It’s the fault of copyright. Restricting what shows you can stream to your users instead of, for example, being required to pay a royalty, inevitably leads to this situation. Netflix being the sole company allowed to stream every show and film would result in a monopoly that would be bad for everyone as they progressively sought to increase profits year over year. One company having all that power would not be a good thing for anyone, including content holders.

The solution is simple: every streaming service should be allowed to stream every show/film in every country. Then, piracy can only compete on price. That requires significant copyright reform, however, and is very unlikely to happen.

In case anyone was wondering what TorrentFreak thinks of this whole thing: https://torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries-and-oppose-file-sharing-150510/

Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)

British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.

The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don’t live in India, so I don’t know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It’s the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn’t affected?

The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.

Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.

It’s kind of funny, but it’s also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.

Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?

Maybe a different perspective could help?

YouTube advertising works a little differently to, say, Facebook. For advertisements longer than 30 seconds, the advertiser doesn’t pay if the user hits “Skip”. Ad-blocking users are far less likely to watch ads to completion, so I can imagine this having almost no impact on conversion.

I believe this change, if it is successful in blocking ad-blockers, will generally be detrimental to advertisers. It means advertisements shorter than 30 seconds (so, unskippable ads) are now shown to a larger proportion of people unlikely to be interested or paying attention to the advertisement. It’s beneficial to YouTube because they can claw back some of the money they spend serving ad-blocking users videos—that ain’t free. That being said, YouTube is still probably one of the most friendly big platforms to advertisers because of how flexible they are. While it uses the Google Ads system, it’s more friendly than Google search ads…

I missed an opportunity to ask someone who did a lot of YouTube advertising whether they noticed any impact at all from the recent ad-blocker blocking change recently, so this is all speculation.

Ah, okay. It sounds like you have a physical server, too…you would need to upgrade it yourself if you wanted to use AV1, right? Sounds expensive and annoying…

My understanding is the client needs to explicitly support hardware decoding with the relevant APIs, and Jellyfin probably accomplishes it with FFmpeg. There is no way Jellyfin would be implementing a software decoder for HEVC, but they should have no problem implementing hardware decoders for every platform.

iOS doesn’t even have a software decoder for AV1 yet, but the iPhone 15 Pro hardware decoder is a start. Likewise, only expensive Android phones have hardware AV1 decoders right now. More desktop GPUs are implementing AV1 decoders. But this transition looks like it’s going to take another 3 years (?) to hit every market segment (cheapest to most expensive)… sigh. I don’t have an AV1 hardware decoder on any of my devices either. It’s insane how long it takes for new hardware decoders to become mainstream. Many HEVC patents might be close to expiring by then, lol.

This was a use case I was introduced to directly before I discovered Firefox was introducing support for HEVC decoding.

I use HEVC because it has significantly better compression than older codecs, and many modern devices have hardware decoding support for HEVC.

If it weren’t for iOS, VP9 could take its place, or so the Mozilla developers thought. HEVC and newer codecs like VP9, AV1, VVC, EVC, etc. offer better compression but often at the cost of compute. I imagine hardware decoding evens the scales a lot; I haven’t done any benchmarking myself. I don’t know how much impact the complexity of H.265 vs H.264 has on battery life, if any. Of course, hardware encoding on VP9 is not really a thing (AV1 is ahead of it, even), so HEVC has the edge there.

In a few years, AV1 hardware implementations will hopefully be ubiquitous; that would solve the efficiency and software patent problems at the same time. It’ll probably coincide with the last of H.264’s patents expiring. So on the one hand, I can understand why Mozilla is in no rush to support HEVC.

So I imagine you use a Chromium-based browser for Jellyfin?

I’m on GNU/Linux myself, and personally, I don’t use HEVC at all. I don’t even decode video in my browser most of the time. I’m usually using mpv with yt-dlp. Streaming services like YouTube, Facebook and Netflix don’t use HEVC to my knowledge (being AOM members and all), but I don’t use services that require me to enable DRM in my browser. I don’t know of a service that requires HEVC decoding support.

It’s possible Mozilla will support HEVC decoding on other operating systems in the future. Windows is just the easiest one to start with. It’s worth noting that Chrome’s HEVC hardware decoding support does not support Widevine, the DRM Netflix and other streaming services use. So you won’t see them adopting HEVC in browsers, at least.

The fact that this bug for macOS is a part of the hevc meta-bug indicates that Mozilla also wants to support HEVC decoding on macOS: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1839107

Chrome supports HEVC decoding on GNU/Linux, so I don’t see any reason why Firefox wouldn’t too, eventually.

In about 5 years, the last patents for the baseline H.264 (AVC) video codec will expire. This means Firefox will finally be able to support decoding for H.264 (the codec most commonly used with the MP4 container) without Cisco needing to cover the licensing fees for them. DaVinci Resolve will also be able to support decoding/encoding on GNU/Linux. Basically, anyone will be able to implement a H.264 decoder/encoder without needing to pay royalties, which means free software programs like Firefox which don’t charge their users will be able to implement it. The codec will no longer be patent-encumbered. See Wikipedia’s debate on whether to support H.264 in 2014 for lots of opinions on this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video

However, H.265 (also called HEVC) is the “next-generation” video codec after H.264. The patent pool situation is so confusing and expensive compared to H.264 that Mozilla, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and dozens of other companies using video compression technology formed the Alliance for Open Media to develop a royalty-free codec they could use instead of HEVC. As a result, HEVC has seen very little adoption, particularly on the web. Most companies continue to use H.264. Windows 10 asks you to pay $0.99 for HEVC decoding support in the default video player. In fact, Google even announced they were dropping support for H.264 in 2011 because of their “focus on open web principles”: https://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html

They never went through with it, of course.

AV1 is finally at a point where there are production-ready encoders and decoders. The iPhone 15 Pro is shipping with AV1 hardware decoding support, so even Apple is on board (though only for the most expensive phone so far). So, we’ll see hardware decoding support in more phones in a few years, and hopefully AV1 will see a lot of adoption.

Adding support for HEVC in browsers feels like a step back because it legitimizes the codec and works against AV1 adoption. Many of these companies have resisted implementing HEVC support (aside from Apple) because it positions AV1 as the only realistic option to shift to from H.264. With HEVC in the picture now, it might be a realistic option in the future. Well, there’s VP9 too, but there are some patent disputes over that codec that might make companies sheepish about adopting it. Not that AV1 is free from those disputes either, but they are far more confident about it and Unified Patents is doing great work invalidating Sisvel’s AV1 patent claims (and even some HEVC patents here and there).

My opinion is that the ship has already sailed. Chrome caving in and adding HEVC support last year, albeit only with hardware decoders, was all it took with their 90%+ market share. Firefox’s 3% market share isn’t going to make a dent, and not doing it risks keeping users who need HEVC support on Chrome. I also don’t think hardware decoding support is a big deal right now due to all the older devices without HEVC hardware decoders, but it opens the door to ask for more support down the line. I very much doubt Google is going to do that, though.

Windows users have been asking for HEVC support for years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332136

7 years ago, this was the answer:

Mozilla currently has no plans to support H.265. Our focus will be on AV1.

The reason we won’t support H265 has nothing to do with the difficulty in finding a decoder, or that a decoder source code is released under GPL. Those are trivial matters.

We will not support h265 video while its patent encumbered.

BTW, even today vp9 provides better results than H265.

The conversation changed to, “Firefox could at least do hardware decode support without worrying about patents, right?”

My guess is they’re doing this because Chrome added HEVC hardware decoding support last year.

Ah, I can see how that might be useful. I first learned about the command pallette when I needed to instruct everyday users on taking a full-page screenshot on Chrome…it’s far more complicated than Firefox’s method of Right-Click > Take Screenshot. Just another odd thing, lol. Interestingly, Firefox is considering implementing this feature: https://github.com/firefox-devtools/ux/issues/101

I don’t think it would make much sense in my workflow right now but I can see how it would benefit others. Quickly turning on accessibility constraints I’m sure would be very useful. One thing Firefox’s dev tools is desperately missing is search. I get along fine without it, but it would be nice to have.

Photoshop Web (Beta) only supports Chromium-based browsers, Descript only supports Chromium-based browsers (well, Firefox still seems to work but you’re on your own), and many new webapps are only supporting Chromium-based browsers. Now, these are beta products, so that might change, but it seems unlikely. So I’ve been switching to Chromium-based browsers to use some of these apps, but I’d really rather not. It’s the way everything is going, unfortunately.

A lot of developers target the web because it means they can have one codebase that is supported on multiple operating systems. Imagine how much harder it would be to develop a macOS, ChromeOS and GNU/Linux version in concert with the Windows version. In reality, some browser engines support more web features than others, and Google has by far the most resources to keep up with those standards. So Firefox is an afterthought. Google Chrome is on every operating system worth supporting anyway, so why bother supporting another browser? It’s a lot less work and testing.

MDN is the best place to read about those standards, though.

I like Firefox:

• userChrome.css lets me make Firefox look like a GNOME program
• I much prefer the developer tools. Everything is a lot easier. I always use Firefox when doing web development.
• I can easily customize the browser. For me, this means having a separate dedicated URL bar and search engine bar.
  • The search engine bar lets me swap between search engines very quickly and keep my previous search terms for new tabs. Switching search engines is really annoying in Chromium-based browsers because you need to use shortcuts, and there’s no autocomplete for shortcuts. It also doesn’t tell you whether you typed the shortcut correctly, so you’re guessing every time! It’s really under-developed. The Android Chromium-based browsers are even worse. You can’t change search engines at all when searching; you need to change your default engine. Firefox lets you search any search engine easily on iOS, and slightly less easily on Android.
• I can…turn off history? Apparently this is an amazingly complex feature that Chromium-based browsers just can’t handle. The best you can do is clear it when exiting, but you can’t just turn history off.

Okay, it’s mostly the search engine thing, to be honest.

But Firefox still doesn’t use the new GNOME thumbnail view when you’re uploading files, for example…

I also prefer chromium dev tools, though it isn’t that bad to switch to Firefox’s dev tools.

I actually vastly prefer Firefox’s dev tools to Chromium’s. There are keyboard shortcuts to open every tab, it has a color picker, it has a multi-line Javascript console, and in general I find it more intuitive. Chromium developer tools seem to be less complete than Firefox and harder to use.

I just learned Chromium technically has a color picker tool, but you need to scroll through CSS propetries to find a color selector, click the color, then click the color picker. With Firefox, I tap CTRL+SHIFT+I to open dev tools, click the color picker which is front-and-center, and it copies the hex code to my clipboard. This is a microcosm of my overall experience with Chromium’s developer tools. Everything is slower or further out of reach.

I don’t know how it ended up this way.

Is your issue that Lutris is buggy or limiting? I haven’t encountered buggy behavior in Lutris, and it gives you a ton of options. I like some parts of bottles but I would really like to be able to change cover art without editing a config file, lol. It’s definitely the easiest way to get started with Wine though.

There’s Heroic Games Launcher too, by the way. It has less features than Lutris but it’s probably easier to use? It’s also prettier than Lutris, I think. What issues were you having with Lutris?

I’ve only used CrossOver on Linux and actually find it harder to use than Lutris. There’s some crazy stuff like needing to declare environment variables inside a configuration file instead of having a GUI for it. But if you look at CodeWeavers’ blog and release notes, you’ll see them constantly making changes to improve gaming on macOS. That’s where they seem to be devoting most of their energy these days. CrossOver on Linux worked for Microsoft Office when I needed to use it, but that was the only reason I bought it.

I still think it was a worthwhile purchase, if only to support further Wine development. CodeWeavers has a great article about the differences between CrossOver and other Wine distributions: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/alasky/2019/3/21/wine-crossover-and-proton-whats-the-relation

PlayOnLinux is no longer under active development (even Phoenics seems to have been stale for a while now), and Steam’s Proton, Lutris, or Bottles are what you should use on Linux nowadays.

As someone who recently worked on a Github wiki…it leaves much to be desired. The first being that I couldn’t actually push with git! I needed collaborator access for that. I also find Github’s markdown flavor to be limiting; you can do a lot more with a dedicated Wiki like MediaWiki. It was okay for viewing, though. And having the docs in an actual repository is much harder to navigate for users who aren’t developers.

So while it’s something you see a lot, I think they would be easier to collaborate on and view on a dedicated wiki.

I tried Lutris and Bottles, but I didn’t give Heroic much of a shot. Personally, I think Bottles is the nicest one, though I’m still using Lutris. Although, for my use case (Japanese language visual novels), Lutris makes it easier to select Japanese Locale for specific games, and hopefully with the next release, it will let you choose Locale when installing games: https://github.com/lutris/lutris/issues/493

I think the Lutris Installer is generally less finicky than Heroic and Bottles as it automatically detects the game executable after installation. It isn’t always successful, but it usually is.

Does the Heroic Flatpak bundle a runtime similar to the Lutris Runtime? It seems to imply that it bundles Wine versions, but what about all the other usual dependencies, like DXVK, Faudio, etc.? There doesn’t seem to be much information on that.

I’ll share the one thing that made my life much easier: Gamescope. So many visual novels don’t fullscreen properly, and Gamescope is a great workaround for that. The upscaling stuff is nice too.

I think a dedicated wiki makes more sense for what is, essentially, documentation.

Emersion put a lot of work into Gamescope for Sourcehut, too. It doesn’t have anything to do with this scenario, but I use Gamescope regularly enough to be grateful for it.

I added a new section for a basic Bottles setup: https://wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:winedistros#using_bottles_as_a_wine_manager

There’s still a lot I don’t know, but there’s definitely some cool stuff in Bottles and I’m glad I can finally use it, haha. Thanks for your help!