Firefox 3 download day was a huge success and it features many improvement over firefox2. But as they say you can’t please everybody, and download issues were not the only blip on this otherwise exciting launch. Perhaps lost in the hoopla over Fierfox 3 impressive new features set is the html5 video support which did not make it into this release. While Chris Double has done an excellent job in building cross platform ogg theora support into Firefox the new implementation strategy raises some questions about the future vitality of open media and open web standards.

Specifically Mozilla current implementation strategy proposes supporting video via hooks into the proprietary media platforms for windows and mac. i.e Firefox on mac will hook into quicktime, Firefox on windows will hook into direct show, while Firefox in Linux will hook into gstreamer…  This approach risks abandoning support for a baseline free codec (ie ogg theora) for the video tag. We can only hope the base cross platform theora support code that is already written is not abandoned as they add in these hooks.

Its now clear that html5 is heading in a codec agnostic direction, thanks to “patent concerns” raised by Nokia and apple pushing forward with quicktime based video tag “support” in Safari 3.1. This of course makes it complicated for sites like wikipedia to count on the html5 video tag to support free media since apple is not going to make any attempts to support it on their own. This makes it slightly more complicated for us at metavid as well. (will have to do some more case detection with the mv_embed script).

What is not clear is mozilla’s long term strategy….

Proprietary media formats do best in proprietary media platforms. Free software does poorly when parts of the web are tied to proprietary platforms. Free software can flourish on an open web. From a purely business perspective anything Mozilla can do to promote a web that works well with free software will ultimately increase the vitality of free software platforms and ultimately increase firefox’s market share. Apple and Microsoft are certainly not going to pre-install mozilla as the default browser in their proprietary platforms.

But forces beyond mozilla’s control have made htm5 codec agnostic… What should mozilla do now? 

They should take the sonbird approach and ship gstreamer across all platforms with native wrappers to direct show and quicktime to fall back on proprietary encoded content while ensuring baseline free codec and free media platform support. There are many reasons to go with an open community extensible free media platform, as outlined in the songbird blog…but let me mention a few more:

• Going with a GPL based media platform ensures they will not be subordinate to the same proprietary platforms that they are competing with. Ie Mozilla will control the media platform user experience rather than the host operating system media platform which has its own browser to promote.
• It ensures that the widely successful Firefox extension concept can be extended to the media platform in a cross platform friendly way. There is already a huge base of gstreamer plugins to build off of.  Imagine a site that installs a simple client extension that enables transcoding from local high quality DV format directly into dirac or theora and uploading to the site… avoiding server side transcodes and associated quality loss. Or an extension that lets you do live brodcasts from your machine integrated with an associated web service or a full featured inbrowser video editor. –these sort of killer apps can help propagate firefox.
• Doing gstreamer cross platform will make it easy to support future free codecs such as dirac in one pass, instead writing and maintaining codec extensions for every codec for each propitiatory platform and trying to ensure the experience is identical across both proprietary and free platforms.
• The code is already mostly written.

If Mozilla takes its own manifesto seriously hopefully they will be more forward thinking about the open media platform issue.