Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more: what chris blizzard said

Absolutely!

Back to the issue at hand. Silverlight, video, adobe, multimedia, market power. How do we compete? Or, really, how do you compete? Because Mozilla isn’t going to create this change alone. We’re very very small by any standard in the tech marketplace. Our reach is pretty good with Firefox 2 + Firefox 3, and we’re starting to have real market effects, but we’re not going to be able to buy our way onto millions of computers by sponsoring the olympics.
People who have talked to me have heard me talk about two things on this topic. I usually say something like “you need to learn how to build a product” or “you need to find out what you can lead at and go do that.” There’s usually more than that, but that’s the main part of the message. And I think that if we want to make sure that the web isn’t overtaken by the acts of industry giants, that there are real actionable things we can do to make that happen.

I’ll use video on the web as a simple example. Here are the things that I think need to happen to make Theora a player in the real world.

1. Make sure there’s a really great video plugin for Apple Quicktime that delivers the OGG Theora video format to people who use the video tag in Safari. When I tried to play the ogg theora video from my post the other day the ogg plugin jumped around, showed a white screen for long periods, paused for a few seconds at a time - bad!

2. Create a control that brings the video tag to IE like Vlad did for the canvas tag. The world is much bigger than just Firefox. This would make it very easy to deliver and build content and make it easy for consumers to get access to it. Bring ubiquity to content like Adobe was able to do with Flash. (Note: Cortado isn’t good enough - it’s still stuck in the plugin prison!)

3. Make a super-easy, consumer-focused, high-quality encoder for ogg theora that anyone can use to encode their videos for the web. (Here’s a hint: Handbrake is still too hard to use.) Hook it up to the various video camera providers on mac and windows so that it’s super easy to create content, encode it, and with the tools listed above, upload it and make it available to others.

4. Even better, build a business around the tools above. Or even a service for people to upload to. Sustainability is an important component and it should not be left behind.

5. Create awesome demos of what you can do with the video tag, or even better mixed with the recent stuff we’ve been showing off with video + svg filters. Blur effects, video driven by content, content people can create and overlay onto existing videos, etc. Some of this stuff is out there, some of it isn’t. But it’s a start. Try mixing video with other content on the web - mash it up, cover it up, add value and context to otherwise boring videos. Its easier to do with the video tag than it is when it’s hidden inside of Flash or Silverlight.

This has been another edition of What Chris Blizzard Said.

reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.

The claim that Mozilla is a very small company that cannot influence as heavily as it might, is a bit soft. With some genuine leadership from Mozilla, XULrunner could be well on it's way to becoming the best cross-platform desktop application platform available. Instead Mitchell failed to take that opportunity and the remaining interest (mozpad) was dead within 12 months.

Considering that the ogg libraries are now being built into that very same platform, why doesn't Mozilla put some money where it's mouth is and commit to creating that high-quality encoder to which Chris refers?

The history of video software is quite disjointed. AutoGK (Gordian Knot) is built from a series of individual applications which all took time to mature. The end result is usable but feels and behaves like an octopus. Then there is the fresh looking GUIs provided with transcoder tools from the likes of vested interest companies such as DivX. These are often too inflexible in many respects.

In terms of 'mechanics' most of the Windows applications for transcoding are merely GUI front ends that parse long commands to the encoding engines no differently than if the engine was being driven by command line. If the OGG library facilitates this, all someone needs to do is design a fundamentally simplistic layout and style like that of the new nVidia transcoder called badaboom: http://www.hkepc.com/database/images/2008052616323959688496724.jpg

I don't know either person but I expect Alex Faaborg and Chris Double could put such an application together in a very short space of time.

Posted by: an0n1 m0us | August 14, 2008 7:58 AM

I don't think there's a need to reinvent the wheel.
Putting all the things together, making them work and optimizing this should be a very good start.
For example, see thread about adding theora support to avidemux (which is opensource (GPL)) at this url : http://avidemux.org/admForum/viewtopic.php?id=1662&p=2
Having theroa supported by default with Firefox is a big boost and will hopefully help to add theora support on a number of video editing applications.(breaking the egg and chicken pb...)

Posted by: matp75 | August 16, 2008 2:56 AM

It is possible that the Firefox 3.1 OGG/THEORA endgame for silverlight, will spark a format war. OGGTV.COM and other THEORA sites, will compete directly with flash, and silverlight will struggle to get out of the gate.

Posted by: William Lacy | August 17, 2008 8:56 AM

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