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New Open Video Codec From Xiph/On2
xercist writes: "Xiph.org, the bringers of the mighty Vorbis codec, have done it again. The patents on On2's VP3 video codec have been effectively neutered, and it is being released under the BSD license for all to enjoy. The combination of VP3 video and Vorbis audio (in an OGG bitstream, of course) will be called Theora, and will soon take over the world. The ETA to a 1.0 release is approximately one year. You can also read an interview with Emmett Plant (Xiph CEO) here. The official press release will be up tomorrow, so don't complain about lack of mention on xiph.org just yet."
What the headline implies is that On2 is not helping out. This is incorrect.
"On2 will sponsor work done by the Xiph.org Foundation to combine those projects, plus On2's already open-sourced VpVision personal video recorder, into a product they believe will provide serious, free competition to the increasingly expensive MPEG-4 royalty fees." --from NewsForge
Hats off to On2!
-b
PS. Currently listening to Oggs and ripping them too. tres nice.
Usually, I'm a GPL supporter, but I can understand the reasoning behind using BSD here.
They're trying to establish a new video standard, which isn't easy. So they want to encourage the maximum number of developers to participate. A BSD license will do that.
It's questionable whether someone would spend the effort to take the codec, improve it significantly, and make it proprietary. In any case, such a proprietary version would probably not catch on.
Remember, there are no effective patents in this case, so the Sorenson problem would seem not to apply.
And Xiph now has a track record of actually maintaining their code, making it better, not pulling funny tricks.
Oh, I (or you) can make this new code GPL today. Just download it, change the license at the top, and post it. But what would be the point of that? There'd still be the BSD version, and it would be better-maintained.
Before anyone praises "On2 Technologies" too much, you should be aware of their product line. VP3 is their old leftovers. They've since improved it and release VP4, and recently made more improvments and released the VP5 codec. They've been giving VP3 away for some time, as more of a demo of what their newer technologies can do better.
While it's better then nothing, (we certainly need an open video codec), but On2 isn't exactly fully on the Open Source wagon.
Just a few facts for those who didn't and won't bother to read the background and articles.
In a word, no. The Xfree project's license is a good example of a modern "BSD license".
Note that you can incorporate portions of the code into your proprietary product, which doesn't have to be released under the same license, and that you don't have to provide source. As far as the recipient of the software is concerned (who might go on to use sections of it in their own proprietary products), it is more liberal than the GPL.
Don't get confused, though, the developers, Xiph, still provide full source and thus the algorithms are completely public.
The reason the BSD license is chosen for this project is presumably the same reason the Vorbis libraries are BSD-licensed - so that VP3 support can be incorporated into proprietary software, which as I have posted elsewhere in this discussion is IMHO a good thing.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You mean like that program that people downloaded that dialed a foreign country and ran up huge phones bills for them? All for the sake of "free porn?"
I've used VP3 quite a bit, since DivX hasn't released a mac encoder yet. In my tests (recording on a Tibook G4 667) it encodes more slowly than Sorenson 3 or Apple's Mpeg4 codec, but the quality is very comparable, even better in high-motion scenes.
Mpeg4 and Sorenson 3, even at bit rates nearly half those of an Mpeg-2 DVD stream, still produce pixellation artifacts in very high-motion scenes. VP3, at any bitrate over 30Kps, does not. While it is not as sharp as the other codecs at high bit rates, I found it to be very superior at lower ones.
My only complaint is that, for some reason, any movie encoded at full size (640 by 480) would, not matter what the bitrate, barely play back at all. even though full 30 fps video plays back without difficulty on my G4. It wasn't a case of a few dropped frames, but a total stall down to 4 fps.
Anyway, for high-quality, low-bitrate video, it's the best codec I've had the opportunity to use personally in terms of quality and playback/ kbps. I'm sure that the newest DivX surpasses it, but I won't be able to play around with that codec until they release a mac encoder. VP3's quality is comparable to the DivX movies I have downloaded, though.
With some development, it could be a very competitive offering.
AC3 can support up to 6 channels, which is the same as 5.1.
Read the last question of the FAQ. "Vorbis does currently support greater than two channels; the default multichannel mapping in the 1.0 release supports up to 255 simultaneous channels." (Mmm. 255 channels.)
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
Finally! A formal statement that specs will finally be written for video+vorbis in .ogg
From what little I've seen, VP3 is, overall, not as "good" as the various MPEG4 variants out now, but is a little better (in terms of quality and lack of "artifacts") than the "windows media" implementation [at least, from the one review I looked through].
The important thing from my perspective is that VP3/Vorbis in Ogg will give us a completely "free" way to offer videos...which brings me to my point.
There ARE some "public domain" videos out there. Not just obscure "indy" things but actual commercial movies, cartoons, shows, and so on that matured into the public domain when their owner didn't renew them (back when that was required).
There's a whole mess of them available on LSVideo (which appears to be undergoing a redesign, but offered and will apparently continue to offer a wide variety of public-domain [i.e. you can legally make copies for all of your friends if you want] videos) and RetroFilms. Retrofilms even offers a number of Disney (!) cartoons that slipped through their iron grasp into mature public-domain works. MOST of them are rather old, but many are well known (Metropolis [not the new Anime', the classic silent film], for example, and the classic "Nosferatu"...and, I believe, the insipid [in my opinion] but well known "It's a Wonderful Life".)And, of course, there's a whole mess of interesting and/or bizarre and/or educational things in the Prelinger Archives Movies Online.
So....as soon as encoding software becomes available [I suspect ffmpeg and/or MPlayer will be set up to handle it pretty quickly after the initial source code and specs become available, if their recent development speed is any indication] I plan to go through the surprising number of videos that I own that turn out to be Public Domain, encode them into "Theora"-type files, and try making them available peer-to-peer.
At the very least, there are bound to be enough "oddball" videos available in the public domain that making them available in this format, combined with the fact that neither the "content" nor the file format, nor the video codec, nor the audio codec will be legally prohibited from distribution, they could easily become encountered often enough to promote the format to the point that, though it may never actually overtake proprietary formats, it'll pretty much "need" to be supported by any piece of multimedia software and playback unit that intends to bill itself as handling a lot of different formats...
I yearn for the day when my DVD playback unit can handle "Theora" videos and "Ogg/Vorbis" sound in addition to the .mp3's it already does...
Get cracking on that spec, Xiph!!!!!
(P.S. - Are there already IRC channels devoted to serving legal, public-domain videos?...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
As far as video quality, vp3 is a good bit behind the better mpeg4 variants such as divx and xvid according to this codec comparison, and this one also seems to be saying that vp4 isn't up to their level either. Both articles are focused on dvd-ripping, which involves resolutions typically from 400 to 700 (horizontal) at around 0.15 to 0.4 bits per pixel, so as to fit an hour-plus movie onto a 700mb cdr at a decent resolution. If vp3 and vp4 weren't designed to be optimal in these ranges then the comparison might be fair, but in general it seems like mpeg4 is the better bet if any halfway decent bitrate (500+ kilobits per second) is available. Of course, the patent-free nature of the xiph codec is what'll be attractive about it.
There was no MPEG-3. That was the working name for the original high definition MPEG format. However, they decided that they could implement HD with extensions to MPEG-2. Thus, MPEG-2 is used in HDTV, and there is no MPEG-3.
- 4/ mpeg-4.htm
- 21 / peg-21.htm
MPEG-4 is the new video/audio/streaming/etcetera standard.
http://mpeg.telecomitalialab.com/standards/mpeg
There are no MPEG-5 or MPEG-6
MPEG-7 is a forthcoming media metadata format. It doesn't include video compression technology. You'd still use MPEG-4 codecs within MPEG-7, or even use non MPEG codecs.
(The official link is broken right now)
No MPEG-8 through MPEG-20, at least not yet.
MPEG-21 is a multimedia authoring and delivery format. It's in very early stages, but think more like a competitor to Flash MX, writ large. We're some years from seeing products based on it.
http://mpeg.telecomitalialab.com/standards/mpeg
My video compression blog
Read better: Ogg is designed to be a generic container for audio/video streams, exactly as Quicktime. The audio codec part is Vorbis, which is shipped inside an Ogg file, hence the full names "Ogg Vorbis".
I don't know why they choose to implement a new container instead of using Quicktime, but probably they have their reasons.
This had better not become a completely biased argument. You are distorting the facts too much.
The software is easy as hell to get, just go to divx.com and download it.
Why do you think we compress the movie? So that it doesn't take up as much space? yeah, think of it this way: how many of us have wav's for all of their music instead of mp3, ogg, or aac?
The encoding takes longer because sound is a one dimensional data stream, while video is 3, the sound, and the 2 dimensions of the video.
The raw amount of data to compress is cubed, therefore making it take way longer, in addition to this, the codecs have to be really good, because we can see the artifacts in the video a lot better than the we can hear it in the audio, to counter this, the codec has 2 options;
1-more data per second, which increases the file size, but improves performance
2-compress the video better, which decreases the size and the performance
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg