Alliance for Open Media launched

A very interesting group has formed the Alliance for Open Media launched today. Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Intel and Amazon have joined this group to develop the next-generation media formats including audio, video and still image formats. Of course the pressing item is video.

What they are looking for is for a common video format which gets them away from licensing hell.
H.265/HVEC may not be as cheap as the presently used H.264/AVC which requires less expensive licensing. Licensing expenses will curtail the growth and use of low cost and non-commercial streaming. It is the defined objective of the alliance group to produce a video codec that is an improvement over HEVC. It may be noted that many of them have their proprietary codecs. For example the adoption of Google's VP8 made it an issue for Microsoft to join the WebTRC.  Google has  more codecs VP9, VP10.  CISCO and Mozilla have their own codecs.

It remains to be seen how efective this alliance will be as it is still in its formative stage.

You may want to read about the H.264 and H.265 details here.

Firefox 3.0 misbehaving

A few days ago I had noticed strange cursor movements on FireFox. This time it was even weirder.

When I see these cursor movements on the page and then try to access the HELP menu item, the Help drop-down begins to dance rapidly from left end of screen up to the Help menu.

I captured this with my Cannon SD600 and conveted the file to MPEG format before uploading to Google Video. The quality of the uploaded fle is not good but you get the picture.

But Firefox 3.0 is great. I can save the browser with all the tabs that get activated the next time it is opened.