Hub: The plain and simple fact is that before Flash-based video became prevalent, I couldn’t watch anything on Linux. Not without using blatantly illegal software, and even then it was a gamble.
Flash enables 90% of the online world’s video for me, versus 0% without it. And that enables access to the culture and ecosystem that has grown around online video.
YouTube et al. have added value to my life experience, in some small way. I think asking me or anyone else to give that up for an ideal of total software freedom is kind of shortsighted, not to mention hypocritical.
Freedom is not zero-sum. One should not be asked to give up any freedom (of say joining a community) in order to assure more freedom. With effort and intelligence, we can create more freedom without sacrificing others.
Instead of ideological debates of the value of freedom, I’d rather have a discussion about how we apply enough pressure and economic incentive for Adobe to open source the Flash player.
UPDATE: Added more hypocrisy by seeding my own ideological debate. Switched “ideology” to “ideal” in the 3rd paragraph.
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I think it’s only a matter of time. Since Silverlight is on the way and will have a linux version (a la Novell), the popularity of that product may just spur Adobe to work that much harder on a better Flash linux player. Although a little consumer pressure never hurt!
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Adobe aren’t going to open-source the Flash player; that would mean that other equally-functional players would appear, and they would no longer have complete control of the system. What we should be doing is trying to push open codecs/containers such as Ogg Vorbis, and while Flash is a decent format to use in the meantime, we shouldn’t get dependent on it.
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@Philip: I totally agree.
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@Jim: Silverlight just uses WMV rebadged a bit; if you want monolight or something that’s still going to use either a. licensed WMV codecs or b. patent-encumbered free software.
Personally, I hope Adobe are smart enough to open their player. They can continue to lead the development of the format; the alternative is Microsoft likely end up eating their lunch.
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hopefully, html5 and it’s audio and video tags (and standard wielding of vorbis and theora) will render the use of flash moot for that sort of use
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if we are talking about flash VIDEO (so not flash-based webpages, or flash-based games),
then open-sourcing the adobe-flash-player is unimportant.FFMPEG already can play most of the flash video files you can find, and because most of the open-source video players link to ffmpeg, they all can play flash video (flv in short).
so there is open-source code that’s able to play those files.
the problem is that FLV video files use either VP6 video-compression, or some modified H263, and i assume both are patented. and of course, the audio is mostly MP3, which is also patented.
or to turn the discussion around:
why cannot i easily create h264 encoded video, and AAC encoded audio in any linux distro?
(which offer roughly the best compression that’s available currently)
it’s not because there is no open-source code for it. there is. it’s because the patents.
so to be able to legally play flash-video with an open-source player, Sorenson, On2 and Frauenhofer/Thomson has to donate the patents to the open-source community (or whatever is needed to make those implementations legal).
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@Gábor: So it seems like Hub’s anger at Flash might be misdirected, and should instead be targetted at the codec patent holders.
Though Adobe could of course support open codecs in the Flash Player. Any idea why they don’t already?
It might be an incentive for them to open-source much of the Player without the codecs, which would be great and valuable: it could lead to integration with the existing open codecs. If this was merged back to the mainline Player codebase, it would provide alternatives to the current codec lock-in.
In the mean time, I guess it’s up to other bodies, like SuSE, to license the proper codecs to legally run the open source implementations.
Or maybe a large company could look into buying out the patents outright, and opening up their usage? This might make sense for Google in order to allow new sources and uses of YouTube, e.g. for live webcams or live cellphone video. I dunno, just spitballing.
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The promise in Flash for Adobe is simply owning and controlling everything the web is built on. Although they have not succeeded in it, it is still their ultimate goal. For dummies, we are talking about a market potential of several billion euros yearly.
Given that in mind, it would take them a lot to surrender that fight. More than what almost anyone can directly do. The correct solution would be perhaps to build a competing product, which does not exist at all at this moment.
(No, it doesn’t. What does is the TECHNICAL solution/product, the rest of the required package is entirely missing. One would need channel partners, good marketing skills, something that adds more value than the competitors, technical development, .. In overall HUGE investment in resources.)
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Your post suggests that giving users the choice to use illegal/non-free platforms might be worthwhile if it makes a positive contribution to their life.
But I don’t know of anyone who is suggesting taking away that choice from you. You are free to run whatever software you want on your Linux box without interference from anyone.
As for creating incentives for companies to adopt open platforms. Have you considered that perhaps one good strategy of putting the pressure on non-free platforms is to ship software that is completely free and unencumbered?
It works in different directions.
From the business level, you are showing that the community will develop an alternative/workaround if you don’t open source your platform [ati driver, java classpath]. From the user level, it helps educate the user base about the non-cooperation of the company if the user understands that the company did not provide drivers/codecs and the user has to fetch them manually.
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Instead of ideological debates of the value of freedom, I’d rather have a discussion about how we apply enough pressure and economic incentive for Adobe to open source the Flash player.
When you pigeon hole Freedom as purely ideological or political you detract from the rest of what you say. Many (most) software freedoms are essentially practical, and prerequisite for everything we’ve achieved so far.
Anywho, turning to the practical matter of how do we persuade Adobe to open source the Flash player, riddle me this: how do Adobe open source the VP6 codec when they don’t control the patents?
A larger market for Flash video players only increases the value of keeping the patents on Flash video unavailable to open source software. If the owners of the patents allowed implementation in open source, a large fraction of the licensing revenue would dissapear as e.g. all the phone makers switch to Linux and an open source stack.
More practically:
1) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5545573096553082541
2) Create an IE plugin. Push like spreadfirefox.com
3) Profit -
@erik: Luckily, this is already being done by the largest body capable of doing it: Microsoft’s Silverlight. And Silverlight’ll be community source licensed. This could be a large enough threat to Adobe’s reign that they look to open sourcing Flash in order to foster more buy-in before it’s too late.
Open sourcing their JS engine is a good start, and Flex a second step. These could be integrated natively into Firefox, enabling a lot of great things currently limited by the plugin-model. The same could be done with an open-sourced Flash Player.
Luckily again, open source can be considered a commodotizing factor. SVG in WebKit and Mozilla might provide a baseline level of commodotization that could make the difference in Flash being *neccessary* versus it just being a better alternative.
Either way, it’s up to us to tilt the scales in the direction that’s best for open source in the long term, while accepting whatever solutions we can get in the short term.
Or, in other words: Hack Mozilla for Freedom.
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@Riddler: Great comment. Thanks for the video link. I’ve switched “ideology” to “ideal” in the post. Check out the rest of the comments for a discussion of the patent issue.
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I really, really appreciate that a lot of GNOME developers provide Ogg Theora versions of video they share. While Flash is better than illegally using codecs, I really appreciate it whenever a developer goes to the effort of providing content in Theora instead or along-side for now.
I wonder whether there are any video sites (ala Google Video and YouTube) that serve content in Theora
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Don’t forget about the Fluendo codecs. That allows me to play quite a few files, and they are legal. Unfortunately, they are not free, but I understand that the algorithm is patented. (One of the few cases I could see for software patents.) Though I want to note that I use Vorbis, Speex, FLAC, and Theora for anything I make =)
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I haven’t found a video for years now which actually needs win32-codecs to play. And I watch a *lot* of video. ffmpeg (in its patent-encumbered version, admittedly, but hey, I live in Canada) plays just about everything these days.
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I remain amazed that patent awareness among Free Software dvelopers is where copyright awareness was ten years ago. I don’t see any patent debate here, only education.
While it would be nice if Adobe openned the source code to their flash player, that’s some way away, and does not in fact address the issue of video, as has been mentioned. Flash supports both h.263 and VP6. Adobe could not buy the h.263 patent portfolio if the wanted to. They might be able to buy On2 to get VP6 if they really wanted to.
Instead we should focus on other avenues. If Adobe published a Flash specification under a license that allowed general player implementaitons, we’d have an easier time implementing our own flash plugins, and we could support it more effectively, the way we have with Adobe Postscript and PDF, even if the format itself isn’t controlled by an open community. Continuing the current developement work based on reverse engineering is a good way to do that, since it removes the “exclusive control of the playback experience” argument.
The other, and much easier avenue is to pressure popular video sites to support free formats. Google video will let you upload theora, and provide a download link so you can get it back out in that format if you want. There’s precedent with YouTube providing video to Apple in h.264. So, ask YouTube to add support for Ogg Theora upload, and then start asking them to support theora through a special gateway and the html5 tag.
The broad support for flash video on Windows and MacOS machines is what made YouTube popular. But the point is that YouTube is popular and we need to support that on free operating systems, not that Flash has somehow made the codec problem go away.
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> Not without using blatantly illegal software
What a load of crap. Next thing you’ll see people quoting you as an authority on this matter.
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Ralph, I think your idea is good. Some projects and open source companies should be able to get that happen with many sites. Then just add ogg/vorbis/theora editing/creating capabilities to default desktops of Linux users and make those applications properly packaged (MSI packages for codecs damnit, at last!) and available for Windows users.
Add some good propaganda and… It might do some good!
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I am forced to continue as my thoughts are not perfectly straight at this moment. Sorry.
For average users the lack of converting (/light editing) support on their default desktops is a blocker. It’s one more step that they don’t quite understand and it takes a little bit of extra effort.
Now, imagine for instance your distro, say Ubuntu doing this: You can double click on the movie files like usual and totem plays them. But, on the right click context menu.. Add something like “Convert to free format!”. And on the totem’s file menus, something similar. It doesn’t have to be intrusive. All it takes is a user to once notice it and click on it. And get a good and user friendly wizard for setting bitrate, size (x*y) etc targets.. With a preview sort of thing for estimating what the outcome might be like. And.. Just do it.
THAT would be sweet. With just little extra marketing even average joe might see some actual non-bs ideological benefits from using that stuff. For instance, add the most common use case feature: joining video files. Whoa. Just simply stellar.
Some gstreamer/gtk/gnome hackers could make first version of the software for Linux almost in one night. The rest (marketing etc) would take a longer time.
And then, the lack of properly packaged codecs for Windows is a lack too. Since they already got high quality wmv codecs and such, the more effort it is to add support for some weirdo ogg stuff the less likely it will be done – even under peer pressure from others. Bring msi packages for codecs (for mass deployment, and it’s the good and default windows software installer anyways) and perhaps even similar conversion wizard for Windows users. That would be something to bring that stuff forward to the average joe AND actually managing it to get installed even to couple computers of normal users would really really irritate certain entities
If you like the idea, please try to get it implemented! There should even still be enough time for Gutsy inclusion
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> The plain and simple fact is that before Flash-based video became
> prevalent, I couldn’t watch anything on Linux. Not without using
> blatantly illegal software, and even then it was a gamble.Well, by the same reasoning, you may want to switch back to Windows and proprietary applications – this way, you’ll be able to “legally” watch your DVDs, play some cool games, get -finally!- rid of all the interoperability problems with Office, and much more!
Free software desktops have no future if we gradually accept more and more proprietary crap just because it helps in the short term.
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I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Flash vs. w32codecs?, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
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I’ll never install the Adobe crap but I might one day install this http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
Currently living quite happily without JewTube & co.
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