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Theora I Bistream Format Frozen

Posted by timothy on from the but-it's-a-dynamic-freeze dept.

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."

4 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. Have questions about this codec? by saskboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's where to look for the FAQ.

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  2. Re:Can Someone Explain What this is? by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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  3. Re:Ogg isn't a format by Tranzig · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ogg is a format. Vorbis is the name of the audio codec, and Theora is the name of the video codec. Ogg is the container, just like avi.

  4. Re:Fighting a losing battle by zurab · · Score: 5, Informative
    I realise that free (as in speech) sound and video formats are a good thing but it seems that certain formats, particularly mp3 are now more or less ubiqoutous (sp??).

    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.