Score another win for Web technologies. The Mozilla Foundation recently teamed up with Otoy, a rendering technology company, to build a video codec written entirely with JavaScript and WebGL that enables plug-in-free video viewing in Web browsers.
It seems that Mozilla has taken a page out of WebRTC's book here to make Web-based video just as accessible and lightweight as real-time video and voice communications with WebRTC. Considering the company's commitment to the technology, it's not too surprising.
The new video codec is called ORBX.js and it not only allows video to be handled entirely by the browser, it also has a watermarking technology that could eliminate the need for digital rights management (DRM). Beyond video, the codec can also be used to render remote applications in a browser.
For producers of video content, ORBX.js frees them from worrying over formatting video for specific codecs, such as H.264 and Google's VP8, which aren't supported by all browsers.
"This means video can be handled entirely in JavaScript and it will not require one codec or the other to be supported," clarified Otoy founder and CEO Jules Urbach. "And that is a huge leap forward for the open Web."
Mozilla's mission to build tools for an open Web has driven it to embrace technologies such as WebRTC or develop solutions like ORBX.js in order to reduce reliance on any browser technology that is patented, proprietary or requires licensing.
Previously, Mozilla experimented with implementing the widely used H.264 codec entirely in JavaScript, but found it too difficult to implement efficiently. Meanwhile, Mozilla says that ORBX.js offers 25 percent better compression than H.264. It can also work with live video, transcoding on the fly to match user bandwidth limitations, in addition to offline transcoding.
In terms of handling applications, ORBX.js can virtualize any program written for Windows, Linux or Mac OSX, allowing it to be streamed to any HTML5-enabled browser — including mobile browsers.
Edited by
Blaise McNamee
