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."

Comments

Licences

[Trusty Penfold]

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.

Re:Licences

[Anonymous Coward]

Beta software should be released under a restrictive license. People cannot distribute modified copies.

That would go against the whole idea of the Ogg project, and could prevent people from contributing (some people don't want to contribute to a non-free project). It's important to have people tinkering with the software, especially when it's new (there are lots of different compression algorithms that can be used, but they need to be decided on before the file format is finalized).

IMHO, a better solution would be to release the software under an open license, and specify that all modified copies must have a different name. This would prevent any confusion without having to use a non-free license (trademark law can be used to enforce this restriction if necessary).

Re:Licences

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

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.

In some cases, that might be a good thing if development of the "main" branch is languishing...

I'm eager to see Ogg Theora ready, but I've been kind of disappointed at how "quiet" the developers are. (As of this moment, my CVS grab of Alpha 1 from September is STILL showing no updates since then - I just moments ago did a cvs up ...). The developers rarely reply to "outsiders" on the mailing lists or even post updates to it. Offers of help are at the moment being ignored (again, at least on the public mailing list, which until very recently still had more traffic from "how do I use VP3 with Microsoft(tm) DirectShow(tm)" than from discussion of Ogg Theora development...

We already have "ogm tools", the "blame" for which I put squarely on the desire to have Ogg video (with vorbis audio) and lack of (or just slow, quiet, and/or "offline") development on it from the official developers (xiph.org).

Even this slashdot "article" (at the moment, at least) has this sort of "secretive" feel to it - none of the links on it seem to have anything indicating a release today (or, indeed, any information more recent than September 25th), there have been no announcements (or even much in the way of comments) on the mailing lists, and CVS doesn't appear to be any more recent than September 25th. Personally, I suspect somebody has just noticed Theora Alpha 1 - released two months ago - which was billed as the "first Milestone"?. I DO recall seeing a "press release" for this release wherein Emmett Plant (Xiph.org ceo) mentioned that they had "big plans" for a December 1st release of the next alpha, but requests for comments or hints on what those "big plans" may be on the Theora mailing lists get only silence.

I fairness, I imagine a lot of this comes from the development being so "early" and the core developer(s) not wanting a million people popping in and immediately "wiggling" the path of development around, but some comments on the mailing list from the developers about the current development plans would go a long way to making the development seem open...

Does ANYBODY have any more detailed information about what's going on out there at xiph.org/Ogg Theora? Will there be the mysterious unnannounced appearance of a "theora2" branch in CVS instead of an update of the existing code (much as theora appeared without updates to the 'vp32' branch back in September)?

Incidentally, I DID grab Ogg Theora Alpha 1 when it was released 2 months ago. I ran into a LITTLE difficulty getting it compiled, but in the end got it going...and it kicks butt. Even unoptimized, the performance was "pretty good" (certainly comparable with, say, mjpegtools' mpeg2 encoders) and the video quality looks good - I'd even say the quality is pretty good at the lowest "quality setting"...

So...please excuse my pessimistic post and mild rant - the code (on those occasions that it gets released) being open but the development work seeming closed and secretive has been eating at me, considering how interested I am in the project and am relatively eager to help. (I am not qualified to do much coding, but testing and documenting I can - indeed, I have (egad, I'm about to slashdot my own server, aren't I?...).

And freedom will come

[foolip]

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?

Good For Post Community

[TheRIAAMustDie]

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.