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Firefox 3.5 Preview Shows New Hope For Open Media Standards
The preview release of Firefox 3.5 is showing some neat tricks relating to online video, but not the kind that comes in a little proprietary bubble of Flash.
For example, the new Firefox 3.5 will be able to smoothly resize videos on the fly within the page. The interesting part, though, is that these videos are in OGG format – in other words, entirely open. With such a mainstream browser showing off what can be done with open video formats, there is a good chance that flash will lose its dominant position, or at least have to share a little. I’m not one to say “death to Flash” just because it happens to be proprietary, but an open video standard would allow for so much innovation. Already numerous projects are attempting to unify our media-watching experience. Just imagine the sudden freedom to create an even better experience if all that media was available in open formats.
Flash has been essential to the rise of sites like YouTube, but it might be time for something more flexible to replace it.
It looks like a version of RealPlayer is being licensed to several major netbook Linux distro companies along with support for a number of commercial codecs that are not usually shipped with Linux distributions.
RealPlayer hasn’t, in the past, had a very good reputation, largely for the tendency for tons of unrelated software to arrive along with RealPlayer. The company appears, though, to have ended these practices more recently, so this looks like a great step forward for Linux-based netbooks.
Of course there are already media players on almost all of these netbook distributions, but most of them do not have the codec playback capabilities that RealPlayer will have, due to licensing issues. Unfortunately, this often confuses people who are used to playback of any media “just working.” Now, though, those issues shouldn’t come up, at least in many cases. If only it were that simple on the desktop (without the $100 price tag, thanks).
Canonical Provides A Solution to A Frequent Misconception
For a number of reasons, Linux is significantly different from other operating systems. One of the ways in which it differs is that it is free. This makes including licensed media codecs very difficult, leading to reviewer complaints such as this one which appeared a while ago in the Wall Street Journal:
When I tried to play common audio and video files, such as MP3 songs, I was told I had to first download special files called codecs that are built into Windows and Mac computers. I was warned that some of these codecs might be “bad” or “ugly.”
For anyone not aware of the issues here, some media files such as MP3s use proprietary formats that you must pay to decode or play. When you buy Mac OS X or Windows, part of what you pay goes to pay that price, but you don’t pay anything for most Linux distributions. These codecs have been (potentially illegally) downloadable and legally purchasable for some time, but now Practical Technology is reporting that Canonical is making it easy for Ubuntu users to get them.
The main advantage of this is that reviewers and new users will be able to go directly to Canonical and purchase media playback software. Buying software like this is a model that customers are familiar with, so it should not seem strange. Of course, they may still not understand the real reasons why media playback support cannot be included for free, but at least they will know it is possible to make it work.
Not everything is right, though. My biggest concern is the price. If you buy both the codec pack and the DVD playback software, the price comes out to almost $90! $90 is just too high. This may not be something that Canonical has much control over, but who ever does have control should seriously consider the price. In the meantime, I hope that more hardware sellers start bundling these codecs in with Ubuntu on their PCs.
This move is certainly going in the right direction and may help to clear up a lot of users’ confusion, but it is far from perfect. If the whole pack was closer to $50 I would be a lot more enthusiastic about it.