Comments for Benjamin Stover

Comment on What you should understand about Mozilla by Jack

Jack — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:03:28 +0000

Why is it that idealism and zeal are considered faults and not virtues? Since when is the most ambitious thing to be average?

The period between 1850 and 1950, despite the wars and misery, was a fertile period of ideals and revolutions, in every field imaginable, from arts, politics to science. Since then the world has become more adept of mediocrity than meritocracy, and people have ashamed of being different, of thinking differently or even of being seen as different.

Such as in your case, being ashamed of having and demonstrating as having ideals and zeal. Sad…

Comment on What you should understand about Mozilla by Chris Double

Chris Double — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:33:16 +0000

Duv, yes Matroska is just a container. It can contain Vorbis and Theora just like Ogg. The main reason Matroska hasn’t been implemented in the browser is there’s almost no Theora/Vorbis content in Matroska available. Wikimedia for example serves all their Theora videos in the Ogg container. It would really need more available content in Matroska containers for it to be considered.

Comment on What you should understand about Mozilla by Duv

Duv — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:24:38 +0000

Chris, isn’t Matroska just a container… matroska can contain a vorbis playload from what I understand, but I am rather unsure about .mkv’s and Theora. That said, there is much to be desided if one can mix and match audio/video playloads in the way that .mkv can.

Comment on What you should understand about Mozilla by Chris Double

Chris Double — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:07:13 +0000

lu_zero, mpeg1 and mp2 have been discussed on the WHATWG mailing list in the past. For Ian’s summary see here:

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020620.html

There have been other discussions too which you’ll find if you search the list.

Vorbis is supported as the audio format for Firefox because it is excellent quality and is the most common audio format packaged with Theora video. It is also very common as a standalone audio format (many hardware players support it). Dirac isn’t supported due to (at the time development of video support was going on) it not being ready. The Ogg encapsulation format for Dirac hadn’t been completed and as far as I’m aware today the quality for a given bitrate vs Theora for web sized video is not there yet.

Ogg was chosen as the container format as it’s the most common packaging of Theora video. Matroska is certainly an option and appears to be gaining some popularity despite what seems to be an almost dead website full of 404’s – if content starts appearing packaged in Matroska I’m sure support would be considered.

I hope that answers your questions.

Comment on What you should understand about Mozilla by lu_zero

lu_zero — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:37:57 +0000

IFF the concern is about really providing unencumbered formats that are easy to use and free I’d consider add support for mpeg1 and mp2 in mpeg, the patent are all expired to my knowledge.

Theora isn’t much different than mpeg2 encoding-tool wise.

There are many interesting codecs that are patent free and opensource. Yet again people fossilize on Theora and Vorbis… Why vorbis and not wavpack in lossy mode? Why Theora and not dirac or snow if you really want to stay on the bleeding edge? Why Ogg and not matroska?

Usually those questions get unanswered.

Comment on What you should understand about Mozilla by Mardeg

Mardeg — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:23:14 +0000

Currently at least 36% of the browser market share can play Ogg Theora videos (and importantly ogg vorbis audio, nobody seems to argue against the audio quality) natively and that stat is on the rise. That’s 3 of the 5 big browsers from http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20100321-20100321-bar being Firefox 3.5 and 3.6, Chrome 4 and 5, and Opera 10.5

Well done and keep up the great work!

Comment on Creating a robust kinetic animation by Benjamin Stover

Benjamin Stover — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:22:25 +0000

Forgot about this comment! I think it’d be fun to try ~ -v, if only because it’s a differential equation :)

Also, Wordpress does not seem to like *’s in URLs. Huh.

Comment on Firefox for Maemo RC3 is out by Benjamin Stover

Benjamin Stover — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:20:07 +0000

@voracity: Yep, you hit it dead on. Since drawing competes with responsiveness, we try to be careful about when we draw parts of the page that are not on screen, especially if there is a lot of animation on the page.

Comment on Firefox for Maemo RC3 is out by voracity

voracity — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 05:46:44 +0000

Once the page has loaded, it works pretty well. Although, I’ve noticed that I see the checkmarked background during scrolling more than I’d like — certainly more than microb. It seems to only redraw the checkmarked areas _after_ the scrolling stops. Is that right? Another job for electrolysis?

Comment on Firefox for Maemo RC3 is out by Benjamin Stover

Benjamin Stover — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:37:18 +0000

@Manuel: It sounds like you have a mismatched xulrunner. Make sure you are on the stable channel (http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/mozilla-fennec.install), uninstall fennec and xulrunner, and reinstall. Sorry for the trouble!

@voracity: I definitely feel your pain on loading pages, but for me after most of the content has loaded it becomes pretty usable. Is that not your experience? Regardless, I’m super excited about where electrolysis can take us in terms of responsiveness. Thanks for being patient with us :)