Slashdot Mirror
Xiph.org Releases Theora Alpha One
Pajama Crisis writes "Xiph.org, the crazy guys behind Ogg Vorbis, have released the first alpha version of Ogg Theora, an open video codec. Downloading, hacking and smashing into little pieces is cheerfully encouraged. Theora has been mentioned on Slashdot before. Also, Xiph has been working with a couple different companies to bring Vorbis to a portable near you; stay tuned."
The killer application is to insert a DVD and have it simplistically rip and encode it for personal viewing. Make it simplistic enough for the masses to use, and let the codec take off as a standard induced by practice not dictates or technology.
...has been rolled into Theora, as is said at both sites.
from vp3.com:
NOTE TO ALL VP3 DEVELOPERS:
Monday, September 9, 2002 -- Starting today, all source code development and maintenance for the VP3 open source codec has moved to a new home: www.theora.org. Piloted by the open-source wunderkids at xiph.org who brought you Vorbis audio, Theora heralds a new era of open and license-free multimedia.
from theora.org:
What is Theora? Theora will be a video codec that builds upon On2's VP3 codec.
So, in case anyone was wondering (like I just was), there you go.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Too true. OSS ideas are to re-invent the wheel, even though many mathematical algorythims are patented (like Ogg - psychoacoutic model of elimination). Still, it may be needed, as Sigma pissed off the guys who were creating Xvid. Cause a company was selling open source software without providing source, the Xvid team is now rioting and is quitting making xvid.
And a second point: what would be more "together", 2 totally diffrent codeds slapped together, or a dual thought out codec. I figure they use similar measuers to make both. If the do, you might only need 2 chips on a Ogg: AV displayer (handheld device). A Ogg decoder, and a video displayer. Just an idea.
Also, Xiph has been working with a couple different companies (iRiver, Frontier Labs) to bring Vorbis to a portable near you; stay tuned.
Oh come on! News like that and no link or credible source?!?
For those who don't know - iRiver is the company that makes Rio's Volt lineup of portable CD MP3 players. Top notch players, but up until now they only play MP3 and WMA.
The Rio Volt's lack of Vorbis support is the only reason I haven't switched to encoding all my music in Vorbis. I've got to believe that the lack of hardware supporting Vorbis is the number one reason for its modest adoption rate.
Really? Do you mean DivX 3.11a with SBC? Or DivX 4 or 5? Maybe the new XviD codec, which is replacing (various versions of) DivX in the pirate scene.
Seriously. "DivX 0wnz". Put a little thought into what you write---unlike MP3, "DivX" comprises a wide variety of codecs and licensing schemes.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
2) Make it impossible to uninstall.
3) Necesitate a live web connection to play files.
4) Upload information to a "security" server every time I play a music file or insert a CD.
5) Utilize DirectSound.
6) Get rid of *nix versions.
6) Release only binaries so terrorists don't get the source code.
7) Use attorneys to bring down all mirror site distributions.
8) Pick sellout a$$hole to pump out CD that installs trojan uninstallabe player onto people's system. Is Peter Gabriel available? http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27272.html
9) Make sure user interface is horrbile, avoid simplicity and good design (so see QuickTime and WinAmp for what NOT to do).
10) Add interoperation with future .NET (Passport) purchasing system.
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.
DAMN they have cool names for their stuff. I wish other people would follow their lead (bloody "Opteron").
Doesn't commerical software work even better as a meritocracy? You make something only if you think it'll be useful, and people vote with their wallets. To me, people willing to pay for a product says *much* more about the quality of a product than if it's given away for free. It's a difference between "Yeah, I'll pay money for that" versus "Eh. Well, it's free."
This is why every commercial package gets bloated and reinvents the wheel numerous times.
Theora is basically a cleaned up VP3, and is likely to remain so. Although some visual improvements may sneak in along the way, this is not the main focus of the project, which is to convert VP3 from being a Windows only mess into a portable cross-platform codec which plays well with the Ogg container format.
Previous tests by places such as Doom 9 have shown that VP3 is beaten by the various pseudo-MPEG4 encoders, although not embarassingly. I imagine that this situation will continue: DivX/XviD/etc. will continue to have marginally better quality.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
"Thanks for your suggestion. Actually iRiver have listened to our users' need and start working with Ogg Vorbis format, ManPower have been allocated to develop the Ogg Vorbis, let's give our engineers more time to develop this format. Some users suggested to give a schedule on this issue. However, it is really difficult to tell at this moment, let's just hope it to be released as soon as possible."
d x=1268&mode=Àüü&strque=&field=1
http://www.iriver.com/user/user_view.asp?page=1&i
Thats clipped from their forums.
I don't know about anyone else, but something tells me you're full of shit...
I'd like to see more evidence of this "increased rate of speaker decay" you claim that Vorbis causes. I honestly don't see that happening, unless the amplifier supplying the signal is fucked, or your DAC is shot and is feeding bad signal (but you'd hear that). Once audio is decompressed, it's just PCM.
IIRC, wasn't Vorbis's big feature that it supported up to 255 independent audio tracks? No joint-stereo crap at all?
And I've encoded karaoke tracks into Vorbis. I imagine the only thing keeping me from singing along is that my Japanese skills aren't that high. Interestingly enough, the tracks I have encoded (so far: Jin-Roh and Escaflowne: The Movie OSTs) are some of the hardests tracks I've thrown at any encoder, and Vorbis pulls off a damn fine job.
Sorry prof., but I'd like more info to back up your claims before my skepticism is anything but high.
Sir (and I use the word loosely), if you're a plant for the competition, try a bit more subtlety and you'll blend in better. I've also found that borrowing buzzwords liberally from 'Star Trek' will help your gobbledygook sound more convincing to both low level nerds and the common man.
Off we go...
I've been studying psychoacoustics in my spare time,
Oh boy, a *real* expert... Give me a second to contain my excitement.
It sacrifices a lot to "sound better" than MP3, and while some of their tradeoffs do manage to improve sound quality
A terrible, terrible thing it is to sound better... there must be something wrong
First off, Vorbis concentrates its encoding in the more audible midrange
completely cutting out higher overtones. While MP3 works similarly, it manages to keep enough of the high range to maintain the "feel" of the original music.
Bzzt. False statement number one. Go study in your spare time a little harder, do some ABX testing then come back and tell us what you learned. However this one is almost forgivable compared to the nonsense below.
Vorbis claims to support more than two channel audio, but this is misleading.
Bzzt, no it's not. 255 channel support, all of which may be totally independent and un-coupled. You need not use 'joint stereo' (our method is more general and we call it 'channel coupling') at all.
MP3 encodes stereo using a "joint-stereo" method, which couples both tracks together into a mono track, giving each frame a different balance to simulate stereo on a mono track. This is equivalent to playing a mono tape and turning the balance knob!
No, idiot, that's 'intensity stereo', not 'joint stereo'. Vorbis does not use intensity stereo.
Obviously, this is less than optimal
It certainly would be, unfortunately--- *GASP* ---it's not true!
While Vorbis supports true stereo encoding, it fakes 5.1-channel audio using a "joint-joint-stereo" method, where the left-back/left-front and right-back/right-front channels and joined together into the two stereo tracks in a similar fashion. Not very good at all.
Bzzzt. Go read the spec again Bucky. You could do what's described above, yes, but that's not 'the way Vorbis does it'.
The way that Vorbis compresses its audio accelerates speaker degradation
Actually using the speakers accellerates degredation too. They last alot longer when you leave them in the box they came in and don't plug them in.
It breaks sound up into an evenly-spaced array of harmonics which approximate the original waveform
Those are not 'harmonics', and Vorbis's compression pays no particualr attention to sinusoidal harmonics. Perhaps you'd like to wait until college and get some signal processing lectures under your belt before coming back.
"Big deal", you say, "that's how all lossy encoding schemes work!"
[sigh] No, no it's not.
But if we assume, for a second, that you said, 'Vorbis is a transform-domain codec', which is what you meant, no, not all lossy audio compression formats are transform based.
But the way that Vorbis does it causes a noticeable amount of harmonic resonance in speaker systems, stressing their driver system and accelerating the rate at which they decay.
The problem Sir is that you have a surplus of Zackthorp particles coming from your warp core, a well known source of wear and tear on cheap speakers. Make sure your speakers are rated for greater than warp 4 before trying to use them so close to a Gammagorp Modulator and your worries are over!
I listened to the result, and believe me, it's true! Because I said so.
If you know the story of the first Tacoma Narrows bridge [carleton.ca], this is the same principle, working at a smaller and more gradual pace.
Given Xiph's poor track record with Vorbis
OK, let's stop here. Everyone gather around, point and laugh!
Monty
[sheesh]
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Evidently oblivion exists at www.mplayerhq.hu. They have an encoder that lets you rip your dvd to DivX4 using 1, 2 or 3 pass encoding. Instuctions are here. Is three lines at a command prompt simple enough?
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
I've been talking to the Xiph guys, it's true, I believe Monty himself will be starting work on a flash for the NEXII/IIe within a couple weeks, if it turns out to be technically possible.
Sweet! I don't see why it wouldn't be technically possible though? What's in one of those NEXII(e) anyways? Or is it possibly the firmware size won't fit? Anyone know how big the flash ROM for the firmware is?
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
If they're smart, .avi. Make it a codec that plugs in alongside XviD, Huffyuv, etc., and you'll have a sizable amount of capture/editing/playback software that'll be able to use it right off the bat.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I think the parent is a troll, but in case he is
serious:
What does a square wave do to your speakers?
We have some decent peakers down in our lab,
because we do vibration testing before real
experiments run and we run all kinds of sharp
looking waveforms thru them and we don't see
any problems. This is in fixed setup, inside an
acoustic room with acoustic level meters and
accelerometers. Doesn't get any more precise than
that. Our speakers are fine after 5 years.
What's supposed to be the problem?