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These developments offer a chance for the open source .ogg/theora format to shine.

While folks at Illiminable have done a good job of providing a codec to play .ogg files within Windows Media Player, I hope this can be available by default.

That is, you attempt to play an .ogg/theora file and the system provides a opportunity to download and install/setup the plugin by default on systems without the ability to play .ogg/theora files.

So I have Flac installed in C:\Program Files\FLAC and I dutifully installed the new version, which DIDN'T seem to install a new libFLAC anywhere, just a new flac.exe

But I also have copies of libFLAC.dll in C:\Program Files\guliverkli\oggcodecs, and C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\plugins. The web sites for Media Player Classic ("guliverkli") and VideoLAN indicate I have the latest Windows version and neither mentions this vulnerability.

This is probably cruft that I accumulated trying to play various media files from the IntarWubwubwub. "Just click to _download this plugin_ and play this format!" Great, now it's a year later and I don't know where they all came from. I think one came from http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ , but that was last updated 2006-02-24 (and again, no mention of this vulnerability).

F*** it, I'll just delete every file matching libflac*.dll and see what happens. But the various Windows free media players could sure do a better job with all the money I give them ;-)

Linux package management seems *better* than random untracked installs and downloads in Windows.

The most recent Windows Video, RealVideo, and Sorenson video (Used by QuickTime prior to H.264) are what I might call proprietary in that there is no public standard. They are likely covered by patents as well. MPEG-4's AVC or H.264 may be publically documented but is covered by patents which put free software implementations in the same legal mud as any proprietary codec. On the audio side, MP3 and AAC are in similar situations: publically available but patented.

For publically available and unpatented codecs, as far as I know we've got MPEG-1 video and MPEG-1 Layer II audio (MP2), and this only because they are so old that patents have expired. Vorbis is a modern unpatented audio codec, and Theora is covered by patents which have been freely licensed to the public making it effectively patent free.

MPEG-1 suffers because it simply isn't as good in a quality vs. bitrate sense as the modern video codecs. It's possible that bandwidth and disk size increases could this help somewhat. MPEG-1 is also only good at resolutions near or below 352x240, even from higher resolution source material. However, MPEG-1 remains the most likely to be playable on a given computer. The one additional advantage it has is that decoding may be less CPU intensive than, say, H.264.

Ogg Theora with Vorbis audio is nice, and competitive with though inferior to other modern codecs in terms of quality vs. bitrate. Like all the Xiph codecs, Theora suffers from obscurity. Version 1 is not officially released, but there are limited tools for playback but little for encoding Theora. Xiph's QuickTime Components recently added Theora playback to the QuickTime system (Mac and Windows). Some Theora filters for DirectShow (Windows Media) support playback and, for the intrepid, encoding.Due to differences between the Ogg container format and other established containers, it has had some trouble properly interfacing with DirectShow for example, but playback does work fairly well. Real's Helix system (Helix Player for Linux, RealPlayer 10 on Windows) also has plugins for Theora playback and encoding.

As an occasional dabbler in filmmaking, I release my videos in Ogg Theora+Vorbis and MPEG-1 Video+MP2 audio. I have released versions using MPEG-4 ASP video (DivX, XviD, ffmpeg's mpeg4) and MP3 audio, yet I lack the necessary patent licenses for that and am somewhat reluctant to do so. Commercial software such as DivX typically extends its patent license to its customers for various uses (I believe Microsoft does not allow commercial use of Windows Media Video by default).

Truly a shame... especially if the claim of a previous poster is correct "VLC or MPlayer only". Both of these play Ogg Theora for example on Linux, Mac, and Windows. If you're already using a format that doesn't work by default with, say, QuickTime and Windows Media Player, why not go all out and use Theora?

P.S. It looks like the latest version of Xiph's QuickTime Components has preliminary Theora playback. And there have been DirectShow (Windows Media Player) filters for Ogg codecs for some time now.

P.P.S. Anyone know that status of Dirac?

Other options for Ogg Vorbis support include Illiminable Ogg Codecs for Windows and OggDS. OggDS has been around the longest, but it's now unmaintained and last time I tried it it didn't support adding files to the Windows Media Player library (I had to drag and drop single files into the Windows Media Player window to play them). Illiminable also claims to support the new additions to the Ogg family such as Speex, Theora, and FLAC, so that one seems more promising.

There's also a program to edit Ogg Vorbis files inside Windows Explorer called Vorbis Extension.

I use an iriver mp3 player for a combination of home-ripped oggs and napster to go DRM wma. Not much choice but to use WMP 10 (will try WMP 11 after it is shaken out a little). Fairly easy to find ogg codecs for WMP (e.g. http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ ). But these only allow you to play oggs, and they get treated as Other Media instead of Music. There is a project named WMP Tag Support Extender found at http://wmptagext.sourceforge.net/index.html which will recognize the tags and allow you to have much better functionality. A little more info can be found related to my iriver solution at http://www.misticriver.net/showthread.php?t=34423

Novell has made a couple of choices which don't display a clear committment to formats one can play with FLOSS.

Recently they started an audio show distributed online and this show is encoded exclusively in MP3 format. I wrote to them suggesting that they upload a WAV or FLAC file to archive.org and let archive.org make derivative files in a variety of formats including Ogg Vorbis, thus simultaneously offloading bandwidth and hosting resources while allowing people to hear their show without necessarily giving up their software freedom.

Now their "narrated screencam" is distributed exclusively in RealMedia format, for which there is no FLOSS player. This doesn't have to be this way—one could distribute the same movie in Ogg Theora+Ogg Vorbis format as well as their (apparently) preferred non-free format.

By contrast the Fedora project, York Student television (including Fluendo's Java player; I don't yet know if this will work with the Free Java software, but it's a handy way to point someone to a URL and let them watch the show) and a number of others distribute audio in Ogg Vorbis and movies with audio in Ogg Theora+Vorbis one can play on any platform using Free Software. There are even plugins for proprietary players to play these files (like illiminable's Windows Media player software).

WMV, AVI and DiVX are all technically patented encumbered on Linux. DiVX (and hence XviD) is probably the safest bet, but OGG is free (as in beer and speech).

Does it really make sense to distribute Linux videos in a format that violates the law if you want to view it on Linux? No, I think not.

Just install OGG already. Don't tell me you didn't have to upgrade your "Winders" box Windows Media Player half a dozen times since you installed XP.

Go here. It just takes a little bit of time.

http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/

# Uninstall any previous version of these filters.(This is important!) Go to add remove programs, remove oggcodecs
# Make sure media player or any directshow applications are closed.
# Run the installer.

Then Windows Media Player or any other directshow application (eg. BSPlayer) will be able to play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, Ogg Theora, Ogg FLAC and native FLAC."

You're welcome.

When I ran Windows I used to use oggcodecs: http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/.

Q. What players currently support Theora?
Major players like mplayer, xine, helix player and VideoLAN supports Theora. Directshow filters are also available for use on Windows platform.

Strange... I've encoded all my music using Ogg Vorbis and I successfully play it on my proprietary IRiver player and through my proprietary DVR software (ShowShifter using free Directshow filters).

you didn't read the parent, the parent says that you pay a license to stream using MPEG4 and co or get a free license to stream in Ogg/theora.

Note that if you opt for Ogg/theora, there exist plugin for WindowsMedia player here
http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/

Mplayer and vlc played them too.

If you don't want your user to download any player, they can use that java applet:
http://www.fluendo.com/products.php?product=applet

Ogg codes for WMP. http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/

A few people do, at least. There are some videos on Wikipedia (or more likely, the Wikimedia Commons) that use Theora. Check out the rather cool Controlled Impact Demonstration. You may need to install codecs to view the videos. (These are just the ones that the Media help page suggests; they worked fine for me.)

Rather than moving to mp3 at the end, you might look into speex. I used this for putting church sermons on the net and got a good size/quality trade off.

I'm suprized for lectures, speex isn't used more often.

http://www.speex.org
(they're part of that whole xiph/vorbis bit)

The folk over here make it work under windows/media-player as well!

I realize you've gotten a lot of responses already, but here's something for everyone else.

The beauty of Theora is that it's completely open source and does have any (known) patent licensing issues. This means that in theory, anything capable of playing a video should be able to play Theora, for free.

On Linux, use mplayer, xine, vlc, or anything based on Gstreamer.

On Windows, download the DirectShow codec or the RealPlayer plugin, or use the Windows version of one of the Linux players.

Now that Theora codec has reached a final state, there should be no excuse for anyone to not be able to play it (barring hardware limitations).

You can check it on live here http://mirror.fluendo.com/hq/ and download the codec for windows here http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ and you can find examples here http://www.theora.org/torrents/

Use Ogg (Theora + Vorbis). Codec for windows are available. Real player supports it. VLC can also be used. On *nix, all players (mplayer/xine) support it. And most importantly, its Open Source. As its adoption increases, its support will grow automatically.

http://www.illiminable.com/ogg

Go ahead and click. It's not a goatse link. Really!!! Honestly!!! ;P

I can get the theora files to play under the latest version of VideoLAN client.

There are instructions for setting up Real Player to view Theora files. Although some people are saying that the latest version of Real Player is not so bad I still don't want to install it. I must have a grudge :-) and Real Alternative using Media Player Classic (MPC) works fine.

Is there anyway to get Theora files to play with MPC? I thought that if I installed the Directshow Filters it may work but no such luck. This would be really handy because I use MPC for just about everything else.