(In reply to Ralph Giles (:rillian) from comment #241) > Running codecs which other browsers don't support doesn't help web authors. > Our goal is not to inspire web pages 'Best viewed in Firefox'. Quite the > opposite. So adding the wide range of formats gstreamer offers doesn't > advance the web as a platform.
Why not? Nowadays web becomes a platform for new OSs. And although we could play unsupported web video in media player (what I do with h264 videos in the web) on traditional PC, on web OS browser itself becomes a multimedia player. I think, supporting as much as possible video formats is a good idea in that case. It even helps to increase popularity of the new html5 video technology against the proprietary flash. > We have for some years been holding the line against for royalty-free codecs > in HTML against very strong commercial and market pressure, because the > patent terms available for otherwise popular formats like mp3 and mp4 are > incompatible with our principles of user freedom. Requiring an alternative > while flash adoption is falling is an important check against those > commercial interests. Hooking into platform-level support for those codecs > would greatly weaken that stance. Why do you think adding gstreamer support will kill free WebM codec? There is still a lot of people that cannot use non-free formats in gstreamer and if web developer want to make a page playable in every browser he should still add WebM/Ogg coded media. The other side of the coin is that a huge amount of people may use non-free media formats without any law restrictions and they will probably migrate to Chrome if you don't add an ability to play these formats. The only practical disadvantage of landing this patch is that such architecture is really bad. Maybe, it should be modular: support of free formats in browser itself and something like plug-in/extention for others (code for supporting free formats could be also converted to a module, but developed and supported by Mozilla). Such API would be very suitable. It would be possible to write backend for native codec support on every OS and keep Firefox as a single project with no branches like 'with gstreamer support', 'with Windows codecs support' etc. Gstreamer support in this case may be used as a first example of such module. Is this possible? -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/412647 Title: Firefox is not able to play mp4 <video> tags To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/412647/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
