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Theora I Bistream Format Frozen
p80 writes "The Xiph foundation announced today that the 'Theora I bistream format is now frozen,' even though Beta 1 is not out yet and encourage people to try it as 'there's no reason to delay adopting a free alternative any more!' Mplayer and Xine both support Theora. For Windows users, Directshow filters for Ogg Vorbis, Speex, Theora and FLAC are available here. You can get test cases here and transcode Quicktime movies to theora on that page." This freeze, as an anonymous reader puts it, "means that all future versions will support the format as it is now. It will be interesting to see if there is as much uptake for this as there was for the Vorbis sound format."
the format for audio is Vorbis. Ogg is just the name of everything, like Ogg Theora
Here's where to look for the FAQ.
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Yes, I agree with you also. Especially since Microsoft will not allow the codec to be included in installs ever. However, there is still some acceptance take for example UT2004. All the music score is done in ogg vorbis now that is cool! If only all hardware players could play it.
.ogg is just like .wav, as it's a container. There can be different types of data inside the container.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Vorbis is an audio codec...but you knew that.
Theora is a video codec.
Ogg is the transport layer that both are stored in, so a video file will be Theora-encoded data inside an Ogg file, while audio is normally Vorbis-encoded data inside an ogg file.
Ogg can/is used for other audio codecs, too, like FLAC.
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They've refered to it as "bistream" in the title of the post on theora.org, and in the body of that post. But elsewhere they call it "bitstream", and that makes more sense to me at least. The term "bistream" is also not in their FAQ.
Google returns Results 1 - 8 of about 17 for bistream theora for me, which is few enough for me to consider it a typo. Is it a typo, or does it mean a dual stream of some kind ?
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I used ogg audio to encode my music collection because I didn't have an mp3 encoder and I consider it a lucky break. It was easier to use krecord, audacity and abcde in Debian Woody than it was to get any kind of mp3 encoder. The files turned out to be smaller but of comparable quality to downloaded mp3's. I did it mostly so I would not have to worry about my dying phonograph player and saved out wav files before encoding. abcde worked great for my CDs and the collection, as you know, is much more convenient on a hard drive.
As for devices, having ogg forced me to get a Zaurus as a portable player. My handspring visor, though still useful, needed upgrading. Zaurus plays both ogg and mp3 from CF or MMC and does so without the annoying DRM problems most players have. So, my $250 investment in Zaurus served more than one function, though it might not be as nice and surely is not as rugged as dedicated players that now cater to ogg. Sharp promisses you can sync Zaurus to outlook as well as read Word Docs.
I'm not qualified to talk about video formats yet, but I have a feeling that I'm going to like theora.
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I'm not sure that's the case with video. As far as products (not technologies), there's Quicktime/Sorenson and WMV which definitely are not ubiquitous; both are proprietary and somewhat expensive to license. Then there's MPEG-4 which is even more absurd at licensing. Real's format does not really fall into the same category. If anything was "ubiquitous" I would say MPEG-2, but that does not count in the same category either as it does not serve the same purpose as MPEG-4 (MPEG-2 is nearly useless at low bitrates).
Yes, there are free divx/xvid implementations but those are useless in commercial offerings as they are not properly licensed. So as late as Theora would be getting to the market, IMO, the field is still wide open. Not only has the consumer market not been saturated with any single low bitrate high quality video compression technology, but video "sharing" itself has not reached a maturity level of audio streams when Vorbis first beta was released and standard frozen.
I predict that many other games will follow suit becuase vorbis is smaller in size while being comparable in quality to mp3, and with modern computers being extremely fast already, the additional overhead that decoding ogg vorbis creates would not be significant.
I noticed the other day that Chrome, an otherwise dull and unremarkable FPS, uses Ogg Vorbis for its music. I'm sure there are others.
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Now I don't wanna hear another fewl asking about it
We put up some sample video torrents including the three winning Creative Commons videos and a full length independent film called "Honey". All of them are made available under Creative Commons licenses. Free videos in a free format, fancy that? Share and enjoy!
Perhaps if oggs were particularly small, say 10-20% the size of the standard mp3, you would probably see more people flocking to it. But in the age of $1/gig hard drives, space isn't such a huge issue.
It's all about your situation. I run Linux at home, so mp3 vs. vorbis is a toss-up in terms of "support". (Actually, since mp3 support isn't shipped with RedHat/Fedora by default, Ogg Vorbis is actually *more* supported....) At work, I wrote my own music player software for my computer lab, and I found it easier to just modify the source to ogg123 than to try to get something else working. So Ogg Vorbis had the advantage. Not to mention I've got 24 client machines in my lab which I can get working on ripping and encoding all at once, giving me a net total throughput of about 4 minutes per CD (counting my walking around to physically swap out CDs).
As far as portables go, I'm almost certainly about to get a Sony CLIÉ, whose audio player supports Ogg Vorbis. And 128MB memory sticks can be had for around $33, and each hold right at four hours of music encoded at 64kbps, so I can buy a handful and have several preloaded "mixes" for long car trips.
I don't know if you've done a listening test with Ogg Vorbis at 64kbps (a.k.a. quality 0) vs. standard mp3 at that bitrate, but I'll give you a hint: one is quite listenable, the other isn't. And AFAIK I don't have access to wma or mp3pro encoders under Linux, so if I want listenable music at 64 kbps, it's going to have to be Ogg Vorbis.
Now, I wouldn't want to listen to 64 kbps compressed audio sitting in my living room on my $150 headphones, but for my noisy car over my factory speakers, it's as good or better than the radio or a tape deck, I'd say.
And speaking of space not being such a huge issue, on Thursday I should receive my new 160 GB hard drive from NewEgg. Then I should finally have enough hard drive space to rip my ~250 albums to FLAC and leave them there, so I shouldn't have to rip ever again, since I can just write a shell script to convert from FLAC to whatever format I like. (And in fact, I already have a couple scripts to do just that.)
Anyway, the beauty of the open market is that consumers can choose the option that suits them best. For me, that's Ogg Vorbis, and I like that it's a format I could potentially use for the rest of my life.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
You can also emerge libtheora first, just to make sure. mplayer/xine will only build with Theora support if you have libtheora on the system, and that may or may not happen automatically if you have the "theora" use variable in place first.
IIRC, Theora is an AVI replacement codec, it's just a file wrapper, much like AVI files can have DivX/XVid/whatever video and MP3, AAC, OGG, WAV sound tracks.
The DirectShow filters means it'll be able to be opened by VirtualDub, and possibly rendered by it.
Woohoo, Xiph ! Anyways, we have a Theora live webcam stream for you guys to test out. AFAIK we're the first doing this. http://mirror.fluendo.com:8801/ With MPlayer, for example, you'd do mplayer -cache 40 http://mirror.fluendo.com:8801 to watch it. If you're lucky you can catch Rupert coding. Not a lot goes on in this stream, we're fairly boring (Read: our boss is watching too) We'll be adding Vorbis sound sometime this week too. The server will be Coming Soon to a Repository Near You.
Okay, with any luck, everyone will go out, get their video players working with Theora, and start encoding content. So, I think I should throw-out some quick tips before people start complaining and/or getting frustrated...
First, to get Theora playback for any players on Linux, you need to compile and install the alpha3 snapshot first, and to do that you need the CVS version of all the "vorbis-tools" as they are called. Once you've done that, you just have to re-compile your video playing programs (like MPlayer) with something like "--enable-theora" passed to configure...
As for encoding, you're probably going to have sync problems... I don't want to waste my time getting in-to details, but suffice it to say you need a version of MPlayer newer than 1.0pre4 (CVS right now), and you need to use the "-vf softdup" option when you are dumping the video to the fifo (from which the Theora encoder is fetching the source video).
Also, trying to have mplayer dump to video and audio fifos at the same time is guaranteed not to work... You need to either dump the audio to a real file (wastes space), or launch two instances of MPlayer, one dumping audio from the source file, one dumping video from the source file.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't started encoding video with Theora, so just keep these tips at the back of your mind, because you'll need them when you do start.
The only other tip I've got, is to wait until a better encoding program is written. The libraries are fine, but the wimpy example programs leaves a lot to be desired. When other media programs (mplayer, or transcode) start doing encoding via the Theora/Vorbis libs, we'll be a lot better off.
Just hope that Theora/Vorbis encoding support finds it's way into MPlayer (or transcode I suppose), then you won't need to worry about all of these issues ('softdup' will likely still be needed though).
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Usually, Ogg files with video in are referred to as "Ogg Media", and given a .ogm extension.