Developers › A Journal from Behind the Trenches

YouTube wants people's feedback: Opportunity for HTML5?

January 13, 2010 · by Haavard

YouTube is doing some "spring cleaning", and is looking for people's feedback on what to fix.

It seems that "Support HTML5 open web video with open formats" is the highest ranked item so far. I'm really happy to see that. YouTube with HTML5 and Theora support could give open standards a huge boost!

If you would like open standards to prevail, let your voice be heard too.

Readers' comments 32

Left under the original article, as archived.

endless loveWednesday, January 13, 2010 11:36:51 AM
d4rkn1ghtWednesday, January 13, 2010 7:23:19 PM
DillonFriday, January 15, 2010 12:09:56 PM
Personal attacks removed by moderator.
Daniel HendrycksFriday, January 15, 2010 1:23:10 PM
That idea is removed from the list.
PurdiFriday, January 15, 2010 7:29:40 PM
Personal attacks removed by moderator.
TeoFriday, January 15, 2010 8:10:50 PM
http://www.osnews.com/story/19019/Theora_vs_h_264

I guess OSNews is a proxy to the so called "industry" ...
TeoFriday, January 15, 2010 8:26:24 PM
Personal attacks removed by moderator.
PurdiFriday, January 15, 2010 8:40:26 PM
LOL, an article from 2007!

How about something a little more recent?

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

Also, who cares about quality? It only needs to be good enough. The masses don't care about super high quality at all. If they did, BetaMax would have beaten VHS, Super-CD would have replaced CDs, and YouTube would have been a failure.
Opera Community ModeratorFriday, January 15, 2010 8:58:41 PM
Posts containing trolling and hijacking removed.

Please stay on-topic, and refrain from posting personal attacks and snide remarks. I don't want to have to start issuing warnings or even suspending accounts.

-JD
TeoFriday, January 15, 2010 9:43:53 PM
Yeah I agree, theora has caught up with the standard Bonus - on my miserable Athlon cpu it uses 10% less CPU, which is very nice.
But:
1. If you pause the example movie on 00:21 h264 kinda looks superior to theora
2. No one has proved that Theora / vorbis are patent free worldwide, or at least on the main markets - USA/EU/Japan/China - though that's not really my problem, it's browser vendors' one
3. If "good enough" was really enough, than noone would have used Opera in the first place, IE5 is good enough. And Firefox is much better than IE5. Yet, Opera desktop somehow has 40 million users - so maybe, just maybe, quality matters, sometimes.

About patents - as I work in the software industry, I've seen quite funny things - the "best" (ironically) example is a patent which in layers and layers of obscure words actually patents double-linked lists - something that is in every school book about programming.

The examples you gave conveniently forget some details.
VHS was good enough and *cheaper*. h264 via the flash plugin and theora via the browser has the same cost to the average computer user - 0.
Audio CD is good enough *and can be ripped without any effort*. The first time I heard Super-CD my jaw dropped. If the music I listen to was published on super-cd and it was reasonably priced, i'd buy them.
YouTube - again, it was a convenient method to get music / last tv shows without paying. That trumped all other reasons, so what's the point?
Daniel HendrycksFriday, January 15, 2010 9:44:35 PM
Originally posted by Teo:

http://www.osnews.com/story/19019/Theora_vs_h_264

That was Theora 1.0, not 1.1. 1.1 addressed those issues.
Originally posted by Daniel James Hendrycks:

That idea is removed from the list.

Am I the only person seeing that the former #1 option was removed from the list?
ouzowtfFriday, January 15, 2010 10:34:36 PM
Originally posted by DanielHendrycks:

Am I the only person seeing that the former #1 option was removed from the list?

It is not removed. There is also response from YT to wishes of that kind.
We've heard a lot of feedback around supporting HTML5 and are working hard to meet your request, so stay tuned. We'll be following up when we have more information. We're answering this idea now because there are so many similar HTML5 ideas and we want to give other ideas a chance to be seen.
Mia, YouTube Team
DillonSaturday, January 16, 2010 8:51:51 AM
I second all of Teo's points. Additionally Xiph's analysis of h.264 in YouTube is a better criticism of YouTube's encoding methods than of h.264 (with the x264 encoder, namely). I believe that people advocating for Theora over h.264 on YouTube using Xiph's analysis should also worry that they would use suboptimal settings for Theora and thereby get worse results than what Xiph got. I also believe that while the best quality may not be always achieved (and it isn't with YouTube's h264 encodes) that it's good to strive for the best quality. I didn't mean any of this (or any of my other posts) as personal attacks and I hope this isn't off topic. I'm still in support of html 5 in YouTube.
PurdiSaturday, January 16, 2010 12:52:25 PM
Originally posted by umbra-tenebris:

If "good enough" was really enough, than noone would have used Opera in the first place

And what do you know, the crappiest browser has the highest market share! Apart from that, the comparison is besides the point because there's no image or audio quality difference in browsers. It's all down to stuff like security, speed, etc. And the fact that people actually promote browsers.

Originally posted by umbra-tenebris:

The examples you gave conveniently forget some details.
VHS was good enough and *cheaper*. h264 via the flash plugin and theora via the browser has the same cost to the average computer user - 0.
Audio CD is good enough *and can be ripped without any effort*. The first time I heard Super-CD my jaw dropped. If the music I listen to was published on super-cd and it was reasonably priced, i'd buy them.
YouTube - again, it was a convenient method to get music / last tv shows without paying. That trumped all other reasons, so what's the point?

Thanks for proving my point.

VHS didn't have superior quality. It was good enough, and had other things besides quality going for it.

H.264 costs the publisher money. And they are tightening the licensing from 2011. Do you really think the end user won't end up paying the licensing costs either by viewing more ads or something else? Money isn't free.

Regular CDs were good enough. No obvious benefit switching to a format with superior quality.

Indeed, YouTube had relatively crappy quality and there were other video services that even served HD video, but it gave clear benefits that had nothing to do with video quality.

Thanks again for proving my point.

Theora gives a clear benefit to publishers because it's absolutely free. The quality is also good enough by now, and the masses don't really care about superior quality (as my examples clearly showed, and you clearly agreed 100%, as you even expanded on them for me - thanks!).
PurdiSaturday, January 16, 2010 12:55:32 PM
Originally posted by Astrophizz:

I also believe that while the best quality may not be always achieved (and it isn't with YouTube's h264 encodes) that it's good to strive for the best quality.

The masses don't care about best quality. They only care about good enough.

Are you going to pay the licensing fees for Opera and Mozilla and any other startup browser that wants to be on the web but can't afford the H.264 extortion fees? Are you going to pay the higher licensing fees from 2011? And any future higher licensing because H.264 gets a de facto monopoly and the owner can pretty much do whatever he wants?

The web is all about open and free technologies. Pushing H.264 over a free alternative is missing the point of what the web is, and what makes it work.
DillonSaturday, January 16, 2010 1:32:26 PM
I can understand to move away from technologies that require license fees as a change for the future and the move to free technologies be they technically superior or inferior. As you say, in the past people have generally settled for lower quality options for various reasons.

I don't know the history of these things too well but I'm curious what the licensing situation has been for technologies like Mpeg-4 ASP, h.263, and vp6 - and whether or not Macromedia/Adobe has shouldered the burden for all of these years with these licenses (mind you I'm not pro Flash). Certainly moving to html5 would internalize the licensing fees for distributing a decoder and I agree, that's an issue for any browser distributor implementing html5 video. I hadn't thought of that.

I also wonder what, if any licensing fees, YouTube had to pay in the past. I'm sure they've done a cost analysis of staying with h.264 but of course saving money with a free codec is also good . Maybe they are also worried about possible submarine patents that may be a part of Theora though I've heard Ogg has a team of lawyers who've put a lot of effort into ensuring there aren't any.

Also I'd like it known that I'm fine with competition and I'm glad for the presence of Theora, Dirac, VC-1, schrodinger, etc. I don't know how I could be an Opera user and say otherwise
PurdiSaturday, January 16, 2010 2:13:58 PM
Considering that YouTube has had huge problems becoming profitablen any license cost might just be what kept them from doing that!

Adobe are selling software (and it's insanely expensive), so you are probably paying the license fee for them when you pay for their software.
Cutting SpoonMonday, January 18, 2010 6:13:38 AM
Buh/Meh. Partly, each codec needs to have sufficient automation work done. From what I've seen, commercial h.264 solutions have better automated conversion quality than either x.264 or Ogg/Theora.

Strictly speaking, Bink video format can be very efficient in playback, but it requires a great deal of effort to encode for efficient playback. Sometimes extra costs relating to actual file conversion are much more important than the license fee alone.
PurdiMonday, January 18, 2010 9:53:47 AM
It only needs to be good enough.
TeoMonday, January 18, 2010 6:40:22 PM
Originally posted by Purdi:

It only needs to be good enough.

On that place there was going to be a big litany to prove you wrong, but while I was writing it, I realized that you are right! Doh.
Charles SchlossThursday, January 21, 2010 5:35:09 AM

YouTube Launches Support for HTML5
http://mashable.com/2010/01/20/youtube-html5/
ouzowtfThursday, January 21, 2010 9:20:01 AM
Originally posted by Chas4:

YouTube Launches Support for HTML5
http://mashable.com/2010/01/20/youtube-html5/

with h264 encoded videos...
tomassplatchThursday, January 21, 2010 10:06:22 AM
Originally posted by ouzoWTF:

with h264 encoded videos...

Is there any way of making Opera play them? It should be possible, given the fact that Opera depends on gstreamer codecs.
HaavardThursday, January 21, 2010 12:32:04 PM
Opera wants the Web to use open standards. You can read up on HTML5 VIDEO support in the Core blog. Personally, I doubt that H.264 will find its way into Opera.
ouzowtfThursday, January 21, 2010 8:15:43 PM
If Firefox starts to support h264, then Opera has to do that too. Otherwise Youtube will never change their mind and Opera would have no chance against the other browsers.

Sad
PurdiThursday, January 21, 2010 9:27:00 PM
Firefox is obviously not going to support an evil, closed extortionist codec like H.264 if they are serious about open standards.
Charles SchlossThursday, January 21, 2010 10:18:10 PM
Most comments I have seen about ogg is the quality tho I think it will get better over time
Daniel HendrycksThursday, January 21, 2010 10:26:04 PM
Originally posted by Charles Schloss:

I think it will get better over time

It will, I have been following and discussing in the mailing list for Theora and a new version is in the works.
PurdiFriday, January 22, 2010 9:11:38 AM
Originally posted by Chas4:

Most comments I have seen about ogg is the quality tho I think it will get better over time

It's already good enough. You don't need it to be better than the other crappy, evil codec, just good enough.
MyOpera team, please fix this!Friday, January 22, 2010 6:07:08 PM
Originally posted by Purdi:

good enough
Subjective.

Originally posted by Purdi:

You don't need it to be better than the other crappy, evil codec, just good enough.
I believe you are the one that doesn't need it to be better. Some people want the best of the best of the best.

I thought (read: hoped) Google bought On2 so we could get a better codec that they would release for free to the world to become the html5 standard. It's still not too late...
Cutting SpoonFriday, January 22, 2010 8:38:42 PM
"Good Enough" and "First" are the big ones. That and a little luck, and Microsoft is in no danger of losing to Linux yet.

"Good Enough" and "Cheap" worked for VHS
TeoFriday, January 22, 2010 9:44:22 PM
Originally posted by Purdi:

extortionist

This word rules, I named a folder on my desktop with it so I could learn it.