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August 4, 2008

Mozilla said today that it is close to releasing a new version of Firefox that could ramp up the use of open-source video software and similar video streaming applications.

Mozilla's Firefox developers at a summit last week in Whistler, British Columbia, said they've started working on native Theora support, and test builds of the Web browser incorporating the new feature are now available for testing. It is slated to be called Firefox version 3.1.

That will be the next major release due by early 2009, and will likely include support for a new HTML tag specifically for embedding video in web pages. Firefox 3.1 will also support the royalty-free video codec Ogg Theora.

Chris Double, a Mozilla code development engineer who has been handling the project said "the code committed so far is a work in progress, but it's a start towards using a common codec across all platforms and will improve as we get towards the 3.1 release sometime between January and March 2009."

When the new upgrade is completely finalized, Firefox users won't have to download a plugin to play Theora content anymore. Another cited advantage is that Web developers can just use a 'video' tag to mark content, rather than needing JavaScript to launch a video.

However, there are some in the Linux community that see all that commercial interest as potentially harmful to the Internet, since Web content locked up in a particular format could become inaccessible due to a change in a vendor's product development plans. But still many disagree.

Video on the Internet these days is a jumble of different software formats and products, with major ones including Apple's QuickTime, Microsoft's Windows Media, Adobe's Flash and Real Networks' Real Player multimedia players.

The plugins are all free, however. Those companies make their money by selling streaming servers and especially designed encoding software for such servers.

Overall, Firefox's work will streamline the delivery of video to users, wrote a blogger by the name of J5 on his blog. "That to me is freedom-- to allow for those who prefer open formats the ability to deliver their content without any barriers between them and their end users," J5 wrote.

Videos in such formats as .AVI can be converted to Theora using VLC, an open-source streaming media server, video player and converter from the Video-LAN Project. Another open-source converter is ffmpeg2theora.

Opera Software, a European company which makes a browser by the same name, has also implemented the video HTML tag. Opera said in July that it has released versions of its latest browser that support Ogg Theora for Windows, Linux and the Mac OS X operating systems.

"It's such an obvious improvement over the previous state of affairs of dealing with online video that it really makes you wonder why it took so long," wrote Ben McIlwain, an IT consultant, on his blog. "We're several years into the online video revolution now, so it's only fair that we finally get native browser support for videos."

The moves by Mozilla and Opera can be seen as a strike against Microsoft, which still largely dominates the browser market, thanks to its Internet Explorer software. Figures from Net Applications from July show Internet Explorer with a huge 73 percent market share, compared to Firefox at just 19 percent and Opera at less than 1 percent.

However, Ogg Theora isn't supported in Internet Explorer 7, and Microsoft has said it isn't in a hurry to support it anytime soon. It is an older compression specification compared to Adobe's Flash 9, which uses the latest H.264 technology and is used on some Web sites such as Google's YouTube.

Source: Mozilla.

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