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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."
Here's where to look for the FAQ.
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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.
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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.
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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.