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0 pointsblasdel16y ago0 comments

Mozilla links directly with liboggplay and actively avoids abstracting it in any way. It can't handle any non-ogm container formats, and ogm was intentionally designed not to handle any other codecs.

They're just assholes. If software patents are repealed in the US they'll mourn the loss of the mainstay excuse with which they force earnest activist wankery on their users. If patents were the real obstacle they'd distribute the x264 decoder to/from locales where the patents are unenforceable, and/or fall back on system libraries.

Their present actions serve only to strengthen the Copyright, Patent, and Trademark status quo, because without IP assholery they would neither have a soapbox to stand on nor an enemy to fight.

0 pointsblasdel16y ago0 comments

Mozilla links directly with liboggplay and actively avoids abstracting it in any way. It can't handle any non-ogm container formats, and ogm was intentionally designed not to handle any other codecs.

Their present actions serve only to strengthen the Copyright, Patent, and Trademark status quo, because without IP assholery they would neither have a soapbox to stand on nor an enemy to fight.

0 comments

4 comments · 2 top-level

pavlov16y ago· 2 in thread

The "ogm" file format is an old, unsupported, deprecated variant of the Ogg container. Do you mean "ogv"?

Sorry, this may seem like nit-picking, but such a fundamental mistake makes it harder to take your strong claims about Mozilla's design and intentions at face value.

blasdelOP16y ago

I intentionally used it to avoid a similar riposte if I had said 'ogg', an even older and shittier container. I didn't know they had implemented a new one, but from what I can tell they took special care to recapitulate all the mistakes of the last one.

1 more reply

yuvi16y ago

Technically, ogg, ogm, ogv, and oga all follow RFC 3533 and can legitimately be called the same file format, namely ogg. The only difference between all those extensions the codecs used; Xiph intentionally left the definition of how to map a given codec into ogg up to the codec.

DarkShikari16y ago

This is pretty much accurate.

There are plenty of other containers, audio formats, and video formats that are believed to be mostly patent-free; the same status as Theora. Firefox won't support any of them. Not Dirac the video format, not Matroska the container format, not FLAC the audio format, and so forth. Despite the fact that, for example, Matroska is far better-designed, more capable, and more popular than Ogg.

Mozilla could care less about patents: all they want is to promote their pet solutions at the expense of everyone else.

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