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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.

AFAIK, there arn't any open-source patent-free standards for video codecs

Well, now you know that the Xiph.org Foundation provides two. Theora is ready now, while Tarkin is a wavelet-based codec of the future.

And let us not forget Theora (http://www.theora.org/). VLC (http://www.videolan.org/) allows you to easily transcode into Ogg Theora and IPTV shows from revision3 (http://revision3.com/) are distributed using Ogg Theora. I have experimented with it a litte bit and I like the results over Xvid (for the same bit-rate), but I have switched to using x264 (developers.videolan.org/x264.html) but since it is also MPEG-4, it could be in trouble.

Or rather, Theora's time, which not only is actually implemented in multiple popular cross-platform player softwares (VLC, RealPlayer) and has a nice converter (ffmpeg2theora), it's also - hopefully - proven to be free of patent issues. =)

There are no free open video codecs.

Rich.

Will it support Ogg?

[ 2004 Jun 1 - Theora I bitstream freeze ] from the official site.

Actually ogg is a container format which can contain both sound and video. Vorbis is the audio format.

But do people actually use Theora yet? Last time I checked, it wasn't even out of alpha.

How well does BBC's Dirac codec relate to Theora?

Instead of presenting a collection of different formats on the service, google should pick only one and transcode all uploaded videos to that format.

Naturally my vote goes to theora because it is free from the patent problems that are causing so much harm to the software world.

Great that they will use Theora, it is a great video format that is free and open!

It uses Ogg Vorbis for the audio coding, which ensures great quality and compression size.

http://www.theora.org/

Ogg is free, (supported by xmms), patentless and offers better compression (or what ever you call it) than mp3.

Get the 'Theora'-codec. For winblows, see the FAQ.

Get the 'Theora'-codec. For winblows, see the FAQ.

In xine on my debianbox, it didn't work untill I installed libtheora0. Since that's what these files most probably are encoded with, maybe you should try to install that?

Going with an open codec like Dirac or Theora instead would have made either one cheaper to use and royalty-free which would benefit producers and manufacturers of the content, the discs, and the manufacturers and users of the hardware / peripherals.

The only major differences between Blu-ray and HD-DVD are the storage capacity and the manufacturing process. Blu-ray has much more capacity, ~50GB vs ~30GB. HD-DVD can be produced without retooling the current DVD manufacturing.

Why not scrap them both and go with BD-ROM with MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and Dirac instead? I mean satellite TV has chosen MPEG-4 AVC and doesn't want anything to do with VC-1. Why should anybody else? VC-1 means not only royalty payments on hardware and software players, but MS DRM in your living room.

Theora development is ongoing, so you won't find the supporting infrastructure that's available for more mature or commercial alternatives, but it's rfree. It is intended to compete with MPEG-4 on the quality scale. Give it a look. If it doesn't suit your needs today, come back tomorrow.

It's unencumbered by patents, totally free, offers quality comparable to xvid and supported out of the box by the latest Realplayer, mplayer, xine, vlc and many others I'm sure. The ogg container format which you would typically use it with makes it even possible to add multiple subtitles inside the video container.

Yes, the encoder is still in alpha but the bytestream format is already finalized and you'll always be able to play the videos you encode now. I've encoded some demos with ffmpeg2theora and it seems to work well, I like the quality I'm seeing and nothing strange has happened.

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/

I suggest using Ogg Theora/Vorbis. It's a Free/Open codec and is supported by a lot of players (Totem, MPlayer, Xine, even HelixPlayer). See http://www.theora.org/theorafaq.html for the Theora FAQ.

Good compression, supported in recent Helix Player, VLC, Mplayer, open source, non-patented and made by good people. I've seen both Redhat and the CC licence website distribute video in Ogg Theora.

Good compression, supported in recent Helix Player, VLC, Mplayer, open source, non-patented and made by good people. I've seen both Redhat and the CC licence website distribute video in Ogg Theora.

A quote from the Theora faq:

Q. Is the Theora bitstream identical to VP3?

Yes and No. Theora is a superset of VP3, so VP3 streams (with minor syntactic modifications) can be made into Theora streams without recompression (but not vice versa).

Theora will be almost entirely based upon the VP3 codec designed by On2. However, Theora video data will be delivered inside of the Ogg container format (with Vorbis for audio), so Ogg Theora files will not be the same as VP3 files. There also may be quite a few performance advantages to using Theora when 1.0 is complete. While our focus is integration, there will certainly be a lot of optimization involved, as well.

On2 itself is well represented in the survey by its VP6 codec, and judging from the pseudo version numbers on the codec names, it should be safe to assume that VP3 is inferior to VP6 (VP6 - VP3 = 3 generations of development).

A quote from the Theora faq:

Q. Is the Theora bitstream identical to VP3?

Yes and No. Theora is a superset of VP3, so VP3 streams (with minor syntactic modifications) can be made into Theora streams without recompression (but not vice versa).

Theora will be almost entirely based upon the VP3 codec designed by On2. However, Theora video data will be delivered inside of the Ogg container format (with Vorbis for audio), so Ogg Theora files will not be the same as VP3 files. There also may be quite a few performance advantages to using Theora when 1.0 is complete. While our focus is integration, there will certainly be a lot of optimization involved, as well.

On2 itself is well represented in the survey by its VP6 codec, and judging from the pseudo version numbers on the codec names, it should be safe to assume that VP3 is inferior to VP6 (VP6 - VP3 = 3 generations of development).

The two Open Source projects with brand name recognition and acceptance beyond Slashdot are Moz/Firefox and OpenOffice.org. Both have commercial, closed-source, origins, large development teams, substantial, stable, financial support, and neither are exactly cutting-edge, at a distance, a successful open-source project can look a lot like Microsoft.

You ignore a world of other fine programs, like the Gimp or a myriad of shareware programs done by one-person (or at least very small) shops. I am not just talking open source, but the world of small development in general.

You give me OpenOffice, which by its nature needs a large organization and a lot of people to create. But what about programs like PGP? Or PKZip? These are examples of programs that live in a domain small enough that one person can work on them. And thanks to evolving tools, the domain of problems that a single developer can work on is expanding. It is very easy now for one person to run a whole web site with commentary.

Your hyper intelligent grad student may come up with a plausible compression algorithm, but how does he test it without the backing of an organization that can bring almost unlimited manpower and financial resources to bear on the problem?...

Well, perhaps he would hook up with the guys at OGG Theora

Towards the end of your listing you were starting to confuse the container (like Ogg or Quicktime) with a codec (like Theora or h.263). Yes a codec needs to worry about things you mention, but someone designing a codec can get a pretty good idea if the results are acceptable by encoding and watching a variety of sources. You absolutely do not need a million people or huge organization to do this, to think otherwise is to get stuck in the snobbish mindset that only companies can produce things of value. In general you will actually find in any company that produces something really good, that in fact it's a VERY SMALL number of people that made that wonderful thing happen (sometimes as small as one!!!). This realization can also bring enlightenment as to how powerful a single individual can be outside the company, especially when banding with a few others with complementary strengths - thus a codec designer with Ogg folks, or any number of open source people relying on the framework provided by Sourceforge.

It'd be nice if they gave Theora a shot. It looks like a lot of work has to go into preparing Microsoft's codec -- why not work on one that has no licensing problems at all, if you have to do that? The code is available now, which is more than you can say for this alternative.

You're asking a reasonable question, but the flip side to your question is, how do you figure out when a company is changing for the better? And the answer is, you ask around. There's enough people out there that either a) have throwaway systems that they're happy to install test software on, or b) run secure enough systems that they're confident they can handle any attempt Real might make to "take over" the system. (As a Debian user and Debian developer, I'm in the latter camp.)

I've been Real-free for years, but when I saw a report on the Theora website that Realplayer was now supporting Ogg Theora, I decided I had to check it out, just to see. Sure enough, they've changed. I didn't (don't) trust Real, but I trust the Ogg folks enough that I was willing to take another look. So now the question becomes, who will you trust to tell you that they (Real) have made major positive changes?

I noticed that some open source projects have Patent issues and it doesn't seem to hinder them.

MS has said that the patent exists primiarly to protect them from an Eolas, but would it be accpetable To OSS if MS went through a similar route that Theora has gone and granted an irrevociable royalty free licence to any open source implemantation that requests it?

Yet another proprietary mp3 file. Are the BBC going to include a Fraunhofer Institute MP3 licence for every listener? I somehow doubt it. With Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora why is the BBC still clinging to these legacy formats? The beeb also promote Macromedia Shockwave Flash over SVG animations.

Proprietary "Apple QuickTime" clandestine format. Whats wrong with supporting modern formats like Ogg Theora BBC?

The BBC used to run BBC ogg vorbis streams. Sadly they have canceled these now. You can contact the BBC through their BBC GNU/Linux help page, and also the BBC Radio 4 Feedback Programme which is broadcast at 13:00 each Friday, if you too would like the BBC Ogg Vorbis radio services to restart.

Yet another proprietary mp3 file. Are the BBC going to include a Fraunhofer Institute MP3 licence for every listener? I somehow doubt it. With Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora why is the BBC still clinging to these legacy formats? The beeb also promote Macromedia Shockwave Flash over SVG animations.

Proprietary "Apple QuickTime" clandestine format. Whats wrong with supporting modern formats like Ogg Theora BBC?

The BBC used to run BBC ogg vorbis streams. Sadly they have canceled these now. You can contact the BBC through their BBC GNU/Linux help page, and also the BBC Radio 4 Feedback Programme which is broadcast at 13:00 each Friday, if you too would like the BBC Ogg Vorbis radio services to restart.

It's free software, you can get the C or C++ source code right from their website.
http://www.theora.org/

There are a few (e.g. creative commons videos) on theora.org. I agree that it's not widely-used yet, though.

Every time you want to view a new Real stream, you have to download RealPlayer version x+1.

That I won't argue with, although it'll be interesting to see if it remains true after some of the most recent and obvious changes to their system.

Their player is bloated with ads and doo-dad components [...]

The new one (or at least the beta I have of the new one) isn't.

Their free player is also crippled beyond repair. You can't save streams [...]

That's not true of the new one (or at least of the beta of the new one). I didn't know this until my four-year old niece had saved a bunch of songs from pbskids.org. (Gah! But at least it's not Brittany, I suppose. :)

Today's Real streams run like technology straight out of 1994.

Hmm, ok, but I like the fact that the player now reportedly handles Ogg Theora! (Although I admit I haven't had a chance to test this yet.)

Their software won't stop f***ing harassing you. [...]

Again, not in the new one (or at least the beta of the new one).

I've hated Real for years, and haven't had their player installed since 2000 or so, but when I saw a mention on the Ogg Theora site that Real player could now be used to view Theora streams, I was intrigued enough to give them one more try, and I've been very favorably impressed.

Anyway, I agree that you've probably named the main reasons people have hated Real. I just want to point out that companies can change (in the seventies and early eighties, I hated IBM, and in the late eighties, I hated Apple, and neither of those is true any more), and there are some signs that Real may be changing. Time will tell. Maybe it's because I'm using the beta, and they didn't bother adding the ads and misbehavior to that, and maybe it's because I'm using the Linux version (although with all the ads and malware that come bundled with Windows these days, I'm not sure why Windows users would be upset by Real), but my impression of Real has certainly taken a major change for the better recently.

I have paid for ten TV licenses in my life, and I have to admit that I am glad the the organisation that gets some of this money is developing something like this...

...although I have to admit, the BBC would have probably have been better off using my money to become the "offical" sponsors for an existing open source project such as Theora, rather than starting from scratch.

The link is the story is dead, I found the home page here, and the SourceForge site here.

Thanks,

Andrew McCall

It seems to me that the best way to support Free codecs would be to throw support at an existing project such as Ogg Theora. Does anyone know why they're not throwing support behind it?

It's great that this is out, and has Theora support. Now if only I could figure out how to get Mplayer to actually encode things into Theora I could use it.

What if the patent depends on, say, some part of a public spec? Either violate the patent, violate the spec, or go home.

I'd choose violate the spec. CompuServe published the GIF specification based on a Unisys patent; we violated the spec. ISO published the MPEG audio specification based on a Fraunhofer patent; we violated the spec. ISO published the MPEG video specification based on numerous patents; we violated the spec. Bottom line: if a specification is patented, then f___ the spec; let's make our own.

Uh, okay, that'll show em. Hey microsoft! Your license to distribute Linux has just expired! TAKE THAT!

That's not sarcasm. Without Microsoft's license to distribute copies of the GNU operating system, the de facto standard userland layer on top of the Linux kernel, Microsoft won't be able to distribute copies of Services For UNIX, and between the termination of the GNU license and such time as Microsoft develops its own alternative, it will lose government contracts that depend on conformance to the POSIX spec.

And how will "the guy in the basement" enforce this anyway???

By handing over the copyright in a free software package to the Free Software Foundation so that FSF's attorneys can take the case.

Even better (because we're talking more of these "popular open source things" and stuff):

Ogg (either hackily or properly) or Matroska.

I was thinking a Theora+Vorbis encoding would be interesting to compare with (now that Theora I is finalized, it's safe to encode movies in it). But I don't have the video file from which the WMV was made, and transcoding won't show off Theora or Vorbis. Perhaps someone who made the movie will read this and make a Theora+Vorbis encoding (it would be even nicer if it were licensed under a Creative Commons license and packaged with a copy of the applicable license so we know we can legally share it with our friends).

We put up some sample video torrents including the three winning Creative Commons videos and a full length independent film called "Honey". All of them are made available under Creative Commons licenses. Free videos in a free format, fancy that? Share and enjoy!

Q: Why the name 'Theora?' A: Like other Xiph.org Foundation codec projects such as Vorbis or Tarkin, Theora is named after a fictional character. Theora Jones was the name of Edison Carter's 'controller' on the television series Max Headroom. She was played by Amanda Pays.

Here's where to look for the FAQ.

For those who didn't know what Theora was either:

Theora is Xiph.Org's first publicly released video codec, intended for use within the Ogg's project's Ogg multimedia streaming system.

True, but to the best of my knowledge most of those files just use DivX and MP3/AAC codecs embedded in an Ogg transport layer. They don't usually use Vorbis or any of the Ogg project's free codecs.

On the other hand, the situation is likely to change soon, since Ogg Theora is approaching beta.

(Yes I know the link is broken, I checked the address but the site's down.)

• Open Source/Free Software Leaders - the people who are doing the advocating of open source software really don't seem to care about the standards. This isn't even a remote priority, although there are some exceptions. I got into a "fight" with Richard Stallman over this issue, and he was essentially unconcerned that standards and specifications would "work themselves out". I disagree. Specification comittees are the "tools that make the tools" in regards to software design.
• Software Patents - This issue more than anything else is the real kicker. While you may be able to get a group together and come up with a standard, any software patents can kill even the most altruistic motives. Compuserve was not interested in making any money off of the GIF standard, and they encouraged the dissemination of the specifications documents far and wide. It was only when Unisys came along that Compuserv had to back off, and that was only to cover their own behind. Software patents have such shaky ground anyway that it amazes me that any get successful prosecuted in court. The Free Software Foundation can and ought to obtain patents regarding free software, if for nothing more than to give the FSF a "patent library" that they can use in a defensive posture. If you have a patent, I don't think the FSF would turn down having it assigned to them.
• Selling Open Standards - Some notable open/free standards have been widely accepted. Notably TCP/IP together with all of the RFC's regarding the internet are free to publish and distribute, and are largely patent-free as well. The PNG group, in large part as a reaction to the issues regarding the GIF standard, set out to purposely make a patent-free standard. How this group came together and what they accomplished is simply amazing, and I'm grateful that their standard is available free for use. The Ogg folks have also done a very impressive job, and my initial complaints about their licensing scheme have been fixed, and the standards are beginning to gain acceptance. What must be done is to get people to know these standards do exists.
• Encouraging Commercial Acceptance - In this regards, I think that Eric Raymond has it correct. If you want to get something widely accepted, you have to speak the language of the C.E.O.s and graduates from business schools. For just the DVD-Video standard, it is $10,000 + $1,000 per seat just to be able to use the standard, and that is if you happen to kiss the right people and not make any enemies along the way. Showing an alternative format that can be used for no royalties (those are on top of the original "investments" into the standard) can make or break the release of a product, provided the libraries are available at resonable prices (or released as Open Source software). If you think DVD-Video is bad, try doing a search on the PCI-bus standard, or even RS-232. Licensing on either of these "standards" is incredibly difficult, and at best you can only get unofficial information. Indeed, one "expert" had the guts to suggest the best source for learning about PCI driver development was to read the source code of the Linux Kernel directly. That should show you the sad state of documentation for these important "standards" and that is just for software development.
• Getting Groups Organized - This is much harder than simply throwing a web server out and saying "Hello!, Come Join Our Group!". Not only do you need to get people to come along, but you need at least a couple of real dedicated people (partially insane?) who are willing to take arrows in the back and put the TIME into getting everything put together. I actually put together an open disc standards group, but since I had other "REAL LIFE(tm)" issues come up, I wasn't able to keep the thing sustained. Most of the group folded over into Ogg Theora anyway, so I didn't consider it too muc

Because Theora is still under development and there is no guarantee that future enhancements will be backwards-compatible until it reaches beta status. Do not publish Theora on the web, yet. But don't take my word for it, read theora.org. Some day soon Theora is going to kick ass.

"OGM" is a spin-off of Ogg from some time ago which hacks together Ogg (a great stream container format) and FourCC (the codec identity field from AVI) to easily add proprietary codecs (ie, DivX, XviD, other MPEG derivatives) to Ogg. Obviously, this is not endorsed by Xiph, the creators of Ogg and Vorbis, as they don't support patent-encumbered codecs.

Also, Ogg is not an acronym, so capitalizing every letter is incorrect. This is a common mistake. :-)

For those that don't know, the Theora project is intended to provide an audio/video file format based around Ogg Vorbis and On2's VP3. But while Ogg Vorbis continues to be compettive state of the art audio codec, the VP3 video codec has gotten stale and since been ditched by it's author in favor of VP4, VP5 and now VP6 codecs. It would be interesting to see what the marriage of this new video codec with Ogg Vorbis might provide. Considering after over a year the Theora project has made it to an alpha3 release, I would guess there is definately time to rethink the direction of the project without loosing too much.

Theora would be nice, but it's perpetually Alpha... I was excited about it at first too, but now it seems it's going to take another year before the code is even in beta, and probably two years before it reaches 1.0, when there will be ports to non-Linux platforms.

I wish Theora would move faster myself. I know nothing about codecs, but might try to find out how I can contribute.

By then, it will be about as advanced as MPEG-1 is today... Way behind the times.

Xiph has a project to develop an advanced codec called Tarkin. From the Theora FAQ:

Q: What about Tarkin?

A: Tarkin is essentially a proof-of-concept wavelet-based codec. Its experimental nature means it will not be ready for general use for some time. VP3 is a high-quality codec that can meet today's video needs now, so Xiph.org will be focusing its efforts on Theora for the near future.

It's a pity one doesn't hear about Tarkin more often, it seems more interesting than Theora, if more fanciful and unrealistic for current needs.

decent free beer formats?
Ogg is more than decent, it's the best lossy audio format out there and it's free as in free speech and beer.
How come u don't even know about theora? u suck! are you a windows XP user or what? Why should we care about MPEG that steals our money when we can use free ogg instead? do u work for them or are you just stupid? (guess u have no idea what FLAC and speex are either)