On Monday 2012-03-12 00:28 -0700, Andreas Gal wrote:
> I want to land bug 714408 on mozilla-central as soon as I get
> review for it. It adds hardware-accelerated audio/video decoding
> support to Gecko using system decoders already present on the
> system. Android, for example, ships by default with a number of
> decoders, and in particular for such mobile devices we really have
> to use these hardware-accelerated decoders for good battery life
> (and performance).
>
> Initially this will be enabled on Gonk (B2G). In a few weeks we
> will add support for Android as well. We will support decoding any
> video/audio format that is supported by existing decoders present
> on the system, including H.264 and MP3. There is really no
> justification to stop our users from using system decoders already
> on the device, so we will not filter any formats.
I disagree with this for two reasons. Joe has already stated the
first (that it fundamentally disagrees with our open codec story).
But the second is that if we are going to support system decoders,
we should be choosing which ones rather than just supporting all
codecs that the system supports. (Our motivation for doing this is
to expose a particular one or two codecs, not to expose all codecs.
So we should expose those and not everything.) I believe this is
preferable for three reasons:
(1) A more coherent story for Web developers: Having a smaller set
of codecs on the Web presents a more coherent story to Web
developers and doesn't encourage them to waste time using codecs
(by offering support on some platforms) that aren't widely
supported and that we don't actually think should become a part of
the Web.
(2) A smaller set of codecs required for future Web platform
implementations: Supporting "all" system codecs risks the
possibility that we'll add a larger number of codecs to the set of
codecs that are required to build a new implementation of the Web
platform. This increases the costs of doing so and reduces future
competition.
(3) Smaller security exposure: Each additional codec
implementation we expose adds additional security exposure; we
shouldn't expose codecs that we don't think Web authors should be
using.
-David
--
𝄞 L. David Baron
http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla
http://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂