Bid for Novell patents still on. Google drops H.264. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# The withdrawal of CPTN Holding proposal to acquire Novell’s patents is purely procedural, said Microsoft.

# Karsten Gerloff explained why the FSFE is concerned about the sale of Novell’s patents to CPTN.

# Google announced plans to support WebM and Theora in Chrome and Chromium, and drop H.264.

# Pentaho …

HTML 5 video is coming, but which codec is going to be used to deliver it?

Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome have chosen on H.264, while Firefox and Opera are going for Ogg Theora. For us developers this sucks, because there is no one codec we can bet on to work in any browser. There's flash, which is more ubiquitous than any single browser, but it's a whole new toolchain to learn, and in my opinion it's a declining technology which will one day join the ranks of shockwave and <applet>. The future is in HTML, so what to do? Unfortunately there's no easy answer, so the most I can do is give an overview of what is going on today.

Choose multiple

First and foremost, keep in mind that the standard for the <video> tag allows multiple codes. You can easily specify a video tag with both an ogg vorbis and an H.264 source. This works as follows:

1. <video controls="true">
2. <source …

Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month.  New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles.  This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.

The solution is built up in an open source paradise:  MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.

An article by …

Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month.  New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles.  This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.

The solution is built up in an open source paradise:  MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.

An article by …