Video
Here is a video of what is in my opinion the best film teaser trailer. It is for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The main trailer released later won awards for its original format and hilarity in making fun of all other movie trailers in the process. I don’t remember what movie I went to when I saw this teaser, but I remember this teaser. The soothing music of Louis Armstrong followed by the sudden explosion of Earth followed yet again by a seemingly asinine “DON’T PANIC” is amazing; your attention is retrieved instantly.
When I started writing this my intent was just to display the video shown, but seeing as I never styled my website for displaying videos in my articles I needed to produce some CSS for doing such. In doing so it reminded me well of my hatred for Flash and the current battle of having a viable standards-based way of delivering video on the Web. I try my hardest to adhere to standards, and when creating this website I decided to adhere to a yet unfinished standard, HTML 5. Flash isn’t a standard, and never will be. It’s a plugin that exists on mostly everyone’s computers and today is the de facto method of displaying video on the web.
HTML 5 contains standards for a <video> element which will allow for easy embedding of videos on webpages, but currently no one can seem to agree on the standard format for video as one or a few need to be specified so browsers will start supporting the formats natively. The authors wish for an open source format which is devoid of software patents (or potential ones). I personally believe they’ll be looking until pigs fly because there’s no single format that exists (or potentially will) that can fit that bill. Potentially the element can play any video format provided the operating system and browser has a method for playing the video format.
Theora is derived from an initial proprietary video format which was open sourced nearly eight years ago. The format has been tested numerous times and found extremely lacking compared to contemporary formats. It’s archaic in structure, and will never satisfy people who want decent quality at small file sizes for their video. This is in complete contrast to Vorbis which through testing is shown to be superior to most formats out there. Despite Theora’s faults it still is the best bet, and for all intents and purposes Vorbis is the best choice unless some dickweed company like Unisys comes along and decides to claim a patent and subsequently enforce it on something with either one; it’s bound to happen.
Better video formats such as the ISO standard MPEG 4/H.264 AVC are littered with software patents, and free alternatives of viewing and encoding the format are legally questionable and locked down with licenses that prohibit the bundling of the codecs with software. Having to separately install libraries and such might be fine for Linux junkies, but for most people it wouldn’t be viable as they’d either do not possess the knowledge or the desire to perform a separate task of installing something that should be included to begin with but can’t be due to restrictive licenses.
Back when the web was in its infancy the W3C decided to take matters in its own hands and develop an image format of their own called PNG since the LZW compression algorithm used in the GIF format was patented at the time. The PNG format took years to be supported, and still to this day many aspects of the format are either half-assed or not supported at all. My fears are that Flash will continue to be the de facto standard for video on the web because there’s no easy or viable way to do it otherwise because of software patents, overbearing licenses, and inferior free alternative formats.