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."

Comments

Porn films

[rodgerd]

We all know that porn site's choice of encoders dictates the success of media formats!

Pass the crack pipe

[MisterBlister]

This will take over the world?

Sort of how OGG took over the MP3 world? Not likely. Its nice to have an optional patent-unencumbered method for video & audio sharing, but anyone who thinks this will be anything more than a tiny niche product living in the shadow of MPEG4/WMV really needs to get out of his mom's basement more.

Re:Pass the crack pipe

[Anonymous Coward]

You fool. Mom's basement is where everything important is. Ogg did take over the world; all the music I listen to is decoded from Ogg.

If you don't think Ogg took over the world, it is probably because you are a follower.

Re:very nice but can it overtake DivX?

[xeromist]

I think it is very possible. The reason ogg really hasn't taken a significant portion of the market away from mp3 is that mp3 is so well established. It is so quick and easy to make an mp3. It's very easy to come by software for making mp3s and you can rip and encode an entire album in less time than it takes to play it. Anyone can do it.

By comparison, DivX is widely used, but _not_ established. Here's why:
There are far fewer people making DivX movies than mp3s;
The software is slightly more difficult to come by;
Ripping takes longer because most DVD drives are slower than CD;
The raw video takes a lot of disk space;
Encoding takes a VERY long time compared to mp3.

Overall this means that those making DivX tend to be a few savvy users and it will be easy for those users to switch to a new standard. So that being the case it will only take a few people changing over to a new standard to affect a change. Of course these people will have to see that Xiph/On2's way of doing things is better, but if Xiph/On2 can prove that, I'd say they have a very good chance.

But what about more than 2-channel audio?

[Sgs-Cruz]

I'm still waiting for any audio codec that lets me encode more than 2 channels. I just read the Vorbis FAQ and can see nothing there. This could be one way that they could get an advantage over DIVX or MPEG-4... they could be the only file format to include options for, say, 6.1 discrete channels of downloadable, streamable, audio. More and more computers have surround sounds now. Thoughts?

another xiph open standard?

[joe_bruin]

they havn't gotten around to polishing vorbis yet, where do they get the time to work on a video codec? will this be the same maneuver as the ogg format?

"look, it's free and open. well, unless you want the specs, which don't exist, so you have to use our source. want an integerized implementation (for your rio)? well, since you don't have the specs, we'll be glad to sell you one."

this is why ogg is not in hardware yet. this is why there arn't alternate implementations (LAME ogg, anyone?).

i'd love to see a free, open video codec. mpeg royalties suck ass. but my patience with xiph is running short.

eat more chicken!

LGPL bad for embedded devices

[Straker Skunk]

Embedded devices often use the equivalent of statically-linked binaries, i.e. ROM images. The LGPL requires that you allow the user to swap out the LGPL'ed part [of a larger proprietary solution] as desired. If you distribute software which is inseparable (to the user) from LGPL'ed code, then the entirety of that software must itself be under the (L)GPL---which would allow any user with a binary to ask for source to your stuff.

The BSD/X11 licenses, since they allow outright proprietarization of their covered code, naturally don't present this difficulty. (FYI, the SDL is well-served by the LGPL as---to my knowledge---the project is not targetting the kind of embedded systems where this would come up.)

10 Years After

[KillerKane]

Isn't just Alvin Lee anymore. So we may finally have an OSS version of something that's been around for over a decade. Quicktime, I mean. Good, great. But in the real world, nobody cares. In the real world, first counts. First by ten years counts a lot. We'd all like to see OSS be a real contender, if for no other reason than to keep the big boys on their toes, but c'mon. If you think this means anything to anyone outside of a small circle of ubergeeks, you're kidding yourselves.

Maybe it's just me, but I think OSS is never really going to matter until they do it first, not second, and certainly not 10 years after. Real innovation, not catch-up. There are a lot of bright people in OSS, why are they always following, never leading? Seriously.

Bla bla bla No numbers! c'mon people.

[tcc]

I read the discussions here, the interresting subject is the licensing, the FUD subject is how it will take over and so on.

First, before even talking about taking over Divx, please point me to a site that has a codec study, not on the theorical, not on lame useless "tom's hardware" numbers, but on a scientific or scientific-like approach with proper setup and testing.

Nothing like an example to clear things up:

Codec usage, yes it can crunch more than divx for "similar" quality that is "similar" to DVD, which is "similar" to uncompressed video... heh. no, this is totally wrong, what I want to see is uncompressed video, original sequence, then compress Divx with best quality at X bitrate, do the same with that new codec, try at least 3 different kind of video that are abusing codecs differently: High contrast (black and white with sharp edges being the most evil), smooth colors (4:1:1 DV videos can show some serious color bending when you look at it closely, for example) so how is the color bending affecting each codecs?, and finally, motion, low speed, high speed, repeat with the last two example and make all the different mix, and then try different bitrates, then check the results, if they are similar, zoom in, check the pixelization, I don't want just words or lame tests with no numbers, I want a half-decent scientific approach, I wish I had time to make such a thing like I did before with mpeg/mjpg/mpeg4 V1.

Of course we all know that you don't have to be the best to win, there are other factors to consider as well, but in my case, QUALITY will make me switch from a codec to another for my video presentation, so far, I still use DIVX for video-only movies, a good optimized MJPEG codec for software playback of home-made multimedia cd-roms on PC only (divx needs too much cpu juice that I require for other realtime tasks on my video display software for slower machines), and I just wish I would find that perfect codec that wouldn't look like thrash when I display the colors and motion on a plasma screen.

I will jump on anything new if it does the job better than what I have right now, but please, don't just say it's so much better because of [blabla], say actual facts and numbers, it will be very interresting to read.

What file format for Theora?

[benwaggoner]

From reading the announcement, I don't have much idea what file format this is going to use. .ogg as I understand it is really designed as an audio codec/format; I'm not sure how easy it would be to add video samples to it, usefully.

If they're looking to still pick a format, I hope they do QuickTime. QuickTime's file format itself is open and documented, and there are a number of open source projects to implement it. As of QT6, QuickTime itself now has native support for VBR audio encoding, which makes it easier to do an Ogg encoder inside QT (VBR decode has been in there since 4.1).

http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/quicktime/qt de vdocs/PDF/QTFileFormat.pdf

With QuickTime support, one immediately inherits a wide installed base of players, and lots of functionality. For example, real time streaming support is availble via the open source Darwin Streaming Server. The codecs just need to have a native packetizer added.

The nice thing about implementing Theora as a QuickTime file would mean folks would have the option of using high-end QuickTime encoding apps like Cleaner for encoding, and generally letting the files work well in both the closed and open source universes.

VP3 is of course already implemented in QuickTime so doing this would mainly be a matter of finishing the Ogg port as a QuickTime codec:

http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/

Re:What file format for Theora?

[inquis]

You seem to be confused as to what ogg really is. Blame part of this confusion on Microsoft, who would lead you to believe that because a file has the extention .ogg and plays audio when you run it that it's an audio file.

The ogg format is a stream format, much like the avi format (published by Microsoft) is. Ogg's primary advantage is flexibility: you can embed practically anything into an ogg stream (video, audio, subtitle streams, whatever) that your player can interpret at the other end. Furthermore, the stream is fault-tolerant and should play even if damaged or incomplete.

(The ogg audio file you're thinking of is actually a vorbis audio stream multiplexed into an ogg.)

Probably the best place on the web right now to learn about video codecs and stream formats is doom9. You will also find that in the forums they are doing active research concerning a new stream format called mcf (well, actually an old stream format, I think it was specified before ogg) and a way to burn raw mcf streams to a CD a la VCD.

Doom9 also performs codec comparisons every time a company / individual / group thinks that they've produced the Latest and Greatest video codec. VP3 was obselete many months ago when it was being compared to div3 and even wmv8, both of which are suboptimal when compared head-to-head these days with div5 and xvid.

Another thing to keep in mind is that VP3's patent-unencombered state is a two-edged sword: while you don't have to worry about maybe having to pay MPEG4 license fees, you also don't have a chance in hell of being playable on any next-generation DVD player. Sure, if you're a game manufacturer and you're looking for a video and audio codec to use in in-game movies, you'll probably use an ogg file with a VP3 video stream and a vorbis audio stream; however, if you're producing video of your son's first steps that you want to throw into your grandfather's new DVD player, you'll be doing it in some variety of MPEG4.

-inq

Clich�s Away

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had a dime for every time Emmett Plant used a cliché in his interview....

I'd have a least $1.30...

How to give it a chance to become popular

[Anonymous Coward]

1 - Make it decently stable.

2 - Encode a good number of movies/videoclips with it and release them to p2p networks (porn stuff will help a lot)

3 - Release -now- the player and the encoder in a userfriendly format. No CVS trees, builds or config files to edit (in Linux too).