YouTube goes HTML5
Written by marpada Thursday, 04 February 2010 17:31
A few weeks ago YouTube published the HTML5 player beta of the site. This move was promptly followed by Vimeo. The HTML5 specification, currently under revision and that won't be approved by the W3C soon, introduces, among many other features, the two new audio and video tags that will enable the streaming of audio and video files natively by HTML5 capable browsers, without need of external plugins like Adobe Flash Player (de-facto standard for multimedia streaming) or Microsoft's Silverlight. This is great news if you, like me, are sick and tired of the shameful implementation of the Adobe Flash plugin in non-Microsoft OS: awful performance, lack of stability and lagged native 64bit support. Also great if you want to access popular video sites from an iPhone or other portable plattform without Flash Support: just use a HTML5 compliant browser and you're done. Great, isn't it?
If you are wondering which video and audio formats will be supported by the HTML standard, the answer is that it is not specified, and that is where the problems begin. The aforementioned sites currenty encode their HD videos with the H.264 codec (already supported by Flash), so to benefit from the HTML5 player a HTML5 H264-enabled browser is needed. Currently there are no many options, just Google Chrome (not in Linux yet :( ) and Safari (YouTube HTML5 page mentioning IE with the Chrome Frame installed sounds like a bad joke to me).
What's up with Mozilla? Well, the H.264 codec is a patented technology and the yearly licensing fee is of several million dollars, which can be hardly afforded by and Open Source project. And what it is more important, should a propietary patented format play such an important role of the new web standard, when there exists a free open equivalent technology like Ogg Theora? A very interesting article by Mozilla's Vice President Mike Shaver can be found here. Looks like the honey moon between Google and the Mozilla Foundation came to an end not so abruptly (yes, the release of Google Chrome was the first nail).
It looks like 2010 will be a very interesting year in terms of video formats and web standards discussion. Let's hope that the dominant player can learn of the mistakes of its predecessor and, at the end, common good, net neutrality and open standards prevail over business interests.
BBC High Definition service draws complaints
Written by marpada Sunday, 10 January 2010 17:04
Via Slashdot I found this interesting piece of news about an optimization in the encoding parameters in BBC HD stream, which reduced the bitrate around 40%, raised the claims of many viewers who noticed a significant drop in the video quality of the transmission. The Channel argued that the change had passed some intensive testing to make sure that not only the quality was not dropped but in fact increased, and Andy Quested, Principal Technologist of the HD BBC department, published a series of extremely interesting articles backing the move from the technical standpoint. These measures did not mitigate the complaints of the consumers, who still claim that the quality of the BBC HD stream is noticeably below its competitors. Once again, it looks like beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
What I find more interesting of this controversy is that how in a few years people seems to be more aware of the video quality to the point that even a "woman with cataracts" noticed the quality drop in the BBC HD stream, but at the same time the appreciation of audio quality seems to have gone down the drain, as most people are more that happy listening to music encoded at reduce bitrates trough cheap portable devices.
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