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Theora (Ogg Video) Reaches First Milestone
strmcrw writes "Today Theora (maintained by the Xiph.org Foundation) releases their first of three planned Milestones. Theora will be a video codec that builds upon On2's VP3 codec and is going to be integrated in the Ogg multimedia container. The code is under a BSD style license, for the legal terms on the usage of the VP3 codec, please check out their CVS page."
It is unwise to release beta and RC builds under an open licence. As has been seen with many other projects, the code gets branched at that point and progress towards and stable and bug-free final release is hindered. Not through maliciousness, but because of the tendency for people to tinker with the source and not pass the fixes back to the original source.
Beta software should be released under a restrictive license. People cannot distribute modified copies. Nor should people be allowed to distribute anything other than the officially released binaries (if they exist).
This would force bugfixes back into the main branch, maintained by the original creators, so the final software is as perfect as possible and bugs don't persist for ever in beta-quality forks.
Seriously though, this is kind of neat. It will be interesting to see how this works out. For all who want to know without reading, the mile stones are:
OK, so maybe they don't tell what the 2nd and 3rd milestones are on the front page.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
HWake up a virgin at 36 in your parents basement and commit suicide
/.
Cool, 4 more years of posting shite to
Forking the project does not in itself hinder one fork from proceeding. The trouble with non-copylefted Free Software licenses are popular proprietary derivatives because then you are competing with what is partially your own work. If the proprietary improvements are patented as well you'll find it much more difficult to write a compatible substitute. As I understand it, the Ogg Theora team's choice of license is strategic.
I disagree. I don't think the freedoms of Free Software disappear or become unimportant just because the software is a pre-release. You cannot force people to help you with your software. You might not get the help you want unless you show you're willing to let them share what you've done.
Digital Citizen
you cunt! you forgot the one about $2 sand niggahs!
Many of us have followed the development on cvs and the mailing lists for the past few months, and this is really heading the right way. (offtopic: A while ago, I encoded Star Trek: First Contact, which required ~90 GB of temp space for the yuv file, that was fun). What I wonder is when there will be a patch for mplayer to encode and decode theora. I realize it would be a bad idea putting it in the main tree, as that would result in people distributing files encoded with this yet-to-be-finished codec. But for testing purposes and hack value -- anyone up to writing such a thing?
I'm happy with this news.. the more good codec options the better.
I've used On2's VP3 codec with excellent results, though I always end up using Sorenson Squeeze (Sorenson 3 codec) for my web-ready vids.
Zygo is another great codec to experiment with, and with Quicktime's ability to grab whatever codec you might need transparently, we should feel free to experiment.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
The moral of the story is, don't use the BSD licence for anything Microsoft and its kind would like to take control over... The BSD licence does nothing to protect an open standard; that's why the GPL was created in the first place.
microsoft already controls (defacto) standards, as does real and apple.
Does anybody know whether they plan to do streaming video at some point? I know that they have streaming audio with IceCast (oddly enough they stream mp3, no mention of vorbis).