I loved those books. I was quite surprised a year or so ago to find that not only have most of the books been preserved online as Project Aon, but someone actually ported the first couple books to the nintendo DS, with enforced gameplay, an inventory screen, managed battles, etc!

It only uses more memory if your OS is decades out of date and doesn't support copy-on-write for all memory pages after the fork(). The fact that windows sometimes falls into this category is a problem for MS, not Firefox...

ahh, the one day I need to remember to NOT visit /.

The so-called "software emulation" was only for the Emotion Engine chip (ps2's CPU). It still required the Graphics Synthesizer chip (video), which was never software-emulated, and is missing in newer PS3s.

NVidia hardware plays High Profile stuff just fine, at like 0.1% cpu usage on my system, even with the crazy-extreme b-frame settings I use.

In practice, though, yes, we me Baseline profile with most of this argument. That is, the "I want to play it on my iPhone/other-mobile/netbook/micro" requests, that are only getting more numerous as time goes on.

So prove me wrong. Show me mobile devices that play Theora. Show me any little bit of a trend that firmware is magically being written for this hardware.

Managers don't care, as MPEG is popular and "official sounding", while Theora is "just noise from those free-software hippies".

Which is why I stake the stance that Mozilla shouldn't sacrifice all of those other cool new features in an effort to make a moral stand about video. Ignoring the codec issue by punting it outside the browser is a pragmatic solution, that is still a huge win because they get to entrench all the cool new features like Canvas, new DOM manipulation, SVG (?), etc.

That said, SVG+Canvas+Javascript/etc isn't feature-complete yet, when compared to Flash. It's missing some notable things. But that probably doesn't matter, as those features can be added later as HTML5 gets more popular.

They won't define every user of Facebook as a non-End User, as the average person is not hosting video content. The average person is getting Facebook (or youtube, or whomever) to host it for them, by contract.

With web 2.0, even fewer people actually pay for their own hosting, and instead use these Walled Garden services to do it for them.

It is a forgone conclusion that H.264 "won", because hardware manufacturers have come to that conclusion and are building all the new hardware with H.264 support. They are not developing Theora players. Those manufacturers are so certain of that bet, that they are committing a very large sum of money to R&D in the form of all these new mobile devices that play H.264.

As I recommended up-thread, the side-by-side method is far better, much like PNG vs GIF. That doesn't change the fact that not supporting H.264 is to take yourself out of the running, as H.264 already has enough inertia to have "won".

"Pride comes before a fall"

It is the height of hubris to think mozilla has the power to order around IE, Chrome, Safari, etc, with only ~47% (or is it only 25% and already falling ?)

No, because that is only for (last I saw) the Fennec mobile-branch. It's explicitly removed from the normal Firefox branch because of the moral issues.

Which to me, amounts to Mozilla saying that they support flash and people should keep using it, as that's what people will do.

Yes, I am well familiar with the mess that makes up the technical features of "H.264", or more precisely, "MPEG 4, Part 10 AVC", the Part 2 variants ("XVID").

None of these technical features matter, as most people won't have any idea what you mean. What does matter is that people are currently buying cameras that capture video in Baseline profile, that magically works on a surprisingly number of devices. What matters is that many current devices, and most future devices support High Profile in hardware.

At no point does Theora enter into it. No devices make it, and no* devices play it (in hardware).

[*] Almost none. Exception are minimal and not significant enough to matter.

The multi-pronged approach is a very good idea, and you achieve that by separating the issues.

Promote HTML5 as an alternative to propriety Flash video.
Promote Gnash (others?) as an alternative to flash itself for games, maybe?
Promote Theora as an alternative to H.264.
Promote general software patent reform, etc, by just using all of the above and accepting the consequences as Civil Disobedience.

By binding them together, a failure in one area also means a failure in the others.

You act like H.264 and Theora are both new, and therefore one equal footing, and so there is a choice.

There isn't. MPEG video is already entrenched. It won so long ago, that hardware manufacturers are now assuming H.264 in most every device. Your "choice" is that we should somehow make the entire hardware and software industry magically switch away from the last few years of work they did, all the current and upcoming products they are releasing, etc.

Yes, I wish this wasn't the case, and I wish that a patent-free format was used instead. But wishing for things that fly in the face of reality is the attitude of religious nuts, not engineers.

My argument is that any patents in any of these formats, and all technical features, are 100% irrelevant. Normal people don't care. What they do care about is if they go to the local electronics Big-Box retailer and buy a camera, that they can post the video on the net. And that video will be in H.264 format. They care about watching youtube/etc. Which is H.26{3,4} format.

If a moral stand is desired, which it should be, it should be done by:
    1) Promoting the proper solution, patent-free, as an alternative
    2) Dodging the problem so you don't drive people away from your cause. ("make the codec separate from the browser")
    3) Use H.264 anyway, and accept the patent lawsuits as a proper form of Civil Disobedience, and get patent law changed.

The path Mozilla is taking is to going to cause normal users to say one thing and only one thing:
    "Hmm. I browse to $cool_new_video_site and it doesn't work. It does work in IE and Chrome. Firefox must be broken, so I'll use IE instead."

How is driving people away a win? The scope here is greater than a video codec.

That makes you a Content Provider in the eyes of MPEG-la and most of the "intellectual property" industry, not an End User, who is a passive consumer by definition.