Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 mean how many people pick up their 128meg solid state ogg player in the morning??
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
Do we really need yet another format? i know the mantra of "choice is good," but then having to track down all the little things i need to decode every random video or audio file i come across is sort of the opposite of good. it's bloody obnoxiouse, honestly. i still don't know what an asf is (mostly because i am too lazy to look it up).
Here's where to look for the FAQ.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
While this is true, it's always possible that we'll come up with something a bit better in the file size/quality ratio. I mean, look at XviD vs DivX. But, that doesn't mean we all have to jump every time a new codec hits, but considering the success of the Vorbis codec for audio, it's a bit sad to see another ogg bite it.
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
Sure... "Ogg" is the actual format of the file, which is simply a container for the content encoded within.
I'd like to see ".ogv" start popping up to signify Ogg video.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I always thought Theora was kind of cool... But frozen? My God! They must really kick arse!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Will Theora codecs ever be as good as MPEG-4 ones? Or we have to wait for wavelet based codecs to have a patent free good format?
IIRC the MPlayer lead developer (Alex) said that he reckons Theora will never get close to MPEG-4.
I think the OGG video stuff will have an easier go of it than OGG the music format.
OGG audio had a few problems - at the start, not as many people knew about it so it was slow to adopt to different players and rippers that people liked to use. The worse problem was that even now it's in almost no hardware, so it made little sense to encode to OGG if you might have wanted to use a portable.
But with video the whole field is still wide open. Getting a Quicktime or Windows media file to my TV is equally hard, so I might as well store my video in OGG as anything - and I am more likley to be able to build a box I am happy hooking to my TV for video than I would have been trying to construct an audio device I would like. And I have a lot more motivation with every consumer video device being generally locked down in very annoying ways.
The other thing that will help is that consumer device makers will have little reason not to adopt this video format since it can be another item on a checkbox and is free to implement. Also the processing power is going to be there in whatever device is created - with OGG audio, for a while there was no good example code for playing OGG files on devices without floating point support (as I remember it).
So, good luck Ogg Theora! I plan to start using it as soon as I can and see how it fares.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
...so now we'll have 'xxx releases new xxx player' with a hundred responses of 'Does it do ogg' followed by another few hundred responses of 'Ogg is not the format, theora is the encoder'
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Someone's gonna mod me down for trolling because I don't echo the Slashdot groupspeak on this. Oh well.
Who honestly cares about or uses Ogg? Really. I have yet to even contemplate it. Sure I have the codec on my machine, but I haven't used it. Nothing is out there in the format that I am interested in or have even ran across accidently. I like portability of my music so I use MP3. (I can't very well install the codec on my machine at work.) I have no intention of recording anything into the format, so it would be a poor choice for me to use it. How many people is it a good choice for? Why?
What about Theora? Probably the same thing, at least for me. Most people already are happy with using DivX, XviD, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, or whatever. Adding another into the mix, while giveing people more choices, probably won't sway one person over. Ogg just didn't do it for me. Theora may not, either.
The only place that I can envision Theora being used is by developers needing royalty free in-game movies.
Or am I completely off base here and it will take the world by storm by sheer ease of use, compatability, support, file size, file quality, consumer knowledge, and/or consumer acceptance?
Clue me up.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
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.
... there's no reason to delay adopting a free alternative any more!
...
Hmm. Thinking.... Thinking.... There must be SOME reason... This is tough. Oh, wait! I know! I've got one!!!
Beta 1 is not out yet
Yeah! There we go. See, I knew I could come up with something.
There's already an excellant open-source codec out there in xvid. Honestly, no one is even going to consider using this Theora codec. And Theora is based on VP3?? HELLO?! There is already a VP6!! And as far as containers go, theres Matroska, which is a far better open-source container than OGM (If you can really count OGM as a container, its really just a hack).
Reading the posts, it seems that people are missing a major use for Theora and even Vorbis.
You know all those games you have that use MP3 for music? They had to pay a fee to do so. You know all those games you have that use bink video for cutscenes? They had to pay a fee to do so.
Now they don't. If there is a free alternative of comperable quality, the developers will use it instead of paying a $25k technology licensing fee. And the companies that don't will end up priced out of the market.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Actually, this was announced two weeks ago.
A format that can be used by the free-as-in-speech porn community.
Producing a better product isn't good enough. You need a SIGNIFICANTLY better product. For me, ripping even a small ~50 CD collection to ogg isn't worth the marginal benefit, even if it is free. 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.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
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 ?
--- There isn't any problem that can't be solved by a small, low yield nuclear device, is there??
Because it's better, it's free, and it's open.
It's not ubiquitous, so what? Do you have to commit to using just one format, and no other?
If you prefer better, free, and open, when you see an ogg in the list of downloads, choose it over the WMP/QuickTime/Real file. If you don't, then pick the one you prefer.
If you're worried about the web becoming more complex, don't. MS, Apple and Real will just have to work to make things easier than ogg--they have to in order to keep the money flowing in.
If you're bothered that there's some people out there whose idealism you find disconcerting, just remember, you made a pragmatic choice (you gave up a little money and control in exchange for ease-of-use), these ogg (vorbis, theora, flac, etc) people are working to make it so that you won't have to make that pragmatic choice. They're trying to make the world how you'd really like it to be if you had the choice (unless you are all about acquiring money by controlling access to technology, in which case they are your worst enemy, and you are right to fear them--they will ultimately win).
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 $250 investment in Zaurus served more than one function, though it might not be as nice and surely is not as rugged as dedicated players that now cater to ogg. Sharp promisses you can sync Zaurus to outlook as well as read Word Docs.
I'm not qualified to talk about video formats yet, but I have a feeling that I'm going to like theora.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It may be open source, but MPEG-4 is patented up to the hilt. You could, in fact, be prosecuted for using it. Not likely, but possible.
We're not talking OGM. OGG is a container itself. OGM was a hack to add extra functionality. Functionality which OggFile2 will supercede. Currently though, the OGG container is plenty powerful enough for the short-term.
VP3 is a base to work from. MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are MPEG-1 with tweaks and improvements. VP6 and VP3's code are probably a lot closer than you think. Don't be too suprised when Theora II comes out and matches its rivals. You're right though, Theora isn't as good as VP6, but it is as good as MPEG-4 (which you deemed excellent yourself).
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.
Yeah, cause outside of places like here AAC is a really well known format.
Yeah, but it's not the fault of the format, it's the fault of "Who the hell needs it?"
From the point of view of the general population, how does MP3 not fulfill their needs? They don't feel the need for anything more, so there's no need for OGG.
But.......my file manager (and sometimes my browser) is launching the player based on the file extension.
What the hell do you use?
MIME-types, baby.
Extensions are for suckers. I mean, even Windows gets it now.
I think I need a new sig here.
Actually, all of the file extensions people use are dumb. The file extension only really matters in any deep way to the user; the computer can determine trivially what's in it. The user never cares what container the file uses, and rarely cares what codec it uses. The user cares how the file behaves when played: Does it make noise? Does it look like anything? Does it have text? Does it change over time?
.png, .gif, and .jpg should be .img; .mng and some .mpg and .wmv should be .vid; .wav, .ogg, and .mp3 should be .aud; and most .mpg and .wmv and now some .ogg should be .av; given that the situation is already hopeless, it doesn't really matter that they're using .ogg for both.
In order to be sensible,
If the people who chose file extensions ran a supermarket, it would sell "cardboard boxes", "jars", "cans", and "plastic bags".
By the same token there was no need for AAC either. Yet somehow that one made it into a player. I'm not sure whether we can really blame the public, or whether the true blame should go to the device manufacturers for not making their devices upgradeable to support more formats.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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!
you want to spread Theora? encode a bunch of pr0n in it and spread it out on the net.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
The Vorbis people are pretty aweful in that department. Why are they hiding the freaking acm version of the codec? When 1.0 or whatever came out I thought for sure they would change their crappy policy of hiding the directshow codec. But alas no. They for some reason don't want to reach 90% of the computing public.
From the readme for the acm version which your likely to find several places with the exception of vorbis.com
"Vorbis Sucks, but I found the stupid goddamned folder on some site in Mexico.
Right-Click on the vorbisacm.inf file, and choose install.
Make sure you've got this dumb-ass vorbis.acm file in the same directory when you're installing.
Why this was difficult to find and why there were dead links to this crappy codec all over the place I have no idea.
Don't like me making this easy for you? Blow me."
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
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).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Usually, Ogg files with video in are referred to as "Ogg Media", and given a .ogm extension.