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New Open Video Codec From Xiph/On2

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-luck-beam-activated dept.

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."

3 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Porn films by rodgerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. Re:very nice but can it overtake DivX? by xeromist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  3. What file format for Theora? by benwaggoner · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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/

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