordinates for any point on a map anywhere in the world.

Other Where 2.0 Coverage:


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Google’s O3D Opens Rift to the Web’s Third Dimension

By Scott Loganbill April 21st, 2009 Categories: Multimedia, Platforms & APIs, Software & Tools


Tired of staring through the Browser window and only seeing content in two dimensions? Google wants to take you back to the future by open-sourcing a new 3D web standard called O3D.

The technology automatically renders 3D environments through the browser. The result is a world that looks a lot like the beautifully drawn 3D panels of the 1993 hit video game Myst. The difference being you can fly around the the O3D environments much like a 2009 flight simulator. Check out the video above for an example — also on a beach/island.

The technology utilizes your computer’s graphic hardware via an API built into a cross-platform browser plug-in. The content itself is in COLLADA format, a format generated by CAD programs such as Google’s own Sketchup. The 3D environment can be embedded and tweaked with extended JavaScript code. Interestingly, Google’s V8 JavaScript engine is embedded into the technology itself (V8 is also found in Google’s Chrome browser).

This isn’t Google’s first foray into a 3-dimensional web. Lively provided Second Life-like 3D chatrooms through the browser. The ill-fated product was discontinued after only four months.

It isn’t the web’s first 3D foray either. Those developing back in 1995 may remember VRML. The web standard was the first to play with mostly clunky and slowly-rendered 3D images. Somewhere around 1997, the technology was superseded by X3D. At the risk of angering some passionate X3D developers, that web standard didn’t really meet its potential either.

But hey, maybe the web is finally ready to be browsed like the 90’s special effect visualizations in movies trying to make this new thing called the internet look more enticing than what it really looks like: a caffeine-laden teenage nerd typing away at a computer. Although Google’s announcement proclaims Google Earth proves O3D’s relevance to the web, I think it’s a technology ripe for its inevitable destiny: making Lawnmower Man a (virtual) reality.

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Tim O’Reilly on Twitter, Yahoo and the Coming ‘Sensor Web’

By Michael Calore April 13th, 2009 Categories: Multimedia, Other


Here’s an excellent video interview with tech publisher and conference mogul Tim O’Reilly, brought to us by our friends at FORA.tv.

In this 30-minute interview, O’Reilly talks about the evolution of sensor-based technology — how things like accelerometers and GPS inside devices, or speech-recognition and face-recognition capabilities within applications are going to revolutionize the next wave of web apps.

Gigapixel cameras will be able to see better than us, and the software inside them will recognize objects more quickly than our own brains.

“What’s the next web UI? It’s a pair of glasses,” he says.

There’s also a riff on how Twitter has brought the concept of “real time” to a whole new level of importance on the web, and a story about how his company almost purchased Yahoo back in the proverbial day.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg. A fascinating half an hour.

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List of the Week: Tips for Tweaking GIMP to Replace Photoshop

By Michael Calore April 3rd, 2009 Categories: Multimedia

Layer-based image editor GIMP has long been the favorite application for desktop Linux users needing to edit photos and large graphics files. It’s colloquially known as the free, open-source alternative to Photoshop, which in many ways it is — GIMP can handle most of the photo editing demands of today’s hobbyist photographer or designer.

But if you’ve ever spent serious time using Photoshop on a high-end Mac or Windows PC, you’ll quickly realize there’s a whole lot Adobe’s expensive, flagship editor can do that GIMP cannot.

This week’s awesome list comes from GIMP fanatic Blair Mathis at Smashing Magazine. It’s a set of tips, tweaks, plug-ins and add-ons that “push GIMP closer to its full potential” as an image editor. The list will show you how to enable GIMP to accept Photoshop plug-ins and brushes, add Layer Styles, tweak the UI to make the toolbars easier to use and even enable deep voodoo stuff like seam carving.

You’ll need the latest version of GIMP to perform most of these hacks. The end result is a GIMP that’s not quite a 100% Photoshop replacement, but is certainly a whole lot more Photoshoppy.

[via Delicious]

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Reflections on 2008: The Year of Cloud Computing

By Scott Loganbill January 13th, 2009 Categories: Mobile, Multimedia, Platforms & APIs, Software & Tools, Visual Design

With both feet firmly planted in 2009, we can now look back at the year 2008 as if it were a wistful dream — that is, if you’re like me and you selectively choose your memories. In any case, thanks to the tail end of spendthrift venture capitalism and advertising-supported research and development, 2008 was a banner year from the point of view of web developers.

Accounting for what 2008 brought us, it appears the underlying modus operandi was to make the Web a much more mobile, manageable and powerful platform for web applications. Big players in 2008 were Google, Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo. Microsoft gets honorable mention for Internet Explorer 8 previews and Silverlight 2, but with Vista and the loss of Bill Gates in the captain’s chair, it was not quite Microsoft’s year.

In general, much of the big wins in 2008 came from browsers and open source technology. Some things we can thank 2008 for:

  • Cloud Computing — From the consumer’s point of view, this means cool applications on the web. From the developers point of view, point no further than Amazon’s S3 and Google’s App Engine for allowing you to offload the heavy duty backend technology so you can focus on web application innovation. The services allow you to rent servers and its processing power without the fuss of having to constantly replace hard drives manage memory and rebuild servers.
  • The Mobile Web — Thanks to the fully capable browsers such as Opera’s mobile browser or those built into the iPhone and Google’s G1 phone, the capabilities of web applications, AJAX and all, were made available to those on the go.
  • Location Awareness — In part because of the mobile web and embedded device location mechanisms via GPS and wi-fi triangulation, open standards were built to help websites discover user locations and deliver services in corrolation. experience, one where the web knows you, knows where you are, and who you are.
  • Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect (and the “OpenID Stack”) — Logging in to all of your favorite sites can be quite the chore. Facebook and Google’s account management tools allow you to log in to multiple sites without having to remember passwords. Even better, you bring along your address book with you, making address book imports and the like obsolete.
  • Interactive Graphics Without Flash — We’re not exactly referring to Silverlight, although Microsoft and NBC used the the technology to stream the Olympics over the web in high definition and it never looked better. HTML 5 brings us two elements with big graphic potential called Canvas and SVG. Designers are just starting to explore just how much animation and graphical filters they can bring to modern browsers without requiring a new plug-in or extension.
  • JavaScript engines — Once Firefox 3 arrived on our doorsteps touting the fastest browser experience, we were hooked. Maybe in conjunction, or just by mere coincidence, Google and Mozilla started focusing on how to render JavaScript for today’s demanding AJAX applications. Google introduced the open-source Chrome browser with the V8 JavaScript-rendering engine and Firefox squeaked out its answer, dubbed Tracemonkey, in beta builds before the year’s end.

Webmonkey would like to thank everyone in the industry who rose above the cruft to make 2008 a prosperous year for the web. Now, can someone please fix the banks so we can get back to upgrading our sheep-throwing applications?

[For more gritty details, check out Michael Calore’s year-end take on Epicenter]


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Processing Hits 1.0: Create Stunning Animations the Easy Way

By Scott Gilbertson November 26th, 2008 Categories: Multimedia, Programming, Visual Design

Processing Example, WatercolorLookout Flash, the increasingly popular Processing language, which was designed in part to turn visual artists into programmers, has announced its long-awaited 1.0 release.

Processing has long been a favorite of animators — the language has been used for everything from animation in Radiohead videos, to web-based tools that can extract a color scheme from your photographs.

Processing is also widely used in academia where even those not naturally inclined to the technical side of programming (that would be us liberal arts majors) have latched on to processing’s ease-of-use and ability to create complex visualizations (for some examples, check out Complexification.net).

Because it’s open source, Processing has also been rolled into a number of other languages like Python, Rails, Javascript and many more.

Given that the new version is a 1.0 release, the focus is naturally on stability. But, while the focus may be stability, there are some new features as well, including an optimized 2D graphics engine, better tools for working with vector files, and new ways to create development add-ons to enhance the Processing production environment.

If you’re tired of Flash animation and you want to try out the new version of Processing — which is free and available for Mac, Linux and Windows — head over to the Processing website and grab the latest release.

[via Daniel Shiffman]

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