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Xiph Releases Ogg Theora Alpha-3

Posted by Hemos on from the frozen-for-usage dept.

ArcRiley writes "For more than a year Xiph hackers have been working on Ogg Theora, an improved version of On2's VP3 video codec. Alpha-3 includes several bitstream changes, VP3 to Theora "upgrade" utilities, and is now supported by Xine, MPlayer, and Real's Helix Player. We're nearing Beta-1 where the format will be frozen, fully documented, and it'll be ready for everyday use."

6 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I've never really understood... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I've never understood why you go on about audio formats, when the article is about video codecs.

  2. Re:DivX popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One word - games.

    Need an animated intro or cutscene in a PC game? The options are kind of limited. You can license DivX or Bink, or rely on whatever codecs come as standard with Windows, but the options are either expensive, low-quality or problematic.

    I was commenting on Ogg Vorbis in games a few minutes ago, and was wondering how the Xiph people were getting on with Ogg Theora. I clicked to go to the Slashdot front page, and behold!

    I reckon I can sense the future, and I don't even have a Slashdot subscription. ;-]

  3. Re:DivX popularity by The+Original+Yama · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've seen an increasing number of video files on the Internet being distributed in Vorbis/Xvid format (i.e. Ogg Vorbis audio and Xvid video). Which raises the question: why is Ogg Theora always looked upon as the champion open source video format? Xvid is GPL, and from my experience it delivers the best quality/compression performance of all the codecs out there. Most importantly, it works -- now.

    --
    OLPC Australia
  4. Re:Xine? Mplayer? by 13Echo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wow. Media on Linux has never been better. With minimal effort, in most cases, MPlayer and the codecs can be installed with a simple RPM package. Same goes for XINE and all of the players based upon it.

    MPlayer and XINE work so well, that even Windows-native formats play back with just a fraction of the CPU load. I have yet to come across a typical, modern audio or video file on the web that doesn't play better on Linux than it does on Windows. MPlayer is just too kickass.

    Audio on Linux is fantastic as well. The ALSA subsystem is professional-grade, allows for plugins and has nearly no latency in routing.

    Multimedia is becoming one of Linux's high points. It's no longer limited like it was a few years ago. The problem is that there are so many patented and closed-source codecs out there that don't have legitimate Linux versions. That's where it gets questionable, when you are required to install a hacked Windows DLL to get a format to play on Linux. Things like Ogg Theora will help to end that ridiculous concept, as Vorbis is slowly doing.

  5. false information? by ArcRiley · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The fact remains that DivX is MPEG-4, because it's patent encumbered it cannot be implemented with Free Software. Many people don't realise this. They think that because there's GPL'ed software available to encode/decode DivX/XviD that the format is free.

    In reality, the royalty requirements of these formats makes GPL'ed software undistributable by anyone but the copyright holder (since it's the copyright holder's responsibility to enforce the copyright they're not going to sue themselves).

    For both commercial and non-commercial uses, royalty-free codecs (such as VP3/Theora) will always top proprietary formats such as DivX.

  6. Re:Xine? Mplayer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ...Or similarly if you use Gentoo...

    emerge sync
    emerge xine-ui mplayer -v

    Xine has been running better than anything I ran in Windows. Multimedia has been much more pleasurable in Linux.