Comments

• NotZed

  2011-07-03 00:42:17

  "Remember what makes Google different from Apple and Microsoft (which actively support the MPEG cartel)."
  
  Although I don't think google's interest here is entirely altruistic. Everything they do is about making money and not having to pay recurring fees to do it. i.e. no per-server license costs by starting with gnu/linux, no per-device license fee for java by writing their own broken version, etc. I bet even FaeceBook would have given them access to data if they paid (enough) for it, but with G+ they can keep it all in-house.
  
  Not that i think that is necessarily a bad thing - so long as they don't close this opportunity off to those that follow. This is really what licensing fees do - lock in the status quo and prevent unfunded competitors from entering the market.
  
  And of course the good-will they engender in the world at large for supporting open standards is worth a good deal of money in itself too.
  
  So in the end it's still about making loads of dough - which ultimately leads to greed, which is increasingly obvious is real root of all evil and the main cause of so much misery in the world.
  
  NB: 'swiffy' is server-side only (i.e. 'fog service') with no source. Doesn't work at all on my client. And in any event i'm utterly dreading the day that animations and sound start playing when i visit every web page - without being able to opt-in as I can with flash-block (or not installing flash). And unlike flash-block which (more or less) fully contains the application, you can't just disable it since then nothing will work.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2011-07-04 08:21:42

  Although I don’t think google’s interest here is entirely altruistic.

  
  
  It never is. However, it can sometimes be compatible with the people's interests.

• saulgoode

  2011-07-06 16:54:32

  People sometimes ask why TechBytes makes content available as YouTube videos in additional to the original Ogg files; well, the answer is always the same. YouTube won’t require Flash for much longer. it will be webM-based, without the dependence on the MPEG cartel , either, Google deserves credit for doing the right thing in that regard. We will soon have the option to choose between WebM and Ogg.

  
  
  Your dozens of iframe embedded Youtube videos have made visiting your website tedious and unpleasant. Loading on a Celeron-era processor (P4 2GHz) takes about 20 seconds and the browser is blocked from doing anything else during this time (other CPU processes are also hindered). None of these embedded videos appear to be viewable on a machine without Flash support. Are any these supposed to be in WebM format? Does WebM work for embedded video? Is it not possible to link to the Flash and MPEG4 versions offsite?

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2011-07-06 18:26:44

  Google is supposed to switch over to WebM. The mistake that I made, now that you mention it, is that I don't abbreviate posts (for multi-post pages). I will correct this.

• twitter

  2011-07-08 04:03:22

  Thanks for the notice, I thought it was just me. Videos might work in a version of Firefox that I don't have but I never bother. US bandwith is so bad that it is easier to download things and watch them later. Thanks also, Roy, for fixing things.
  
  One thing you can do to help is to change your gtk-gnash settings to "start is pause" or remove gtk-flash completely. This makes it easier to browse all sorts of web pages, even with an 1.2 GHz PIII like the one I'm typing this message with.
  
  I've also read that any YouTube can be played as WebM if you append "&html5=True" to the URL.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2011-07-08 06:46:12

  The videos posted from now on will appear in the front page with just the first video and a button for "more"/"read on". I hope this helps. It sure takes little effort to make those videos, compared to other things. TechBytes probably takes the least time.