Ahh, yet again, Reality forcing it's way in the face of Idealism. Exactly as I predicted ~1.5 years ago. Once standards become entrenched, they are next to impossible to displace, and for better or worse, H.264 is the de facto standard.

But as i mentioned in that old post: this is not a total loss! The codec war may be lost (for this generation), but the CONTAINER and IMPLEMENTATION are easier to replace, and could still be a place to gain ground! To put it simply: displacing FLASH with a Free Software (but still patent encumbered) implementation is still a win! And more to the point - it's a win that's worth fighting for.

And even if a System Codec technique relies on a proprietary solution for now, that's a LOT easier to replace with a Free version in the future! (you're not telling people to replace all their existing infrastructure; it's just a "different install-and-forget driver")

Focusing on the codec ONLY ends up just giving these other areas back to Flash ("it makes my $FavoriteVideoSite work!"). for no good reason...

ext4, which was somewhat light on tools last i checked (have to look into that...)

More to the point, though... halting writes wasn't really possible, due to a lot of unrelated (and probably more important) things thrashing the disk.

It's a beautify example of why a well though-through backup plan is important, unfortunately. RAID doesn't protect against being an idiot with 'rm', and it's probably a good idea to research things like those undelete tools before you need them...

especially when combined with 'find' and 'xargs', in what is supposed to be a simple task.

If you don't, you'll do something like what i just did ("worst typo in a decade"): you see, i was trying to update emacs and wanted to purge all the .elc files from ~/.emacs.d
Unfortunately, through a bad typo, some miss-applied keyboard shortcuts, and rushing through without mounting a scratch monkey... what actually ran was effectively "find ~/.emacs.d | xargs rm".

accidently deleted the 'grep'. Oops. 15+ years of elisp/etc destroyed.

Was it backed up? Nope! Been meaning to check it all into git, but always put it off as a "minor, unimportant" task I'd get to later. Of course, we all think that way up until the disaster hits...

*sigh*

Printer? What printer?

You can't grep dead trees.

It seems that we've come full-circle back to "brown".

I thought we had left that with Q1. D3 may have been way too dark, but at least they used some bright colors now and then. I blame the recent Fallout games. I love them, but they seem to have kicked us into a heavy steampunk-rust-brown fad.

Actually, the game looks pretty decent; it's just that an all-brown color scheme gets boring after a while.

Yet another reason I'm glad I've always recommended against Linksys to friends and family. Shoddy equipment in the past, and no preparation for the future now.

You don't need to split the screen to play Contra!

Proper co-op should be one screen.

So I'm running FF3.6.9 and click on the first of the video tests, which they claim they got "no result" for in both FF 3 and 4.

It seems to pass just fine, and matches their example image.

This makes me wonder if anybody even bothered to check the results.

IE and Netscape came bundled with the flash plugin in various versions.

On the other side you'll have Safari (on iOS and OS X) and IE (partially, see above) who will support H.264. This is not exactly a clear-cut battle.

Chrome also supports H.264. Including the partial IE support, it's really only firefox that's left out.

You'll also have recording devices like video cameras, cell phone cameras,

And these all support H.264, often with specialized DSP support. This is also the fastest growing market for the web, and likely to be increasingly important in the near future. Ignore mobile support at your own peril.

But first, before any major moves, Google has to make WebM workable - i.e. fully optimized encoders, decoders, quality, etc.; then start making major moves towards its adoption.

This is not even remotely relevant. It's important to us geeks, but we basically don't count. Managers don't make decisions based on quality or decoder speed. They offer their web pages in what they believe to be the popular, common choice.

This puts WebM, as a newcomer, at the very bottom of the list.

Removing patents would only benefit RedHat? What about smart investors that want to compete in the future against cheap knockoffs from China, that totally ignore patents? This myth that patents are necessary (or even relevant) reeks of a limited, USA-centric point of view.

The problem is that Open Source distributions can't license the patents and remain Open Source.

Of course. Which is why the problem should be side-stepped, by leaving things to the OS. We successfully distribute MP3 support from international /contrib branches in many distributions, and video should be no different. Forcing such software to be included in Firefox or other user-visible software is asking for trouble.

That doesn't change the fact that people are buying cameras that output H.264 now, and non-tech people won't understand why "firefox won't play my video - it must be broken".

The fact is, anyone can install a plugin to play any format they like, and most browser users will

Hilarious!

Nobody installs extra plugins. The only reason flash became popular, was that it was distributed with the browser itself. And even more important, managers will make the same decision they always make: targeting the non-plugin, popular solution, which usually maps to "Microsoft/IE". The fact that mozilla (the org) is actively fighting against allowing such plugins makes this irrelevant in any case.

Note, I'm not arguing against lobbying for Open codecs. That's the ideal solution, of course. But the pragmatist in me says that normal people don't even notice patent issues, and will trend towards the software that "just works" with their fancy new camera. Free Software can adapt to that use-case, or be seen as irrelevant.

It's worth mentioning: this has happened before, and the solution was to adapt. I install linux for family/friends, and things like "how do I play my [commercial] DVD?" come up. Discussions of how it's technically illegal to play such a video file with Free Software just cause them to tune out, often moving back to Windows to avoid the issue. Fortunately, many distributions now work around the problem, fetching some DeCSS equivalent from international souces on first use.

Normally, yes, that's a great idea. But in this case, fighting H.264 is going to drive normal, non-technical people away and into the waiting arms of non-free software.

Fighting for an open codec isn't worth it, if it destroys the market share of Firefox in the meantime.

Yes, pragmatically speaking, patent reform is likely also a hopeless fight. But if you are going to fight an unlikely battle, you might as well fight the one that will pay off more in the long run.

Many people in the Free Software press seem to be putting a lot of faith behind WebM. There seems to be this belief that Google can come in and magically make the entire video codec situation go away. WebM might be able to find a home in a few niche markets, but the hopes that it will displace H.264? It's laughable.

I love Free Software, and generally strive to run as near to 100% Free as I can on my own systems. Yet even I can recognize that the video codec war is not one that will be winnable by fiat and propaganda. The critical-mass of users are those that are buying cameras that output H.264 today, and possibly various managers, that are going to be arguing "nobody got fired for using MPEG".

The video codec war is not winnable right now, but the container and codec implementation wars might be. Striving to replace Flash with x264/ffmpeg implementations in the browser is a huge win, and one that can be realistically accomplished. Sure, it'd be great if people used a free codec like Theora/WebM (make it a prominent option! advertise it!), but not supporting H.264 at all will have one effect, and it's not the one we Free Software advocates will like: people will see the player as broken, and move to alternatives that are "not broken". Your parents, boss, and other non-technical people don't care about the alphabet soup of codecs; they just care about "software that works".

So dodge the problem and make codecs an external, OS-level issue like they always have been, and win the battles that actually can be won.

Oh, and if you really want to make a political stand, here's an idea: instead of fighting stupid technical issues about what falls under the various MPEG patents with things that may or may not be infringing (WebM), fight the patent system itself. This whole stupid issue only exists because we stupidly allow software patents. That fight is way more important, and applies to a wide variety of topics, not just video.

You could probably do that, but Chrome is not open source.

You say that as if people care about "open source".

They don't. At all.

All normal people see (and say) is "the Cool New Video Site is broken in firefox, which obviously must be firefox's fault. So I'll just use Chrome/IE/whatever".

What all the anti-H264 people are missing is that not supporting H264 will drive people away from Firefox. I fail to see how driving people to the non-free browser is a "win for open source".