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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."
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.
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.
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?...)
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