Short Thoughts

An Open Letter to Mozilla

Dear Mozilla,

You have a great opportunity at your doorstep. With a single decision, you have the ability to propel the web forward into a quasi-eutopian society in which audio and video content are delivered without the use of non-native third-party plug-ins. You can make true native HTML 5 standardized media delivery a reality.

But if you don’t support H.264, we will forever be encumbered by Flash video streams.

I personally have a strong dislike for Flash, but it’s not fair to simply ignore its achievements: arguably, Flash is single-handedly responsible for bringing motion content to the World Wide Web. Flash was capable of delivering interactive experiences literally years before anyone even got close with JavaScript and other modern web technologies. In fact, it’s fair to say that, even in 2010, Flash has some legitimate uses for delivering motion content.

Motion content and video content, however, are two very different animals. While much of what Flash was once used for can now be easily replicated with JavaScript and a combination of SVG, Canvas elements, and CSS 3, it’s still a viable platform for immersive motion experiences. Flash was never intended, however, to deliver video and audio: rather, it was a stopgap for the sake of compatibility — most user agents have support for Flash, so it made sense as a reliable platform for delivery, regardless of how inconsistent the result.

Nowadays, however, the browser can do so much more than its counterpart of yesteryear. HTML 5, therefore, brings forth native user agent support for video and audio, and the Internet community is embracing it readily: quite frankly, most content producers don’t like Flash, and have no problem moving to a more native means of delivery. The question is, what codec should be used for HTML 5 video?

Mozilla’s decision to use Ogg Theora and Vorbis for video and audio (respectively) is certainly admirable: personally, I would love an open codec to gain widespread industry notoriety and usage. The fact is, however, the production industry has already standardized on H.264. Nowadays, H.264 is perhaps the most common codec for Internet-distributed video, with the exception of Flash, much of which is encoded in H.264 anyway!

Content producers love H.264 because it works with their existing workflow tools, and there’s widespread hardware-level support for H.264 on a number of devices, including the iPhone and Android-based phones. The benefits brought by a switch to Ogg Theora — if any even exist — are vastly outweighed (for most content producers) by the time and effort required to make such a switch, and quite frankly, most producers don’t want to be serving up both H.264- and Ogg-encoded content.

As a result, this is what I’ve been hearing from a lot of content producers:

“I’ll encode my video as H.264: I can display it natively for browsers that support it, and deliver a Flash player for all the rest.”

Once again, people are resorting to Flash, not because it does video better, but for compatibility reasons, just like they did back when Flash video players first appeared on the web. The startling thing is, unless Mozilla decides to implement H.264 into Firefox, Firefox is going to be one of the browsers getting served content in “compatibility mode.”

There was a time when Firefox was known for its high level of standards-compliance, and was generally seen as a symbol of fostering a standard-compliant web. However, even though it’s unintentional, if Firefox doesn’t add support for native H.264, it will be holding the web back from making a move to truly native video on the desktop. Firefox users — which account for the largest chunk of non-IE web users — will still be served Flash video.

Mozilla, you have an opportunity to move the web into the future with native browser support for audio and video. However, if you refuse to provide some mechanism by which H.264-encoded video can be played using HTML 5-standardized methods, you run the risk of returning the web to the Dark Ages of format wars. You don’t need to abandon Ogg, you could even open the video element up to third-party codec installation like Safari (as long as you make it easy to find/install a third-party H.264 codec) for all I care; at all costs, though, you must make H.264 video natively playable in Firefox.

Don’t let Firefox become the browser that content producers mutter about under their breath.

Sincerely,

Matt Patenaude