Multimedia, AV Archive

Has it only been five years? Yes, it has only been five years. The site that has become synonymous with video on the web, the site that sparked so many delightful internet memes, turns five years old today. Whether it's the best line in video game history repeated a million times over, or the most beautiful piece of art ever created in human history (the lesser-known HD version, of course), YouTube has it all.

According to Hulu, HTML5 is not yet ready for its needs. "We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn't yet meet all of our customers' needs," Hulu writes, "Our player doesn't just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren't necessarily visible to the end user."

"Adobe has rejiggered its DRM software for the Flash platform, combining a number of access control features under the rubric of Flash Access 2.0. The new platform can give content providers all sorts of ways to offer media content securely, including controlling what type of output devices can display the content - in effect, Adobe is enabling HDCP and broadcast control flags for Flash content."

Are you guys sick of the H264 debate already? Yes? Too bad, because we've got more. Microsoft's decision late last week to restrict Internet Explorer 9 to H264 was met with a rather immense amount of criticism, so the company decided to publish a new blog post responding to some of that criticism. While Microsoft makes a few good points, the overall feeling is still that of 'fear, uncertainty, and doubt'.

A major milestone for the x264 project - and for Free software in general. "Thanks to tireless work by Kieran Kunyha, Alex Giladi, Lamont Alston, and the Doom9 crowd, x264 can now produce Blu-ray-compliant video. Extra special thanks to The Criterion Collection for sponsoring the final compliance test to confirm x264's Blu-ray compliance. With x264's powerful compression, as demonstrated by the incredibly popular BD-Rebuilder Blu-ray backup software, it's quite possible to author Blu-ray disks on DVD9s (dual-layer DVDs) or even DVD5s (single-layer DVDs) with a reasonable level of quality. With a free software encoder and less need for an expensive Blu-ray burner, we are one step closer to putting HD optical media creation in the hands of the everyday user."

"In summary, it's possible to play full-screen Ogg Theora videos on the N900 at full frame rates with low CPU use by off-loading video decoding to the DSP and colour-space conversion and painting to the GPU. There are opportunities for optimization left, tuning for battery life needs to be investigated, and the integration into Firefox still needs to be done."

This is a little bit off the beaten track for OSNews, but hey, it's about science fiction and it's funny. "This month, 'Battlefield Earth', the blockbuster bomb based on the novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, won the Razzie for 'Worst Movie of the Decade'. J.D. Shapiro, the film's first screenwriter, accepted the award in person. Shapiro, who also wrote the screenplay for 'Robin Hood: Men in Tights', 'We Married Margo', and is developing a King Arthur spoof called '524 AD', explains what it's like to be attached to one of Hollywood's most notorious flops."

In January, we had read the various arguments regarding Mozilla's decision not to get an H.264 license. This has generated a lot of discussion about the future of video on the web. With Youtube, Dailymotion, Hulu and Vimeo having adopted H.264 for HD video, Mozilla and Opera should use the codecs installed on a user's system to determine what the browser can play, rather than force other vendors to adopt Ogg. Refusing to support a superior codec would be a disservice to your users in years to come. Why hold back the majority of your users because 2% of your users are on niche OSes?

This one was accidentally deleted from the submission queue when it was first submitted some time ago, so I decided to keep it around for a slow news day (such as this one - dear lord, it's quiet). FFmpeg developer Mans penned down a number of crucial problems with the Ogg container format.

"By encouraging more people to post videos in Wikipedia articles, we can bring theora video played in html5 to a very large audience. Currently, there are very few wikipedia articles that have videos. We hope that this campaign will bring thousands more to the site and show people how great theora can be. HTML 5 video, which plays without Flash, is a wonderful step towards a more open web - but if it depends on proprietary codecs like h.264, we will still be stuck with a gatekeeper for online video."

"A lot of commercial software comes with H.264 encoders and decoders, and some computers arrive with this software preinstalled. This leads a lot of people to believe that they can legally view and create H.264 videos for whatever purpose they like. Unfortunately for them, it ain't so."

The debate about HTML5 video is for the most part pretty straightforward: we all want HTML5 video, and we all recognise it's a better approach than Flash for online video. However, there's one thing we just can't seem to agree on: the codec. A number of benchmarks have been conducted recently, and they highlight the complexity of video encoding: they go either way.

Sigh. So, we have the music industry whose DRM schemes and other anti-piracy measures have thoroughly failed, and are only hindering consumers who stick to the letter of the law. Now we have Hollywood who's going to do it all over again: the AACS LA is busy killing off component video - even for existing, currently-owned equipment.

In a way, it's kind of sad. The old media squealing and squirming, trying pathetically to hold on to a time that has long been lost to the sands of... Well, time. Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC, made such a pathetic attempt before a US Congress committee yesterday, claiming Boxee stole Hulu's content.