Day: 31 October 2013

Kicking the Can ⇥ blog.mozilla.org

I know you love it when I discuss video codecs. After all, what other subject could be more exhilarating?

Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich:

As I noted last year, one of the biggest challenges to open source software has been the patent status of video codecs. The most popular codec, H.264, is patent-encumbered and licensed by MPEG LA, under terms that prevent distributing it with open source products including Firefox. Cisco has announced today that they are going to release a gratis, high quality, open source H.264 implementation — along with gratis binary modules compiled from that source and hosted by Cisco for download. This move enables any open source project to incorporate Cisco’s H.264 module without paying MPEG LA license fees.

Pretty good solution, right? H.264 is, by far, the most popular video codec on the web, so it’s good that Firefox can finally play it in a way that’s largely in-line with their philosophy. They’re going to build it into Firefox, and any open source project can use the BSD-licensed version of H.264.

Free software proponent Monty Montgomery doesn’t see it as great news, though (ugly-ass LiveJournal warning):

Let’s state the obvious with respect to VP8 vs H.264: We lost, and we’re admitting defeat. Cisco is providing a path for orderly retreat that leaves supporters of an open web in a strong enough position to face the next battle, so we’re taking it. […]

Fully free and open codecs are in a better position today than before Google opened VP8 in 2010. Last year we completed standardization of Opus, our popular state-of-the-art audio codec (which also happens to be the best audio codec in the world at the moment). Now, Xiph.Org and Mozilla are building Daala, a next-generation solution for video.

In simpler terms, the decade-plus-long battle to have an open, free, and patent-less video codec on the web has, once again, failed. Therefore, the proponents of such measures are going to try again with a brand new and different codec.

At what point does someone realize that this is a fruitless endeavour?

H.264 is extremely popular, and compatible products (read: nearly every piece of video-playing gear or software released in the past five years) will be transitioned to HEVC, which significantly improves upon the compression/quality ratio of H.264, therefore being suitable for much higher-resolution video.

Meanwhile, there’s VP8 (otherwise known as WebM), which is used almost solely by Google. This succeeded Theora, of which the only major user is Wikipedia. Theora is old, and has a relatively poor quality-to-size ratio — this much was admitted when VP8 was released. VP8 still doesn’t compete with H.264 in terms of quality. Now, some in the open source community want to put both of these behind them as they develop a brand new codec, with the goal of beating HEVC and VP9.

I simply don’t see this endeavour being meaningfully more successful than past efforts to create an open source, free, and patent-less¹ video codec for the web.

The New Rules of Tech Journalism ⇥ curiousrat.com

Harry Marks:

Things have gotten out of hand. Tech writers are given far too much freedom to perpetuate inaccuracies and falsehoods, as well as a generous helping of incompetence these days. That’s why it’s time to put a bit of structure in place for those publications that don’t understand good work from bad work.

How I wish everyone followed these basic, simple rules. If a website does not follow at least a majority of these, it’s a pretty accurate indicator of the quality of the news.

Android for Some ⇥ googleblog.blogspot.ca

Google’s SVP of Android, Sundar Pichai:

Building a platform that makes mobile phones accessible for everyone has always been at the heart of Android. Until now, some lower-end Android phones couldn’t benefit from more recent Android releases due to memory constraints. With KitKat, we’ve slimmed down Android’s memory footprint by doing things like removing unnecessary background services and reducing the memory consumption of features that you use all the time.

Brad Molen, Engadget:

Google has taken to its Spanish support pages to announce that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is not on the list of devices to receive Android 4.4 KitKat. This seems a bit odd, given the new update’s focus on “the next billion” and offering solid performance to other budget devices, but at the moment things aren’t looking up for owners of the phone — or any older Nexus devices, for that matter.

The Galaxy Nexus was released in 2011, about a month after the iPhone 4S. Google cites an eighteen-month update cycle (phones released more than eighteen months ago don’t get updates), which is an odd choice when most carrier contracts are still two years long. I’m still using an iPhone 4S, and I know loads of people still using their iPhone 4, both of which received the iOS 7 update. I don’t know about you guys, but an eighteen month upgrade cycle seems needlessly expensive.

KitKat brings some new features to supported devices, as Darrell Etherington and Greg Kumparak of TechCrunch explain:

Aside from making KitKat the One OS To Rule Them All, Google has also introduced a number of new features with this update. Album art is displayed full screen behind the lockscreen when music is playing, for instance, and you can scrub the track without unlocking. There’s a new launcher, with translucency effects on the navigation bar and on the top notification bar.

How original.

Android now offers up a new dialer, which incorporates search for easy reference. This means you can enter the name of a business even if you don’t know it’s number or have it stored in your address book, and then the dialer will retrieve it from the same database that powers Google Maps. This also allows the phone to provide caller ID information for incoming calls, too, and there’s a new auto-populating favorites menu that builds a list of your most frequent dialled numbers.

This is really clever. Until just recently, I wasn’t aware that cell companies don’t have access to the caller ID information of landlines. Even if your cell provider is also a landline provider, there’s some sort of technical restriction which prevents them from accessing the same database. I’d really like this feature in iOS.

Measuring Google+ Activity ⇥ jessicalessin.com

In July, I undertook a casual survey of web pages which included sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. In nearly all of my sampled pages, the counter on the Google+ button was in last place, often by a wide margin. This didn’t jive with the claims from some analytics firms that Google+ was the second most popular social network.

In that article, I derived from the sharing data that people weren’t using Google+ in the same way that they would use their Facebook profile. The lack of activity on Google+ suggested that it was not the second most popular social network around. What I didn’t know was how Google measured activity on Google+.

Amir Efrati over at Jessica Lessin’s new project¹ has a well-placed source:

In the past, statistics about active users in the stream included anytime a person clicked on the red Google+ notifications in the top right corner of their screen while they were using Web search, Gmail, or other Google Web services. The person didn’t actually have to visit plus.google.com to be counted as “active.”

Google doesn’t want you to think of G+ as a Facebook competitor, though:

During [the May 15] Google I/O developer’s conference keynote address, Google+ played a big part in many of the more exciting product announcements, even though it wasn’t always called out. The redesigned version of Google Maps will recommend restaurants based on what your Google+ friends have reviewed and visited. The new Google Music All Access service will also use your social graph to hone in on music you might enjoy.

“That unification of Google, of bringing Google together, makes for amazing things,” said [Vic] Gundotra.

If that’s the case, though, why does the Facebook-ish component of Google+ exist?