Umm... buggy H.264 in Linux? Come again? H.264 playback using Open Source software is not buggy. Far from it. Whether VLC on Linux or MPC on Windows - it works extremely well.

In-browser H.264, maybe, but that's has nothing to do with the quality of open source H.264 decoding. Maybe a plugin problem, and likely a temporary one at that.

I use open-source codecs to watch H.264 all the time. I have watched hundreds of hours of it on Linux-driven devices without a problem. This article is nothing but FUD itself.

And if you want to talk about the quality of H.264 encoding, I'll put x264 up against any commercial product any day, period. It beats the hell out of everything I have seen.

H.264 playback on Linux is a nightmare. Libavcodec can only do single-threaded decoding, which makes playing 1080p content practically impossible. Even my 3.2Ghz Core 2 Duo can't keep up in scenes full of motion or film grain. The same files play fine in Quicktime on my 2Ghz Macbook.

In addition, many postprocessing options are inefficient and actually decrease video quality. For example: the default settings in both VLC and XBMC cause video to slowly get blockier and oversaturated until a new keyframe comes in. Again, the same videos look fine when played in Quicktime, and I've seen this issue across platforms.

Another problem I've had is that I'll often see a single row of green pixels at the bottom of the screen. It's probably caused by some sort of off-by-one error.

All of these sorts of annoyances accumulate to become infuriating. No commercial product would be released in such a state.

Up until you claimed "No commercial product would be released in such a state.", it sounded like you knew what you were talking about! ;-)

I use mplayer with vdpau (nvidia gpu acceleration) on my Athlon II X2 240 and it happily plays 1080p.

Only certain newer graphics cards from Nvidia and S3 support VDPAU. If you have Intel or ATI/AMD graphics, you're SOL.

Also, the feature isn't auto-detected in any player I've used. You have to know that your card and player support VDPAU, and know how to enable it.

Every nvidia card since the GeForce 8xxx series beginning supports vdpau (save for a few exceptions), and even a few from the 7xxx series.

And if you don't have nvidia, sucks to be you for buying from a video card mfg that doesn't make nice things for its users.

The set of Linux users who are willing to install a codec which is either closed source or illegal is likely very small. Some people are happy to so. Some people are happy to run on a pirated copy of Windows, but I'm not one of them either.

Also, VLC is easily the single worst media player I've used (on any platform). If I wanted to look at a screen full of blocky green artifacts, I'll write a screensaver -- at least that won't take up a core to do so.

I don't have a license to use x264, and it's patented in the country I live in.

I understand that there are ways to watch H.264 in Linux if you're willing to skirt / violate patent law (such as pirate repositories), but I'm not interesting in doing so. Advocating for open formats is, in the long run, better.

I believe you actually need a license to use it, even at home, non-commercially, under U.S. doctrine of what constitutes "practicing" a patent (but this is rarely litigated, for obvious practical reasons).

They might not get arrested but if someone on hacker news stated the completely false claim that it was legal, just like you did (twice!) for H.264 further up this thread then they'd probably expect to be corrected by someone.

(I'd also assume that some poor, probably non-white person has gone to jail for exactly this kind of law that everyone ignores.)

Well, remember that most people in the world aren't from the US. It's like saying "you can't say whatever you want on the Internet" because in China you can't.

You also can't in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, etc. There might be some country where speech on the internet is completely unrestricted, but its population is likely too small to matter except to bittorrent operators.

Yeah, in practice you'd have to be using it in a way that someone would notice. I believe there's some 19th-century precedent on it being illegal for farmers to make DIY versions of patented tools, even if they never bought or sold them--- just making and using them was a patent violation. Presumably they were somehow obvious enough for somebody to notice.

Playback isn't a problem usually, but i did encounter problems with encoding H.264, on server side, using ffmpeg of which the build process wasn't trivial.

Doing a high-quality video encode is a non-trivial procedure. Even using a GUI tool like Handbrake effectively, requires understanding a lot of parameters. You could just take defaults, but the results will be nowhere near as good as if you tweak the settings for your particular source material. I encode a fair amount of video using FFMPEG, but usually I am using x264 directly.

As to compiling ffmpeg yourself - again, non-trivial. Better to rely upon good builds or packages. I've done it on occasion to take advantage of some new cutting edge stuff. The thing is, ffmpeg works really well. It is a fabulous tool with a tremendous amount of power and capability. But any complex piece of software, with many pieces and many dependencies, is going to be difficult to build.

Packages ware old, especially with regards to H.264 support, granted you have to tweak the settings to get a good result, but at present I think H.264 suffers on Linux, because of the legal baggage that comes with it.

Many services will surely rely on trans-coding on the fly, questionable support for this format on the server level might adversely effect development on open source platforms.

I see, was it easy to install the software you used to play H.264 on Linux? Did it come out of the box with the Linux distro you were using? Maybe I shouldn't have used 'buggy.' I certainly wasn't trying to contribute to FUD, just compiling a likely senario with history of proprietary format support on free software, sprinkled with some over the top sarcasm. I just find it a little far fetched that the tweets and blog posts of people who care about open standards think it will do any good. I mean I support their effort, it just seems like the fight is already over.

Yes and yes. Extremely easy all around. Also extremely easy on Mac and Windows. Double-click an installer, and then run the app. Check it out for yourself. Google VLC for Windows or Mac. Or the K-Lite Codec Pack for Windows which comes bundled with Media Player Classic - full open source high-quality high-speed H.264 playback.

To say the fight is over may be true for Theora. That is a losing battle because, despite its promise, Theora just can't match the quality and efficiency of H.264. But again, you are mixing two things together if you think that the death of Theora is the death of open source video encoding and decoding.

VP8, by the way, has already been open sourced by Google. This will very likely change everything.

EDIT: Correction: No they haven't yet, but multiple sources report that they will at I/O. My bad.

> VP8, by the way, has already been open sourced by Google. This will very likely change everything.

It has not. It's only rumored that they will release it at I/O in May.

So in other words, sit back and relax while we wait for VP8.

I have a question - I am a linux user and am willing to pay a few dollars to get a patent-encumbered, high quality decoder - if it allows me to watch high def entertainment with low enough internet bandwidth expenditure.

Is it that a vast majority of Linux users are unwilling to _pay_ : for content and software ?

If it is as I suspect, then it could easily sound a death knell for media consumption on Linux. I wonder how much sooner would we have had Linux hardware-assisted H.264 playback (ffmpeg, vlc), if there money to be made off them.

H.264 is evil for content producers - for content consumers, if (and _only_ if) the quality of H.264 >>>>>>>>>> Theora, then I can see why we would have to pay for it.