FirefoxFlicks on Linux

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I know I’ve been away, so maybe I’ve missed the discussion on this one – but why does the FirefoxFlicks site, containing a load of videos promoting a piece of open source software, only offer them in a proprietary format I can’t play on my open source operating system (Ubuntu Breezy)?

If anyone can point me at either a rationale, some open source software which will play the current format (some variant of QuickTime, I think), or an alternative repository of the flicks in a suitable format, I’d be very grateful.

24 thoughts on “FirefoxFlicks on Linux”

  2. If you download the video files you should be able to play them with a program called VLC. Just do a search for “VLC” in your synaptic package manager and grab it from there.

  3. I think the main aim of firefoxflicks should be to reach as wide an audience as possible, and primarily people who haven’t heard of Mozilla Firefox or Open Source/Free Software. I’m not sure that makes QuickTime the best choice, but I suspect more people can play QuickTime video than can play alternative Open Source formats. That said, it would be nice if the videos were available in multiple formats.

  6. My Ubuntu Dapper installation buffers the video at 99% and just sits there (using mplayerplug-in). I would really like them to add OGG format. Oh, Firefox, please think of the OSS community! (NOTE: This is partially a joke :) )

  7. I think the main aim of firefoxflicks should be to reach as wide an audience as possible, and primarily people who haven’t heard of Mozilla Firefox or Open Source/Free Software. I’m not sure that makes QuickTime the best choice, but I suspect more people can play QuickTime video than can play alternative Open Source formats.

    That seems very much like the “we can reach 95% of our target market by only supporting IE” argument that many businesses adopted as rationale for blocking/not testing with other browsers. It seems ironic that the Mozilla Corp. are now recycling that justifcation for making their content hard to access outside of a mainstream windows/mac environment (yes, I had the same problem as Gerv).

  8. Matt Bernstein: Installing that package from the Ubuntu repository doesn’t help. Have you actually checked that it works? QuickTime is a container format; doesn’t libquicktime just enable support for the container, not the codecs used within?

    Peter Rock: You’re right, VLC can play them. Thanks :-)

  9. Gerv: it works for me on Fedora using totem and gstreamer (and some packages from the freshrpms.net repository), on Linux/x86_64, complete with thumbnail images in Nautilus :)

    libquicktime includes some codecs, gstreamer-plugins-ugly (etc) some others. I don’t know how to identify which packages contains the .so files required for these films..

  10. igraham: Do you think there are many people outside of the Windows/Mac community that haven’t heard of Firefox? Is there a Linux distribution that matters that isn’t shipping it yet?

    Personally, I’d have thought that MPEG would be a more logical choice, but it’s either that or QuickTime if you want to serve reasonable quality media in the real world.

  11. > That seems very much like the “we can reach 95% of our target market by only
    > supporting IE” argument that many businesses adopted as rationale for
    > blocking/not testing with other browsers. It seems ironic that the Mozilla Corp.
    > are now recycling that justifcation for making their content hard to access
    > outside of a mainstream windows/mac environment.

    I’m not a Mozilla Foundation/Corporation employee, nor have I ever been. I have no idea why the videos have only been made available in QuickTime format, and I certainly didn’t claim the above justification was the position of the Mozilla Corporation. Please don’t twist what I said, or make baseless statements about the position of the Corporation as if they were fact.

  12. Gerv, there is a very easy solution. Just go and get an iPod, download iTunes, download the movie you want to watch, get an Apple video out cable for your TV and presto�� you have your open source solution. :>)

    Whatever you do don’t tell France!!

  13. Please don’t twist what I said, or make baseless statements about the position of the Corporation as if they were fact.

    Sorry, I misphrased that. I should have said “it is ironic if the Corporation are now recycling the same argument”. I certianly haven’t seen any official position on this matter, nor did I mean to imply that I had.

    igraham: Do you think there are many people outside of the Windows/Mac community that haven’t heard of Firefox? Is there a Linux distribution that matters that isn’t shipping it yet?

    That’s not the point. The point is that the Mozilla project has previously suffered greatly from web content being avaliable only in “proprietry” formats (HTML that works only in IE, activeX, etc.) because the software for reading those formats (IE) had by far the largest market share. The Corporation now, for whatever reason, has done exactly the same thing. This is irony.

    Also, it’s probably worth noting that people who already use Firefox are likely to be the people most effective in spreading these videos. If the aim is for some form of viral markeing campaign, cutting off technically knowledgable existing users is the wrong approach.

  14. Technically knowledgeable existing users are already using Firefox. Konqueror users aren’t really the target audience.

    MPEG-1 is still patent-encumbered. There is no Web video format available which is both free of restrictions and widely accessible to non-technical users.

    This argument got tremendously boring when the Slashweenies used it to ponder why Mozilla was available for Windows all that time ago.

    – Chris

  15. Totem played the videos for me, but there was no audio so I used mplayer instead and they worked fine.

  16. Extra note: I have no objection to the videos being provided in Quicktime as a default, as long as they are also avaliable in a format which everyone can play.

  17. I think there are a few reasons why it’s quicktime:

    1. That’s what revver.com seems to use (the guys who power firefox flicks site). The main reason they likely use it is because QuickTime is a very popular format within the video production business. Very stratigic. Not to mention it’s pretty good for size/quality.

    2. Because of iTunes (which is just a frontend for QuickTime) it has a gigantic user base of people able to view them.

    3. The only platform that lacks QT support is Linux (which is a small market), and most of those users have an alternative method to view QuickTime content (vlc). Why VLC isn’t included in more distro’s (and if it is, why it’s hidden so nobody can find it)?… I don’t know.

    Since the goal is getting video out to the masses as a marketing tool, QuickTime is the best solution.

    RealPlayer,Windows Media Player both have issues on the Mac platform (WMP isn’t even really Mac supported anymore). Both have pretty lame implementations that lack many features, and stability.

  18. I have no objection to the videos being provided in Quicktime as a default, as long as they are also avaliable in a format which everyone can play.

    Nothing quite accompanies casual Microsoft allegations like a bit of disingenuity.

    – Chris

  19. I’m a Mozilla/Firefox fan since a long time — I also tried to promote Firefox adoption at my University developing a library toolbar and other academic extensions, bookmarklets, search engines…
    But this thing made me VERY angry! Until I found the “Download” link and installed all needed software/codecs to be able to view the flicks in Ubuntu.
    Please give Linux users more choises and better explained instructions or you’ll loose their love.

  23. What’s wrong with Flash video? QuickTime is *awful* even on Windows – the plugin is ludicrously unstable and has been since v7 came out. Seriously, QT may be what media-types prefer but it’s an awful way to distribute video on the web even if Linux didn’t exist …

  24. “…only offer them in a proprietary format”
    “Quicktime isn’t supported.”

    The videos I downloaded appeared to be mov/mpeg-4 files containing streams encoded as mp4v (mpeg-4) video and mp4a (aac) audio so they’re not in a proprietary format (patent issues excepted) and all the ffmpeg/faad based players should be able to play them ‘natively’. There are sometimes problems with some player/library combinations and some files though. For example, on my Gentoo box, the latest version of ffmpeg won’t play these files at all and the previous version won’t play the audio but Xine (with its own version of ffmpeg) plays them just fine and I expect Mplayer would too.

    “MPEG-1 is still patent-encumbered.”

    Probably all codecs are. Even the BBC’s Dirac codec developers can’t be sure they’ll not be infringing some patent. For that matter even streaming is and you can’t switch your FLOSS running computer on without infringing US and European patents.