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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."
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.
OK, Developers got my attention, because I am one.
I understood the word "Releases".
And that's about it, from that title.
All I can think of is Gary Larson's comic strip where it has the "what you say" vs. "what they hear" when you speak to a dog...
Blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah GINGER...
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
I'm happy to announce at long last the release of theora alpha 3. This incorporates all the bitstream changes we wanted to make both for future encoder improvements and to permit lossless transcode of VP3 content. This is an important milestone for us on the road to a stable release.
As this is an alpha release we are again providing sources only. See the files section of downloads. This version requires libogg 1.1 or later and libvorbis 1.0.1 or later.
Also new in this release are a set of experimental tools in the win32 directory contributed by Mauricio Piacentini. This includes a transcoding tool for avi-encapsulated vp3 video which also works on linux.
We hope to not make any further incompatible bitstream changes, but this is still alpha code. Don't use this for content you're not ready to re-encode!
Thanks to everyone who contributed!
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?
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
I notice that the CBC's Quirks and Quarks radio show supports Ogg. Figures that a science program would be clued-in on latest developments. Hopefully the rest of the CBC will catch up--they still only offer the Big Ugly Three (and sometimes only Real).
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
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?
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
My Rio Karma works just fine with Ogg. In fact, all I have on the thing is Ogg.
It works incredibly well, and with 20gigs for $250 shipped, and a Java-based interface program (which runs on FreeBSD and Linux), I'm very happy with it.
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.
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?
You are right that the 'brand names' don't support these formats very well. This is why you should probably look past the brand names and check out the little guys...
- 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.These things are not implemented yet, and will probobally not be useable on earlier Beta releases either, but as of Beta-1 the bitstream will not change in future-compatable ways. That is, while some optimisation fields won't be supported yet, no new fields will be added. Future players will always be able to play media encoded by the Beta releases. The same is not true for movies encoded with the Alpha libraries, so Beta-1 is really the first point where it should be used for distributed movies.
The 1.0 release will include support for atleast decoding these optional fields, it'll likely use them all too for encoding, and should be considerably higher quality than the VP3.2 codec from which it started with. It'll always, however, be able to upgrade VP3.2 media to Theora and, again, always be able to play media encoded with the Beta releases.
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.
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.
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.
./configure /usr/bin6/ginstall -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes /usr/i486-slackware-linux/bin/ld /usr/i486-slackware-linux/bin/ld option to reload object files... -r /usr/bin6/nm -B /usr/bin6/sed checking whether ln -s works... yes /usr/bin6/nm -B output... ok .libs ./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
cd flac
checking for a BSD-compatible install...
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...
checking if the linker (/usr/i486-slackware-linux/bin/ld) is GNU ld... yes
checking for
checking for BSD-compatible nm...
checking for a sed that does not truncate output...
checking how to recognise dependent libraries... pass_all
checking command to parse
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...
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 $(MAKE)... (cached) yes
checking for getopt_long... yes
NING: *** Ogg development enviroment not installed - Ogg support will not be bui
lt" >&5'
yes, it is
dnl check for ogg library
XIPH_PATH_OGG(have_ogg=yes, AC_MSG_WARN([*** Ogg development enviroment not inst
alled - Ogg support will not be built]))
AM_CONDITIONAL(FLaC__HAS_OGG, [test x$have_ogg = xyes])
if test x$have_ogg = xyes ; then
AC_DEFINE(FLAC__HAS_OGG)
fi
Scroogle
Rob Lanphier
Developer Support Manager
RealNetworks
What you describe is Trademark law, which is probably the sanest branch of north american IP at this point. You cannot trademark common words or phrases (modulo certain exceptions) so an effort is generally made to prevent brand names from becoming same by prosecuting uses of the trademark that don't refer specifically to the actual product.
Copyrights belong to the author (or sponsor) automatically and can only be given up voluntarily or lost when the rights period expires, which is now some significant time after the author dies.
Patents are granted on a first come, first served basis to whoever applies for one and provides a monopoly on the implementation of a particular method for a fixed term.
Neither copyright nor patent rights are contingent on enforcement the way trademarks are. Holders of these two rights can and do choose which infringements to pursue.
This is the problem with MPEG-4. We can avoid the copyright issue by writing an open source version from scratch, since the standard is at least published. We don't have to call it MPEG-4 so there are no trademark issues, although while the MPEG logo is trademarked in the US, one can refer to the specification because that itself is not a trademark and because there is no attempt at confusion.
But there is no way around patents because they grant a monopoly on implementation rights. Just because you wrote your own doesn't mean you don't have to buy a license, or that you won't be forced to buy one sometime in the next 20 years. If you live in a jurisdiction that doesn't enforce patents, you're fine for now. If you just want to trade movies underground, you're probably fine because there's safety in numbers. But if you're like me, and want digital media to be as easy and ubiquitous as webpages; something anyone can do, something you don't need permission for, you need a something that's Free as in Freedom and Free as in Beer. Something like Theora.