Slashdot Mirror
Ogg Theora Alpha 2 Released
An anonymouse reader writes "After almost seven months, another alpha release of Ogg Theora is finally out. Still not production ready, but it's certainly showing some progress." The world needs a free video codec. Looking forward to seeing where this one goes.
Yeah, it was supposed to go beta 2-3 months ago...:
Ogg Theora was scheduled to go Beta (that means the bitstream is locked down, and all features are represented) in March of 2003. Obviously, that's slipped. Alpha 2 is going to be released shortly; but please remember that until Beta, there is no promise that files you encode will be supported in the final release.
But when will Theora be done you ask?
From the site: We nominally expect to be finished by the end of 2003. VP3 is a very mature video codec, so most of our effort is going into the Theora project.
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
Hopefully this will be as good as their OGG audio codec. I think its great cos the file sizes are smaller than MP3 yet the quality is just as good!
:)
Keep up the good work
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.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
of major companies picking this up. Are they really going to use this for movie trailers/previews. I don't think so. They'll stick with QT and WMP. Big business loves Big business. I guess we'll be stuck with
I hate QT, why don't they bring it out with something OSS
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
the RIAA will bully their way into making them illegal
... let me suffix that with a "yet".
They haven't done that with MP3
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Just a friendly reminder, you don't get the bonus karma unless you spell it 'pr0n'.
"The world needs a free video codec."!?
What about XviD?
"XviD is Free Software (licensed under the GNU GPL), open to all contributions, its only aim is to stick to standard compliance."
http://www.xvid.org
Not that the video codec is the only important part of this, but the fact that unlike most, Ogg Theora is completely free of patent / royalty issues.
;) -- including well-designed menus like the ones for freevo and mythTV, suitable for low-res TV screens -- so it could be used without a conventional monitor attached).
Imagine (it's not a great stretch anymore, though it might have been a few years ago) being able to assemble a box with a hard drive, motherboard, memory, then popping in a CD ala Knoppix or Gentoo Live, and BOOM there's a DVR. Movix is one side of the instant multi-media computer, but does not offer capture / record functions.
Built-to-purpose, such a computer ought to have a TV-out (and the live ISO would have to support it
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The world needed a free audio codec but ogg vorbis is still a fairly niche market in the compressed audio field these days. I use it and love it but I am still in the vast minority. I would use (and love) a free video codec from the Xiph people as well, but that doesn't mean that other people will. It's that damn market momentum holding good things back, but such is the plight of a lot of good technologies it seems.
I love it when a FAQ document doesn't take itself to seriously....
Q: Can I convert Ogg Theora files into VP3?
A: Why would you want to do something stupid like that?
Are you nuts?
.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
The formats you mention are patent encumbered and full access to the official specs (MPEG4) are under fee and NDA. Yeah, you can use 'em and and even code implementations but those implementations exist under a shadow. Divx is basically MPEG4. Free implementations are legally gray at best.
The benefits are primarily legal. Ogg codecs are intended to be fully legal to implement and use freely.
Congratulations on getting karma for answering your own question. Hopefully you won't get a karma boost for the question as well, I can just see it now, everyone asking and then answering themselves to get double the karma!
First, allow me to whore a bit...
---start whoring---
[ June 9, 2003 - Theora alpha 2 release ]
The libtheora reference implementation has reached its 'alpha 2' milestone. A lot of bugs have been fixed and new features added, including all the planned changes to the bitsteams format.
This is more of an internal milestone than a public release, but we are making a source tarball available for convenience. Nevertheless we recommend using the cvs version if possible. This release also requires cvs libogg and libvorbis to compile; you might try the cvs nightly tarball if you don't already have these checked out. You will need to build and install the 'ogg' and 'vorbis' modules.
---end whoring---
Note that it's not a user release, but a developer release.
Finally, here is a mirror, to help out with their bandwidth costs.
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
And what is xvid... swiss cheese?
No, XviD is an implementation of MPEG-4, which is encumbered by patents. The code for XviD is free, but you can't compile and run it without a license since it uses patented algorithms, and you can't get licenses on an individual basis.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
mpeg is a patent minefield.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
The implementation is free, the codec algorithm is not. ;-)
To actually use it, you legally have to pay money to patent holders.
Theora is totally free and patent unencumbered(as far as we know so far anyway
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Yes, we should all have stuck with Cinepak!
I agree, one of the most underrated projects out there :)
...) -- what I think would be better (for many people, not all) is a simple schedule / record / pause / playback system. Maybe something which, if these things were all beers, could be called "MythTV Lite."
However, no, I'm just imagining something much simpler. MythTV is complicated to set up (which makes sense, considering it's a complex, full-featured thing
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
It doesn't cost money, but it's still using a patented algorithm and you can't legally use it without a license.
Do you have to make the the actors available to everyone you give the binary to?
Patience, that's the key :-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The RIAA cannot make tools like codec's illegal. It would be like outlawing screwdrivers because they might get used to hotwire a car. While technically true, there are far too many legitimate uses for the tool.
Ogg Vorbis is used in mainstream games like Unreal. There is no reason to expect the game industry wouldn't go with Ogg Theora for video as well. As long as it's stable and performs well, why would game developers opt for non-portable proprietary solutions?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If patent encumbered tech becomes standard, electronics become more expensive. If patent-issue-free tech becomes standard, electronics become cheaper.
If patent-issue-free tech becomes standard, legally distributing media can become absolutely free.
If patents are too expensive, some cool tech just never comes to light.
Besides all this, which people like paying more for their electronics, movies and music?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Simple: MPEG-1 provides poor compressions ratios and VP3.2 has poor(er) quality. I think what people are really meaning when they say "we need a free video codec" is "we need a video codec that reaches the size and quality levels of MPEG-4, but isn't patent encumbered".
The RIAA cannot make tools like codec's illegal. It would be like outlawing screwdrivers because they might get used to hotwire a car. While technically true, there are far too many legitimate uses for the tool.
While quite true, the discount with which cartels like the RIAA and MPAA can purchase our ostensibly "elected" officials is appalling. The bottom line, the could outlaw just about anything they like, as they have already done so with security reporting and many forms of reverse engineering through the DMCA, which the aforementioned cartels are now trying to encode into international law, thereby making any legislative reform impossible.
As for legitimate uses, the most interesting one for me, personally, is the ability to create and distribute my own videos in a free and unencumbered format, using free software, to anyone anywhere. Blender animations, shorts, even home made feature length films are an exciting possibility, not to mention of course the ubiquitous home videos of mom, pop, and the kids.
The MPAA fears the loss of the cartel by independent artists. In a few short years we'll be able to generate LOTR quality movies on our home computers, and likely there will be free software available (e.g. blender plugins like 'Make Human' and other enhancements, povray, etc.) that will be available as well. Any talented write with a good script will be able to get together with a few friends and make a movie to shame anything from Hollywood and potentially market it direct via the internet.
Goodbye media cartel.
Which of course is the real reason the MPAA (and the RIAA, within their context vis-a-vis mp3) are so hysterical. It isn't about the illegal copying, which has been going on since the days of the cassette tape, it is about controlling artists' access to their marketplace, and our political "leadership" (I use the term very, very loosely) is complicit and likely quite knowledgable in this. Why else would the FCC be so eager to allow further consolidation of an already oligopolistic media? Because it is easier to apply pressure and suppress dissent with only a few players than it is with a few thousand (as was the case 20 years ago) or a few million (as will be the case if the Internet and independent media are ever permitted to realize their potential).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The world needs a free video codec.
There already is one. XviD is an open source (gpl) mpeg4 codec. Although there is no 1.0 release yet it is completely useable and can achieve better quality than DivX 5.05 (although encode times are longer). XviD currently supports B frames, chroma searching, VHQ, and host of other compressability improvers and motion tracking aids. I don't develop for it, but I am an avid fan. Check it out if you want to support open source video.
Any reason why people don't use either more often?
I don't now about VP3.2, but MPEG-1 is garbage. Unless you are looking for something in the area of VHS quality, you can toss it. MPEG-1 demands high bitrate, but doesn't give you much in return. Compare that to MPEG-2, which demands high bitrate, but pays you back with beautiful video, the experimental features of mpeg4 codecs such as DivX 5.05 or the open source XviD which allow a low bitrate stream to (nearly?) match the appearance of a high bitrate encode. It is easy to see that mpeg-1 is on its way out. The only use it has is so 1337-k1dz can make (S)VCDs.
Prices for commodity goods aren't set by the cost of manufacturing those goods. Prices for commodity goods are set by what the market will bear.
Sorry, but you're wrong. In a great many cases, competition drives the price down to cost+1, or even below cost, if there's another means to recoup losses... for example, phones are a loss leader, and it's easier to add features to a loss leader if the loss is less. If the cost of adding the feature is too high, it just doesn't happen at all.
It's free now. You need a license only to make and distribute an encoding or decoding device.
Wrong again. MP4 is NOT free. You pay to encode, you pay to decode, you pay for devices, you pay to distribute content. Read the docs over at MPEG-LA.
Where a profit is available to be made, somebody will go out and make it.
Exactly. Requiring payment of licenses to outside parties raises costs, and reduces profit. The profit line hit's zero, the device is never made.
Prices for these things are completely disconnected from video format patents.
So, you're saying that increasing the cost of the product for the manufacturer does not increase the cost of the product for the consumer. Care to substantiate that?
You've typed a great deal, but you don't seem to have any intelligent arguments (no offense). Perhaps you should think of some before you reply next time?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Actually, the corporate world, especially European companies, are looking to MPEG-4 as their future format of choice. The cable industry has already agreed to switch to MPEG-4 for digital cable (in the vague future). MPEG-4 is becoming the standard format for cell phones via 3GPP.
A lot of this has to do with maturity. You can actually buy interoperable, commerical MPEG-4 solutions from a variety of vendors today. Also, MPEG-4 supports real-time streaming over lossy networks. And it has profiles for everything from cell phones to HD. There's at least 100x more work into MPEG-4 than Theora.
Of course, Microsoft's Windows Media 9 is even farther along in maturity in many ways, and certainly has strong technical advantages over MPEG-4 if Windows 98 or higher is the exclusive playback platform. It has better compression efficinecy, and much better scalability over real-world consumer internet access.
It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
My video compression blog
There's something related to what kind of math operations are used by the codec. If the codec uses mostly math operations that are implemented in typical CPUs for PDA-like things and for portable MP3 players, then the codec is "fit for implementation in hardware".
I'm sorry, i don't remember though what are those operations...
DivX is not a "new video" or whatever. In fact, DivX is not even open source!
;-) 3.11 (with the smiley), DivX 4 and DivX 5 (without the smiley). DivX 3.11 is as illegal as it can be: it's a hacked MSMPEG4v3 codec. DivX 4 and 5 are legal rewrites, but are commercial and closed source.
- MPEG is an open *standard* (not source! since it's not an implementation but a specification).
- There are several versions of DivX: the "original" DivX
There's also OpenDivX, which has been dead for more than a year now. Basically Project Mayo stole all the code from OpenDivX and turned it into their closed source DivX 3/4 codec, and then killed off OpenDivX. Dispite it's name, OpenDivX is NOT open source! (read the license)
- XviD, DivX 4 and DivX 5 are implementations of the MPEG4 standard. Only XviD is open source (GPL), DivX 4 and 5 are not.
- Ogg Theora is something completely different. I don't know whether the quality has improved, but according to a codec comparison at Doom9.org (a site about video encoding), VP3 is one of the worst codecs (codecs compared: DivX 4, DivX 3.11 SBC, XviD, WMV, VP3, RealVideo).
Just install Xine. Download and install the Windows DLLs. Done. Now you can play QuickTime files, and even QuickTime webcasts (not to mention Windows Media, because those DLLs contain the required codecs). Heck, if you install RealPlayer9 for *NIX, you can also play Real Media in Xine. ;-)
If you install the gxine interface, not xine-ui (but you can install as many interfaces at the same time as you like) you even get a Mozilla plugin to play all those formats in your browser.
For the lazy, Red Hat RPM packages are here: freshrpms.net.
No emulation (Wine or otherwise) required.
The only use it has is so 1337-k1dz can make (S)VCDs.
Nope, MPEG1 is only for VCD.
SVCD uses MPEG2, which has a better quality. That's why VCD is so crappy, and SVCD is actually watchable.
MPEG2 is also used by DVD, but at a much higher bitrate.
Does anyone have any further information on what's happening to Ogg Tarkin? The Ogg Theora FAQ says the following:
Blog Ho
If you want a cool utility to index and search metadata from ogg vorbis files (and other files), try Scopeware Vision.
Well, Theora isn't done yet, nor is its bitstream locked down, so it's impossible to say how small files will get.
By the time it is GM, I imagine MPEG-4 will be well along in its migration to the new AVC codec, which offers much better compression efficiency than the current Simple and Advanced Simple profiles used by Divx, Xvid, etcetera. So even though the final Theora might be somewhat better than MPEG-4 today, it almost certainly will be behind MPEG-4 by the time it is released.
Bear in mind that MP3 is ten years old now. Modern audio codecs like HE AAC are definitely better than Vorbis, technically.
If Theora gets market share, it'll be because of its openness, not because of any price or quality advantages. Windows Media 9 is free-as-in-beer for most uses, and is today a lot better than Theora could possibly be in a year.
My video compression blog
Compression will always be with us. By using compression, being ABLE to send a full length 2 hour video in 5 minutes will be here a lot quicker than if we wait for bandwidth alone.
On a completely different note, I'm trying to figure out what niche a free codec will fill.
Streaming media for one. How many people already download realplayer to listen to internet radio or other streaming audio? No harder to make those people download a vorbis enabled player, such as winamp, (or just ogg codecs for WMP). It has the advantage that Ogg sounds better for an equivalent bitrate than WMA, real, or MP3, and has the double bonus that the stream provider doesn't have to cough up for licence fees or expensive streaming software.
Theora theoretically will provide exactly the same benefits, except versus quicktime as its competition.
Another market? People who use linux. Just as apple are pushing AAC, linux pushes ogg, and linux desktop marketshare is rapidly approaching that of the mac.
Supporting them often means supporting ogg, and the linux customer base is only going to grow, if the server market is any indication. And if that doesn't turn out to be true, linux is making huge inroads into the settop box, along with DVR projects like freevo and mythtv. Theora would be the natural codec to use on those platforms.
Finally, there are the people who control the playback mechanism. Game writers not wanting to pay licence fees, and take advantage of the better compression? Natural customers. People wanting to cram more video an a support multimedia disc (just think non-ms encyclopedias). Natural customers.
OK, it's not going to replace Mpeg on DVD, or rewrite HDTV. But it will give some people more bang for less buck. And that's never a bad thing.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Well, it really depends on what you want to do. The reason why MPEG-2 is "good enough" for DVD is that it is compatible with the DVD Video spec, which means it'll play back on set top boxes. It's not like we didn't have better codecs than MPEG-2 five years ago, but they aren't enough better that it'd make it worth ditching the installed base of DVD players!
Still, we'll certainly be moving away from MPEG-2 when we move to HD DVD, since backwards compatibility will be punted anyway.
There are lots of features that MPEG-2 has that are useful for video archiving and distribution, like support for interlaced video, support for non-square pixel files, and low per pixel-second CPU requirements. I don't see that Theora has any of these advantages.
Conversely, it costs $2.50 to license MPEG-2 decoder support for a product, and Theora will be free. And Theora will be able to provide better quality at low data rates.
It all depends on what you need to do.
Personally, I doubt Theora will get a lot of uptake by corporations. Its openness advantages are unlikely to overcome its disadvantages in maturity. Heck, Ogg Vorbis is quite mature, but no major media companies are using it as a distribution format. Apple picked AAC-LC instead, even though they have to pay a fee, as part of their general support of MPEG-4.
My video compression blog
An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense
...
...
Ogg is a larger multimedia project that does not only concern compression; Squish became the name of one of the Ogg codecs. For that reason, we usually just refer to it as Ogg when there's no Netrek context nearby. The Ogg project has nothing to do with the common surname 'Ogg'. Nor is it named after 'Nanny Ogg' from the Terry Pratchett book _Wyrd Sisters_.
Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book _Small Gods_. The name holds some significance, but it's an indirect, uninteresting story.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?