Fedora + WebM

[jvillain]

Firefox has a version in the pipe that that has WebM support baked in. Since Adobe has stopped releasing their 64bit flash player and there is only the exploit ridden version left I started thinking about WebM again.

Does any one know if Redhat via Fedora will be releasing the Firefox versions with WebM baked in when they filter down or are they worried about getting sued over it or are they still trying to make up their minds?

Gnash plugin has never worked for me since the day it was released and every thing else is just to cludgy these days. I pulled down the latest firefox 3.7 some thing nightly build and tried to run some WebM stuff over at you tube and it told me to go get Adobe flash.

[droidhacker]

Originally Posted by jvillain

Firefox has a version in the pipe that that has WebM support baked in. Since Adobe has stopped releasing their 64bit flash player and there is only the exploit ridden version left I started thinking about WebM again.

Does any one know if Redhat via Fedora will be releasing the Firefox versions with WebM baked in when they filter down or are they worried about getting sued over it or are they still trying to make up their minds?

Gnash plugin has never worked for me since the day it was released and every thing else is just to cludgy these days. I pulled down the latest firefox 3.7 some thing nightly build and tried to run some WebM stuff over at you tube and it told me to go get Adobe flash.

I don't think that there's too much to worry about here. RH has a pretty substantial patent pool to defend against MPEG and their buddies... and so does GOOGLE.

MPEG has made some threats, which from my perspective, is actually a GOOD thing for VP8... now, if they DON'T act, it legitimizes VP8. If they DO act, they'll get flattened by the steam rollers and again, it legitimizes VP8 -- and hopefully ALSO frees up h264. MS, almost unbelievably, has already stated that they're not interested in taking up this fight, so its really down to MPEG+FRUIT against the rest of the world. Fruit never passes up an opportunity to make a fool out of itself.

I strongly suspect that if MPEG DID go after VP8, they would probably end up being forced to free up h264 (as an alternative to paying royalties that greatly exceed its value).

Now as far as RH's move here... remember that fruit has been threatening vorbis... that hasn't changed RH's stance on it. HTML5 has to have SOMETHING, and given the licensing issues that go along with RH's software, h264, under present licensing restrictions, is simply out of the question. The choice being one of h264, VP3/theora, and VP8 -- well VP3 isn't going to do it since nobody's going to use it - h264 being out of the question, that leaves VP8. Content providers aren't going to use h264 when it is only supported by msie and fruit -- especially when VP8 is supported by msie (through add-on codec easily and automatically installed as needed) and FIREFOX (compatible with virtually ALL platforms, possibly with the exception of fruity dieJunk).... VP8 has to win this.

I'm sure that RH has already decided to support VP8, and I'm sure that they've already got their lawyers on to the task of defending it.

http://www.webmproject.org/

[jvillain]

I had just tripped across that and got it working. I was just coming back to post it but you beat me to it. Works pretty good.


A tip for any one that just wants to try this temporarily. Download and untar the firefox tar ball some where.

Then close your current version of firefox. Go into the firefox directory you got when you untarred it and run firefox from there eg. ./firefox &

If you try to run the new version of firefox while the old version is still running the new version will not open. It just opens a new window forked from the old process.

I am running the 64 bit version of 3.7a5pre and it is running fine. After you sign up for HTML5 at you tube you can then do a search on webm to find stuff to try. Obviously lots of stuff isn't converted yet but they are working on it. Hopefully the Fedora people will choose to package the 3.7 versions of firefox soon and make this easier for those who want to try it. It's not like we have never run pre-release software on Linux before.

I am never,ever, ever going back to flash ever again. Ever.

[RahulSundaram]

Hi

FYI

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash...d_WebM_support

[bonedome]

Hello
like many I'm eagerly awaiting another alternative to adobe flash, I tried a little very untechnical cpu usage experiment yesterday with youtube
all figures are approximate using top

1: adobe flash player 41% pulse audio 10%
2: greasemonkey/youtube without flash/gecko plugin 20% pulse audio 9%
3: totem with youtube plugin 85% pulse audio 8%
4: html5 vp8/webm 58% - 80%
you need to add about 3% to the first two to have firefox running in the background

all except webm where fairly constant and fluctuated no more than about 2%, webm on the other hand was up and down like a yoyo but more importantly (to me anyway) it was way higher than cpu hog flash

For a very informative, blunt and independent view of vp8 read the various insights of dark shikari an x264 developer http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377 he is quite scathing about the amount of copy and pasting of code and the door to any further improvements being firmly shut, despite the general slating I was quite impressed with the quality (of vp8) albeit on a very small selection of vids

All we need to do now is await the outcome of the patent war that will no doubt ensue
quote from dark shikari

How likely is VP8 to actually be free of patents? Even if VP8 is worse than H.264, being patent-free is still a useful attribute for obvious reasons. But as noted in my previous post, merely being published by Google doesn’t guarantee that it is. Microsoft did similar a few years ago with the release of VC-1, which was claimed to be patent-free — but within mere months after release, a whole bunch of companies claimed patents on it and soon enough a patent pool was formed.

[mindfaq]

Originally Posted by bonedome

1: adobe flash player 41% pulse audio 10%
2: greasemonkey/youtube without flash/gecko plugin 20% pulse audio 9%
3: totem with youtube plugin 85% pulse audio 8%
4: html5 vp8/webm 58% - 80%
you need to add about 3% to the first two to have firefox running in the background

This is very unlikely to be an VP8 issue. VP8 decoding itself is quite fast on general purpose CPUs. The problem here lies in the browsers. Rendering video embedded in the browser window is not so straight-forward compared to a simple video player application like mplayer. Flash suffers from the same problem. Eventually the situation will improve as browser developers gather more experience and faster ways of rendering get implemented. Which browser did you use for your tests? Chromium seems pretty advanced to me, whereas Firefox needs a little more work. Get it from Spot's Chromium repository. Expect the performance to improve over time in all browsers.

If you still think it's a VP8 issue, double-check it with H.264 videos on Youtube. You need an H.264-enabled browser for that, though. Enabling H.264 and other FFmpeg-delivered codecs in Chromium can be done at compile time.

edit: Sorry, the Chromium version in Spot's repo doesn't support WebM yet. My fault.

[jvillain]

All of that really doesn't matter bonedome if flash isn't available on my platform.

[bonedome]

Hello jvillain
what platform do you have ? power pc ?
If you want to watch youtube (and others) without flash I could write a "how to"

[bonedome]

Hello

He doesn't know what he's talking about.

seems to me he knows a hell of a lot about what he's talking about, I'm not naive, his bias is fairly evident, I think we've all learnt to read web blogs with a pinch of salt and read between the lines

He is not a patent lawyer, so any speculation of his about patents is exactly that, speculation and quite frankly wrong.

he makes no claim to be a lawyer and speculation is speculation, you'll have to elaborate as to why he's wrong.
google are loaded, there will undoubtedly be someone (in America) who thinks they can make a quick buck out of claiming vp8 used some of their patented code.

As a developer of x264, if webm gets widespread html 5 video adoption, his work on x264 will become mostly irrelevant because the codec won't be widely adopted.

I never really saw the two in direct competition, webm/vp8 will (hopefully) completely replace adobe flash in web sites but x264 was never really in that equation, it is simply an open source h264 encoder/decoder, which is already built into adobe flash player, so until vp8 has better quality and compression (than h264/x264, which given the spec seems now to be set in stone, probably isn't going to happen) I don't think we'll be seeing the last of it for years.
I can see vp8/webm becoming the medium for streaming and h/x264 for downloading/storing

It's in his interests to say x264 is better

of course, why wouldn't he blow his own trumpet x264 is one of the best pieces of open (or otherwise) source software around.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, I've watched a few html5 youtube vids and am generally impressed, especially compared to the flash version, what I wasn't impressed with was the amount of work my cpu was having to do, I appreciate the nightly build of firefox I used may be partly responsible.
The future of streaming media certainly looks better (in an open sort of way) I'll be glad to either see the back of adobe or them opening it up (probably never happen)
I suppose it's now down to website designers to weigh up their options

[bonedome]

Hello

Why are there so many idiots on this internet calling for flash to die

us idiots just don't like adobe's closed attitude and bullying tactics, not dissimilar to yours.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion.
I'm signing off from this topic now as I don't want to get dragged into a pointless slanging match

Holland Vs Spain will be the 2010 World Cup final and Spain will win the World cup.

come on Holland

[bonedome]

I'm signing off from this topic now

ok I lied

Adobe doesn't bully people

google Dmitry Sklyarov and rtmpdump dmca

By stating that you want flash to die

I have never made that statement

If you want to get all emotional about adobe and flash

the only one getting emotional is you amigo

please do but keep it to yourself because no one cares

are you speaking on behalf of the whole forum ? I thought the whole point of a forum was to discus things not try to shut people up and belittle them because you disagree with them