Super Volatile

Krzysztof Szafranek's link blog

Hi, I'm Krzysztof and I make websites.
When I'm not making websites, I read these.
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Mar 23, 2010 / 1:25am

Daring Fireball: GIF, H.264, and Patents

This uncertain patent landscape is reportedly one reason Apple doesn’t support Ogg Theora. If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court with MPEG LA, not individual licensees. If a patent troll decides Ogg Theora violates a patent, they might sue those who are using it.
more on daringfireball.net

An interesting view on the video codecs discussion. Maybe in fact MPEG LA group can be trusted to not demand patent fees as soon as H.264 will become ubiquitous? Anyway, Ogg Theora is not so safe as it seems to be.

Filed under: firefox   standards  
 
Jan 30, 2010 / 12:01pm

H.264 Licensing And Free Software

In other words, if you're an end user in a country where software patents (or method patents) are enforceable, and you're using software that encodes or decodes H.264 and the vendor is not on the list of licensees, the MPEG-LA reserves the right to sue you, the end user, as well as the software vendor or distributor.
more on weblogs.mozillazine.org

Most likely in the short term it end with videos being served with <video> tag, using H.264 in Apple world, and with Flash elsewhere. So much for interoperability.

Filed under: firefox   standards  
 
Jan 23, 2010 / 5:06pm

Video, Freedom And Mozilla

So why doesn't Mozilla just license H.264 (like everybody else)? One big reason is that that would violate principles of free software that we strongly believe in. In particular, we believe that downstream recipients of our code should be able to modify and redistribute it without losing any functionality. This is freedom that copyleft licenses such as the GPL and LGPL (which we use for our code) are intended to ensure. It is possible to obtain patent licenses in a way which works around the letter of the GPLv2 and LGPLv2, but honoring the letter while violating the spirit is not a game we are interested in playing.
more on weblogs.mozillazine.org

An explanation why new HTML5-based YouTube and Vimeo don't work in Firefox.

Filed under: firefox   html5   open source   standards