Xiph Releases Ogg Theora Alpha-3

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."

Comments

Another standard that probably won't get embraced?

[ChaoticChaos]

The #1 thing about open source compression standards is how unwilling most of the brand name players are to support them.

I've got a Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox 3 and Ogg Vorbis is still not supported and I'm beginning to wonder if it ever will be.

If OV supported on the iPod?

The unwillingness by the major brands to support all standards really leaves the consumer in the bind. I've got OV encoded music tracks and just can't listen to them on my Jukebox 3. :-(

I've never really understood...

[Stopmotioncleaverman]

Why leading companies (eg. Creative, Apple, etc.) consistently fail to support, or even downright ignore the Ogg format - it's a good, clean, relatively non-lossy, and compact compression system. Why isn't it supported by the mainstream audio hardware manufacturers? With further enhancements, Ogg could be set to draw level with MP3 on a usability and listenability basis (is that a word? it is now!), only sadly not on a compatibility basis. We can only hope that Ogg will grow in popularity and so become a more prominent feature in the audio market.

DivX popularity

[PingKing]

While I'm sure this is a great codec, hasn't DivX pretty much sewn up the market on video codecs?

It's established, popular and gives tight compression. Can new codecs such as Theora break into this market to any significant degree?

DivX problems

[ArcRiley]

Patents. DivX is just a series of alpha-releases for MPEG-4 and is covered by the same set of patents (from dozens of different companies). They're only being nice about DivX until MPEG-4 comes out, then they're going to "crack down".

Remember when MP3 was gaining popularity, Frauhofer just let everyone do whatever they wanted with players, encoders, etc... but once they realised they had something worth charging for they cracked down and their lawyers started sending everyone ceise and desist orders.

Ogg Theora is not encumbered by patents. It is, and will always be, royalty-free. To my knowledge it is the first video codec that can be implemented in truly Free Software.

Theora's File Size

[TrekkieGod]

I'm really interested in Theora, so I've done some looking around trying to get some more information. Theora, from the faq, is a superset of the VP3 codec. I couldn't find much more information on what it is specifically that they improved on.

The VP3 codec has one major drawback in my opinion. It's designed to keep a constant quality without paying attention to the file size. You can do constant bitrate on it, but you can't use multiple pass encoding with variable bitrates to get that balance of quality while having strict file size control (as with xvid). Is this something that is being added to Theora, does anyone know?

Theora for streaming

[ArcRiley]

It's ironic to think of Theora as a "Real-killer", while it does compete on the same field as Real's proprietary video streaming codecs, Real is adopting Theora for the video format in their Helix suite (and throwing money at Xiph to help get Theora out faster).

I've seen Theora be streamed with Icecast (check out the last Ogg Traffic), I've seen decent quality Theora video at 80kbps (320x240@30 even), and I've seen how well it works in an Ogg container, vs Quicktime/AVI which (unlike Ogg) were not designed for streaming.

But don't take my word for it, try it out for yourself! That's one of the reasons the Alpha releases are available to the general public. See what it can do, and prehaps, drop us a donation through Paypal or Affero to help the Theora hackers spend more time hacking.

Whatever happened to Tarkin?

[cozziewozzie]

Slashdot used to report on Ogg Tarkin (next-generation, wavelet-based video codec) a lot in the past, but since Theora showed up as a stop-gap solution, nobody's mentioning Tarkin. Is this project still alive?

Re:Another standard that probably won't get embrac

[asv108]

OGG Vorbis is acutally making up ground in terms of hardware support:

• Rio Karma is probably the most popular OGG portable.
• Roku Soundbridge is a great home player that supports both OGG and Itunes DRMed AAC.

There are a bunch of other devices that support OGG, but those two are my favorites.

Notes...

[Ayanami Rei]

1) Some enterprising math/CS graduate student could probably try a drop-in replacement for some simple wavelet transformations instead of DCT. They might even create a block-level estimater that picks the correct wavelet/DCT kernel to use. I suspect you wouldn't have to touch too many other parts of it.

2) Arithmetic encoding is patented by Samsung. (gak!) And it's not like it's hard or anything. Huffman coding was shown to approach arithmetic encoding efficiency as the number of symbols increases, which usually means that distinction is not something to cry about. So we can deal with huffman vs. arithmetic coding for now until the patents expire, at which point everyone (info-zip, IJG, bz2, xiph.org) will switch to it to gain that extra 1-2%.

Getting Xiph's FLAC to work with Theora?

[Wills]

Has anyone managed to configure and compile any version of FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) after having installed all the prerequisites like ogg* and theora*? I get the errors below despite having the recommended version of ogg devel installed and despite having tried various versions of FLAC from 2001 tarball thru to current CVS FLAC.

cd flac ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin6/ginstall -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... gawk checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking build system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking for style of include used by make... GNU checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output... a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of executables...
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ANSI C... none needed
checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3
checking for ld used by GCC... /usr/i486-slackware-linux/bin/ld
checking if the linker (/usr/i486-slackware-linux/bin/ld) is GNU ld... yes
checking for /usr/i486-slackware-linux/bin/ld option to reload object files... -r
checking for BSD-compatible nm... /usr/bin6/nm -B
checking for a sed that does not truncate output... /usr/bin6/sed checking whether ln -s works... yes
checking how to recognise dependent libraries... pass_all
checking command to parse /usr/bin6/nm -B output... ok
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking for egrep... grep -E
checking for ANSI C header files... yes
checking for sys/types.h... yes
checking for sys/stat.h... yes
checking for stdlib.h... yes
checking for string.h... yes
checking for memory.h... yes
checking for strings.h... yes
checking for inttypes.h... yes
checking for stdint.h... yes
checking for unistd.h... yes
checking dlfcn.h usability... yes
checking dlfcn.h presence... yes
checking for dlfcn.h... yes
checking for ranlib... ranlib
checking for strip... strip
checking for objdir... .libs
checking for gcc option to produce PIC... -fPIC
checking if gcc PIC flag -fPIC works... yes
checking if gcc static flag -static works... yes
checking if gcc supports -c -o file.o... yes
checking if gcc supports -c -o file.lo... yes
checking if gcc supports -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions... yes
checking whether the linker (/usr/i486-slackware-linux/bin/ld) supports shared libraries... yes
checking how to hardcode library paths into programs... immediate
checking whether stripping libraries is possible... yes
checking dynamic linker characteristics... GNU/Linux ld.so
checking if libtool supports shared libraries... yes
checking whether to build shared libraries... yes
checking whether to build static libraries... yes
checking whether -lc should be explicitly linked in... no
creating libtool checking for g++... g++
checking whether we are using the GNU C++ compiler... yes
checking whether g++ accepts -g... yes
checking dependency style of g++... gcc3
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... (cached) yes
checking for getopt_long... yes ./configure: line 8616: syntax error near unexpected token `have_ogg=yes,' ./configure: line 8616: `XIPH_PATH_OGG(have_ogg=yes, { echo "$as_me:$LINENO: WAR
NING: *** Ogg development enviroment not installed - Ogg support will not be bui
lt" >&5'

yes, it is

dnl check for ogg library
XIPH_PATH_OGG(have_ogg=yes, AC_MSG_WARN([*** Ogg development enviroment not inst
alled - Ogg support will not be built]))
AM_CONDITIONAL(FLaC__HAS_OGG, [test x$have_ogg = xyes])
if test x$have_ogg = xyes ; then
AC_DEFINE(FLAC__HAS_OGG)
fi

Rio Karma 20 GB supports Ogg and Flac

[abe ferlman]

Subject pretty much says it all. It also works with linux via the rio music manager lite java program, and I've seen some free software ports but haven't tried them yet. The base has an ethernet port and the device is smaller than an ipod, 3x3. It's pretty nice.

Theora / VP3 probably better than you think

[bigberk]

I've got a bit of a surprise for y'all... have you tried the incredible 'Internet TV' (real-time video streaming) available in the Media Library feature in winamp? The quality is really good; the streams are relatively low bitrate, and they stream beautifully. Well, Nullsoft's NSV format is really just MP3 + VP3. So that's what VP3 looks like, and I think it's pretty damn good -- this is by far the best streaming video I have ever experienced. If Theora is an improvement on this, looks like they're heading in the right direction for streaming video.