Tag: video

Categories
Internet

90% Of Web Traffic Is Video

There’s a lot of talk about the prediction from YouTube’s Robert Kyncl that video will be 90% of internet traffic. This sounds shocking until you realize it’s not, and doesn’t really mean much in context of the internet.

This number presumably is at least partially based on a prediction by Cisco who makes routers that carry that internet traffic. They even bought Flip (an unfortunate tale) simply to help drive video on the internet and presumably drive up the need for routers, their main business. They might have a bias.

The reality is video already is, and will continue to be the vast majority of Internet traffic. However that doesn’t mean people are spending as much time on it as the numbers will make you believe. Video per minute of online activity is just insanely high bandwidth and expensive. The percentage of bandwidth is meaningless, what matters is where people spend their time.

Video compresses very poorly in comparison to text and audio (interestingly, speech compresses fairly well these days). Video these days either streaming or progressive download is still a very bandwidth intensive activity.

This webpage is likely under 160 KB for you and loads in about 300 ms. You’ll spend statistically a few minutes reading this, perhaps slightly less if you just skim for the numbers. The takeaway is experiencing: this blog post is about 160 KB over a few minutes assuming you visit the site, and don’t use an RSS reader (go ahead RSS users, try it).

Now lets figure out what video is typically. Most web video these days is still H.264, and generally 640×480 (480p) or 1280×720 (720p). Most laptops today are pretty cheap and just can’t handle 1080p, certainly their displays aren’t good enough to show a measurable difference, not to mention the buffering time annoys people, so we’ll ignore it’s existence.

I want to make this a little realistic, so to figure out a bitrate, we’ll use the standard formula for what Adobe calls ‘ideal’ in the H.264 Primer, and what most seem to use these days:

[image width] x [image height] x [framerate] x [motion rank] x 0.07 = [desired bitrate]

For 1280×720 that means:

1280 x 720 x 24 x 2 x 0.07 = 3,096,576 bps = ~3000 kbps

And for 640×480:

640 x 480 x 24 x 2 x 0.07 = 1,032,192 bps = ~1000 kbps

This sounds about right. As of today, Wikipedia lists the bandwidth range for 720p at 2–2.9 Mbit/sec and for 480p at 0.8–1 Mbit/sec. So we know we’re on track.

That’s all the math we really need to do. Google can do the conversions for us:

For 720p:

3000 kbps = 1,318.35938 Megabytes / hour = 22 MB / min

For 480p:

1000 kbps = 439.453125 Megabytes / hour  = 7.3 MB / min

Going back to the example of this blog permalink, at 160 KB for a few minutes of reading vs. 7,475 KB for one minute of 480p video. That is why video is 90% of traffic.

Video growth is huge, but it’s not nearly as one sided as the stats will lead you to believe.

Categories
Apple Google Mozilla

On Chrome Dropping H.264

The Chrome team announced they are dropping support for H.264.

WebM Support

WebM support will be growing quickly as Firefox 4 rolls out (Firefox upgrade adoption is legendary). Chrome commands sizable market share and is pushing the Chrome OS platform. Opera is also supporting WebM.

Apple and Microsoft could join the party and bundle WebM support along with the other codecs they support at any time, though they are licensors for H.264 and wouldn’t benefit from WebM market penetration. Microsoft’s implementation does allow for VP8 support if a codec is installed. I’m not aware of anything for Safari and am rather certain nothing can be done for the iPhone without Apple intervening.

On the hardware side AMD, ARM, Nvidia are backing WebM. Broadcom announced support, as did Qualicomm and TI. These are major vendors for mobile chips. Intel is working on stuff too.

H.264 Trouble

H.264 is problematic and bad for the web for many reasons I’ve mentioned here before as well as great posts by roc and shaver. I’ll leave it at that rather than rehash.

There was buzz a while back about H.264 being “free” (quotes intentional), but it’s not really “free” if you read the fine print. As Peter Csathy of Sorenson Media notes:

But, you say, MPEG LA recently announced that it will no longer charge royalties for the use of H.264. Yes, it’s true – MPEG LA recently bowed to mounting pressure from, and press surrounding, WebM and announced something that kind of sounds that way. But, I caution you to read the not-too-fine print. H.264 is royalty-free only in one limited case – for Internet video that is delivered free to end users. Read again: for (1) Internet delivery that is (2) delivered free to end users. In the words of MPEG LA’s own press release, “Products and services other than [those] continue to be royalty-bearing.”

That’s hardly “free”. That’s just one potential use case that’s now royalty exempt. The reason they are doing that is presumably if they can get H.264 adoption high enough, all the other cases will be paying and therefore subsidizing this one case.

WebM is licensed a little different: Patent wise, it’s irrevocably royalty free. License is about as liberal as you can get.

There’s no proprietary html, css, or images (GIF was, now it’s dead) used across the web. Why should video be any different? The key to success and growth has always been an open platform that’s low cost and encourages innovation.

Implementing Today

For anyone who suggests that this further fragments the market, that’s not really true. Adobe Flash actually creates an excellent shim to help migrate away from Flash to <video/>. Allow me to explain:

Adobe will soon be supporting WebM through Flash. Adobe already support H.264 in Flash. For legacy browsers and those who won’t support WebM, you have the option of delivering a Flash experience just like most websites do today. There are websites doing this today via Flash and H.264. For modern browsers you can just use <video/>. Once your non-WebM market share drops low enough, you can get rid of the Flash experience. Soon enough you’ll be able to push WebM to your Flash users. The benefit of switching your Flash experience to WebM as a middle step would be one encoding for both delivery mechanisms vs. using H.264 and WebM in parallel. Of course if you’re supporting mobile you likely need H.264 for a bit longer but likely use a smaller resolution and different profile for mobile consumption.

No matter what there will be two delivery mechanisms for those looking to push video using HTML5 to users today. The only thing that changes is the lean towards standardizing on the actively developed WebM codec vs. H.264.

All new technology has speed bumps, that’s the cost of being on the bleeding edge. However this is a positive turn as things are now starting to line up. The most awesome thing is that the codec, HTML5 specs, and some of the most popular browsers in the world are open and inviting feedback and contributions to improve things.

Categories
Google Mozilla

YouTube HTML5 + Firefox

Google has been a long time supporter of HTML5. They recently launched a HTML5 beta of YouTube however it will only work in Safari and Chrome. The reason for this is not due to the actual markup but the video codec chosen. YouTube is using h.264, the same codec used for YouTube HD via Flash. This works in Safari and Chrome because Safari uses QuickTime to render <video/> and Google licensed h.264 for Chrome. Firefox however doesn’t include the proprietary codec for licensing reasons. It’s not a matter of cost but principle.

IE is supported through “Chrome Frame” which is essentially the Chrome browser in IE’s chrome. Your really just browsing the YouTube site with Chrome. Google could use this as a way to get people away from Flash and IE and onto Chrome one way or another.

I discussed the h.264 debate in more depth a few months ago.

You have to wonder why we don’t want anything proprietary slipping into HTML5, or want proprietary image formats (GIF turned us off to that) but exceptions are made for video.

Edit 1/23/2010: More on the topic:

Edit 5/21/2010: Thoughts on WebM.

Categories
Mozilla

Things You’ll Love About Firefox 3.6

To be honest Firefox 3.6 is a little lighter on Features than Firefox 3.5. It’s more about refining and improving than bells and whistles. Here are the things I feel are really noteworthy.

User Centric Features

UI Speed – Many things in the Firefox 3.6 UI have gotten faster. For example startup time has been improved thanks to various optimizations. My personal favorite is the awesomebar is now asynchronous, if you don’t know what that means, just trust me that it makes things feel faster if you have a slow hard drive like in a laptop.

JS/Video Speed Improvements – TraceMonkey, the fast JS engine has gotten some tweaks to improve performance even further. Seeking in <video/> is now much faster than it was in Firefox 3.5.

Focus – UI geeks will note that Firefox has had a few issues regarding focusing elements. Thanks to some refactoring it’s vastly simplified and improved.

Personas – Firefox has always supported theming, but it’s a complex process to build a theme and it’s prone to breaking as the UI evolves between versions. Personas is a light weight system to customize the look of the browser’s chrome.

Plugin Update Notification – A big cause of Firefox crashes, and security issues actually aren’t related to Firefox directly but plugins. Firefox can now notify you when you need to update a plugin helping you to keep your system as stable and secure as possible.

Full Screen For <video/> – Firefox can play native <video/> but thus far had no method to go full screen. Apple may want you to pay for “Pro” for full screen but with Firefox 3.6 you get it at no extra charge.

DLL Blacklist – To improve security/stability Firefox now has a DLL blacklist and can prevent other DLL’s from interfering with Firefox. This is Windows only at this time.

Opening Links In New Tab Position – When you opened a link in a new tab in previous versions it opened in a new tab on the far right, with lots of tabs open this created confusion as you may have several different tabs open on various things your doing. Now this will result in the new tab being created to the right of the current tab. If you don’t like this behavior you can set tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false. It takes a little getting used to, but it’s worth it.

For Developers

-moz-background-size – This is exactly what it sounds like. I’ve wanted to do this a few times in the past.

Poster frame for <video/> – Poster frames are now supported for <video/>. It’s a small bit of polish but will hopefully benefit design and perhaps even SEO down the line.

Web Open Font Format (WOFF) – Imagine an open font format that supported compression and meta data. Now imagine that a lot of font foundries have expressed support for it. WOFF!

async attribute for <script/> – It’s simple enough, the async attribute is now supported. Those who care about performance have wanted this for a long time.

Using Files from Web Applications – This is a huge step towards making web applications first class citizens. Hopefully we’ll see support for this in Google Docs at some point (one of the apps I think could best make use of this).

HTML5 Parser – Firefox 3.6 ships with an HTML5 parser, though it’s disabled for now by default. To enable set html5.enable to true.

Categories
Mozilla Open Source Politics

WhiteHouse.gov Goes Open Source

I noted in January that WhiteHouse.gov relaunched for the Obama administration using a closed source infrastructure (it was using ASP.NET on IIS 6.0) running a proprietary CMS.

It has now relaunched using open source Drupal. Also interesting is that it’s no longer broadcasting any headers regarding it’s server. Considering Drupal is by far better tested on a Unix OS andApache, I’m wondering if they dropped Windows Server/IIS 6.0 in favor of some sort of Linux and Apache. I can’t find any hint at what they are using.

It’s noteworthy that Drupal was already used on recovery.gov and has been used in politics by way of CivicSpace for the Dean campaign in 2004.

Via Drupal it’s still using jQuery (verison 1.2.6). It’s also now using RSS rather than ATOM for feeds, which I presume is by way of the switch to Drupal rather than an intentional effort.

Another interesting change is they tweaked the doctype from XHTML Transitional to XHTML+RDFa.

Pretty much everything else is still the same including the design. Analytics is still done using WebTrends (holdover from the Bush administration) and Akamai still sits in front of their servers.

For CSS hackers: They still choose conditional CSS for IE compatibility.

Their pages don’t fully validate anymore, though there is no terrible markup either.

Video is still done using Flash, maybe they’ll consider adopting HTML5 video. They could do so and fallback to Flash. The latest versions of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome could take advantage of it today. The rest of the browsers would get the Flash experience. That would be the next major step in opening up. Mark Pilgrim has a good primer if they need.

Edit [9/26/2009 @ 1:45 PM EST]: Tim O’Reilly confirms it is indeed running on LAMP, specifically Red Hat Linux with Apache, MySQL and obviously PHP. Apache Solr is used for search.

Categories
Mozilla Web Development

Debating Ogg Theora and H.264

Since the big HTML 5 news that there will be no defined codec for <audio/> or <video/> there has been a lot of discussion about the merits of such a decision, and what led to it. To quote Ian Hickson’s email:

Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used by Safari), citing lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent landscape.

Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora’s quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.

Opera refuses to implement H.264, citing the obscene cost of the relevant patent licenses.

Mozilla refuses to implement H.264, as they would not be able to obtain a license that covers their downstream distributors.

Microsoft has not commented on their intent to support

I think everyone agrees this is going nowhere and isn’t likely to change in the near future. For the sake of moving HTML5 forward, this is likely the best decision.

Here’s how I interpret everyone’s position:

Apple’s Argument

One of the undeniable perks behind H.264 right now is that there is hardware decoding available and used on on certain devices. One of the most notable is the iPhone. Using hardware decoding means your not using the CPU which results in better performance, and most importantly better battery life.

Thus far there’s no hardware Theora decoder on the market (if you know of any let me know, my research says none), which I suspect is why Apple is hesitant to jump on board. Until there’s hardware that’s proven to perform well, be cost-effective in the quantities Apple needs, and not be bombarded with patent infringement claims, I suspect they’d rather settle with H.264. The patent part is critical. Apple can update software to comply with patent wars pretty quickly, as many other companies have done with software in the past. Hardware is not so easy. Last minute hardware changes are harder to deal with than software because of the many things it impacts, and the inability to update at a later date.

I’m almost positive the lack of hardware support is the exact same reason Apple has been so against Flash support. Remember the YouTube application isn’t using VP6 like regular flash, it’s using H.264 (that’s why it took so long for all of YouTube to be available on the iPhone).

If there’s enough Theora content out there, there will likely be Theora decoder hardware made to meet market demand. To get to this point will be difficult with the amount of VP6 (Flash) and H.264 content already on the web. H.264 alone has a major head start in applications. VP6 has several years of video on the web now (and I still don’t think it has a hardware decoder on the market though that might be due to licensing again).

In the long run, I think mobile technology will improve enough to make this a somewhat unnecessary constraint. Mobile CPU’s and GPU’s are just starting to get to the caliber needed for video. Performance per watt should improve. Battery technology is just starting to get pushed to the limits. This is a good thing for Theora in the long run, but the question is how long?

Until it can be played with minimal impact on battery life, I don’t think any company who has a heavy investment in mobile will want to jump on board.

Google’s Argument

Google has money and can license H.264. Shocker. Google however has trouble when it comes to Chromium. I suspect Google doesn’t care too much about which way this goes since what they support in Chrome doesn’t mandate that YouTube support it. However if the encoding quality for a given bitrate is good enough, it becomes a viable option.

Regarding the quality argument, I’ll simply point to this comparison. I the quality today is comparable already, and likely to get better as the encoders improve. I’ll leave this discussion here.

Opera’s Argument

Opera says H.264 is to expensive to license. I don’t know what the costs are, and what they would be for Opera, but I’ll take their word on it. After all, the do have a product available for free download. While commercial and closed source, they don’t have Google’s revenue stream and I respect that.

Mozilla’s Argument

Mozilla can’t license for downstream Gecko use etc. I’m sure a good part of the argument is also that requiring licensing fees to use <video/> is bad for the web and open source. I agree.

Microsoft’s Argument

No comment. Historically they implemented <marquee/> but not the <blink/>. Make of that what you will.

<video/> could be supported by plugin if needed. I recall Adobe supporting SVG by plugin a few years ago.

Where to go from here?

I think there are a few possible outcomes. As for what I think are the most likely:

  1. There’s a push for hardware decoding that makes Theora on mobile technically possible and working well. If Apple legally is satisfied and jumps on board that changes the game. As I stated earlier I think Google is mostly ambivalent since they support both right now. Opera doesn’t want H.264 anyway, so they are cool. IE 8 can likely be handled by a plugin. Apple really is the deciding factor. Theora is the future.
  2. See what the web does. I suspect at least for a long while the web will just stick with Flash since it works on almost all desktops. For mobile the iPhone and Android make up pretty much the bulk of the mobile video market and that doesn’t look like it’s changing so fast. Content providers that want mobile will encode for mobile. That means 3 target platforms, not ideal but reasonable. H.264 and whatever Adobe adopts is the future.

I know how the media is interpreting all of this. How do other developers, and open source folks see it?

Categories
Mozilla

Things You’ll Love About Firefox 3.5

For the upcoming Firefox 3.6 release: go here!

Firefox 3.5 is around the corner. For those who don’t pay attention to development here’s the big features worth checking out. There are lots more, but these are my favorites:

User Centric Features

Private Browsing – Officially it’s called “Private Browsing” but most know it as “porn mode”. Simply put once you turn on the feature nothing about your browsing is saved to your computer until you turn it off. No browser history, cookies, cache, no passwords, download list. Great for shared computers where you may not want the next person to know where you shopped, what you bought etc.

Faster JavaScript – Everyone is doing it. Firefox 3.5 now ships with TraceMonkey which uses a technique, called trace trees to add just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey, the JS engine in Firefox. Bottom line: faster JavaScript makes JavaScript powered sites like Gmail way faster.

Faster Awesomebar – The awesomebar is a fast way of browsing the web, but the UI can sometimes get a little sluggish. Some awesome work has been done to optimize it for better performance. Faster UI = better browsing experience.

Better Awesomebar – The Awesomebar got a few enhancements including autocomplete for tagging, which is extremely handy as well as editing tags on multiple bookmarks at the same time.

Undo Closed Window – We’ve all done it before. Now you can undo a closed window just like a closed tab.

Drag Tab To New Window – Previously you could drag/drop to reorder tabs. Now you can drag a tab off the tab bar to move it into its own window. This may sound trivial but it actually makes organizing tabs much easier.

Video/Audio – Firefox 3.5 supports the new HTML5 <video/> and <audio/> tags. Specifically it supports Vorbis in Ogg containers, as well as WAV with support for more formats expected in the future. I’ve discussed open video before and suggest learning more about how important this is there.

SSL Error Pages Suck Less – The error pages shown when there is an SSL error were pretty tough on users since they didn’t display anything helpful. The new error pages are a bit more helpful. The bug implementing the changes has tons of details on the changes.

Geolocation – Simply put a website can (if you allow it) gather information about your internet connection and using a location service (provided by Google by default) will calculate your location. No more needing to constantly type in your zip code, or city name to get local information. For privacy you need to explicitly allow it. Geolocation is in a word awesome.

New Icon – Well, it’s not really new. It’s “refreshed” I guess. It’s not a huge change, but it does look really sharp, especially in more modern operating systems that use larger icons like Mac OS X. Alex Faaborg has it on his blog in various sizes for you see.

Developer Centric Features

Web Workers – My personal favorite is web workers. Essentially its background processing in a separate thread for JavaScript. No more locking up the browser’s UI because you need to do some complicated JS calculations. I’ll leave it to the documentation linked above for examples. Very handy stuff.

@font-face – Designers have long been frustrated with the lack of font options on the web. They often resort to using images and flash as a way to expand their font options. With @font-face it’s now possible to use custom fonts and reference them via css. There is however the issue of licensing of fonts used on a webpage since the font file itself is accessible via a web browser.

Native JSON Enough said. Native JSON is fast. var obj = JSON.parse(someJS);

Cross Site xhr – xmlHttpRequest() has ushered in a new era of JavaScript. It’s not however without some serious limitations. One of the most obvious limitations is that you can’t use it across hostnames. Until now.

There’s more cool toys, but these are my favorite.

Still not convinced of all the new stuff? Check out this demo, then look at the source behind it. It’s pretty impressive.

Categories
Mozilla Open Source

Theora Improvements

I mentioned back in January that there was a push to improve open video, something I think is very important for the future of the web. Chris Blizzard pointed to a recent Theora update which includes screenshots of the progress that has been made. It’s very impressive to actually see. Even more impressive is the mention that it’s using the “same encoder parameters, equal bitrates”. This isn’t just turning up the bitrate in an attempt to improve quality.

Since these improvements are in the encoder rather than the format, or the playback library that means existing Theora users, as well as all Firefox 3.5 users will be benefiting from the work already done, as well as work done in the future without needed continued software updates, though I bet even playback will get some improvements over time.

Even better is that open video is free unlike most other formats out there.

Categories
Mozilla Open Source

Open Video

Just the other day I was complaining that Ogg Theora/Vorbis hasn’t really proven itself and achieved market penetration to the point where people will still care about it in several years. My concern with less popular file formats is that data is lost forever if future computing can’t view it. Popularity, while it may not be fair does help encourage it. For example I can still open up old WordPerfect files easier than I can Professional Write files (trip down memory lane anyone?)

I’m thrilled to see a push for open video. Better encoders and decoders along with working with the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia’s use of Theora can be very influential) will hopefully provide a boost for these formats which tends to be a cyclical trend once it gains momentum.

Categories
Funny

DTV Transition

DTV Transition

February 17, 2009 (125 days from this post) full-power analog TV will be no more. If your still enjoying OTA analog signals, see the above video for how to get a digital TV converter. I found the video pretty amusing.

For most people who use cable or satellite nothing is involved. For those who still use OTA TV, they may need a converter if their TV can’t handle it. For broadcasters it does however have some complexities.