Jacob Meuser wrote:
> don't blame youtube and the like for creating "de facto" standards.
There fixed that for you.
Flash wasn't really used until YouTube started pushing it on sheeple.
Also AFAIK, Flash is a specification for a data format, not an actual
*standard* for a data format.
Functionally, Flash (as it is currently used) does very little that
Quicktime or MPEG could not already do in 1993 or so. Back then many
transfers were at 9600 Kbps over level 1 or 2 copper. 2Mbps ethernet
was considered screaming fast. While it would make sense to look
forward and plan for files measured in 10s or 100s of MB ...
> either blame the w3c
... the W3C became busy after the commercialization of the Internet in
1996 cleaning up the mess caused by the browser war started by Microsoft
and exacerbated by Netscape.
( See http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
for context)
Recall that the W3C had to stop and put HTML development on hold to
waste time making a compromise called HTML 3.2 before moving back on
track with HTML 4 and CSS1.
A short video is still a few MB of data to transfer.
Some of us were setting up streaming back in 1995, though I would
consider that a late start anyway. Networking didn't support casual
downloads of MB of anything.
Currently, video specifications in HTML5 appears to have been hobbled by
1 Apple Employee and 1 "former" Microsoft Consultant. For the latter,
see the annotated "Halloween Documents" for how decomoditization of
standards fits into their strategy.
> or the FOSS comunity in general for not creating a
> superior "free" video codec.
The have. But first, two points of clarification there:
+ First, the complaint is about data formats (i.e. flash) not about
software (i.e. a codec for flash).
+ Secont, last I checked the Adobe(r) Flash specification was available
*only* under NDA and *only* under the condition that it be used for
export *not* playback.
Members of the FOSS community *have* come with better open video
standards:
The BBC started Dirac, but seemed to then become the target of politics
( not quite "open video for less than the cost of a cruise missile" but
along those lines ) The current specification was finalized in 2008 and
can be used in Ogg, Quicktime and AVI containers.
http://diracvideo.org/developers
Ogg Theora is another one. Ogg Theora support is now built into
Firefox. So there is now at least one mainstream browser that supports
open video formats. In addition to the format itself being open, the
main software for Theora is available under the BSD license:
http://www.theora.org/downloads/
For plain audio, there is speex and vorbis:
Ogg Speex, for voice audio, is widely used. Being an open format, it is
even already part of the above maligned Flash.
Ogg Vorbis is *very* widely used. Yes few ipod-like devices use it.
However, it still managed to pass over 12% of audio traffic a while back
and is widely used in the gaming industry for audio.
So there are now two good open standards for video that don't require
NDAs to implement and have open source supporting code. At least one is
supported in Firefox already.
Vote with your feet / wallet.
-Lars
