World's First Large-Scale Ogg Theora Stream

Ur@eus writes "The GNOME European Users and Developers conference is currently underway in Kristansand, Norway. The whole conference is available live online as an Ogg Theora stream (the videos of the talks are also archived). This is very exciting as it is a proof of concept that it is possible to do high quality streaming using a fully free format today. The stream is done using the Fluendo streaming server software which will be released under the GPL in a few months. You find information on how to view the streams at the GUADEC streaming website."

Comments

Huh?

[Bingo Foo]

What concept needed to be proved? Does the freeness of a codec affect its scalability?

Re:Huh?

[BFaucet]

I believe the significance of this is that now there's a large stream available on the web... that you can point people to. Saying to someone that a ogg streams rock is very different than showing them.

Hopefully radio stations and Public Radio shows will adopt Ogg. At the moment, most if not all use Real *shudder*.

Re:Huh?

[Mr. Bad Example]

> What concept needed to be proved?

That thousands of people saying "Ogg Theora" all at once sounds like a cat the size of Montana hacking up a hairball.

Re:Huh?

[Psymunn]

Forgive me for beign naive, but if i went up to the magority of people i know and said 'hey man, there's this kick ass confrence streaming on the internet, and guess what: it's OGG' i'd receive a whoel lot of WTF.
Don't get me wrong, i support ogg because it's 'free as in awesome', and i hate realplayer because it's 'annoying as in YAPI' (yet another plug in) but i think another format is just going to confuse new users.
What's more, joe user isn't truly going to embrace something like ogg until bob porn producer does.

I'm willing to help test this

[Anonymous Coward]

...as long as the person in the streaming video is cute, female, and scantily clad.

Re:I'm willing to help test this

[Vaevictis666]

I'm willing to help test this...as long as the person in the streaming video is cute, female, and scantily clad.

The usual would be three options, pick two. But since this is the internet, you'll probably have to settle for just one of the three... Sorry.

Real Problems

[artlu]

Sadly, most of the streaming video is still reliant on Real from my experience. However, most places now have quicktime/mpeg alternatives. Does anyone know if Apple's new codec which will be released with Panther is planning on being Open Source? It is supposedly going to be able to be used for video streams.

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Re:Real Problems

[Wesley Felter]

Apple releasing an open source codec? Are you kidding? Various people are working on open source H.264 implementations, though. (Just like MP3 and MPEG-4, it's only open source in countried that don't recognize the zillions of patents that cover it.)

Re:High Quality Streaming

[sik0fewl]

That's only funny in stories about Real Pl ...BUFFERING...

username and password

[Bob Loblaw]

I particularly like them giving away the username and password of the presentation computer at the end of this archived ogg stream:

http://stream1.hia.no/ogg/dump/room1/ogg-theora- vo rbis-high.2004-06-27-18:47:39.ogg

It proves the high fidelity that ogg has to offer :]

Good! My representative couldn't make it there

[KjetilK]

That's really interesting to see. I'm in Norway, and I've been writing my representatives in the Norwegian parliament "Stortinget" to get them too attend this conference. It is not only about GNOME, mind you, tomorrow, there are a bunch of politicians there, from the starting keynote, then about software patents, EU policies, and finally a big keynote by Dr Edgar Villanueva, our friend from Peru.

Unfortunately, the guy who was closest to getting there was stuck at his office, in spite of Kristiansand being his hometown.

That's too bad, but now I can actually try to have them look at the stream instead, and even failing that, there's the archive.

Anticlimax

[sploo22]

It would be a lot more impressive if the stream hadn't GROUND to a SCREECHING HALT within 5 minutes of being posted...

How to play Theora in Windows RealPlayer

[AlexJeff]

Here are the instruction on how to play Theora in your Windows RealPlayer:

http://stream1.hia.no/instructions/theoraandreal wi ndows.html

Here is the best link to the free RealPlayer for Windows:
http://www.real.com/freeplayer/?rppr=hc. org

Excellent

[nizo]

This is very exciting as it is a proof of concept that it is possible to do high quality streaming using a fully free format today.

All three people who have software to decode this format and 10 megabit connections are very excited!

Re:Excellent

[Nodatadj]

It was working for us (the gnome people who aren't at guadec) all day yesterday and this morning, so I would say that yes, these problems are due to the /.ing

The city name is...

[easter1916]

Kristiansand, not Kristansand. Never heard the Tricky song?

I met a Christian in Kristiansand
And a devil in Helsinki.

Playing Theora files in windows

[hsoom]

I can't get the stream to work so I just tried playing the first file in the archive and it worked.

I can get the theora files to play under the latest version of VideoLAN client.

There are instructions for setting up Real Player to view Theora files. Although some people are saying that the latest version of Real Player is not so bad I still don't want to install it. I must have a grudge :-) and Real Alternative using Media Player Classic (MPC) works fine.

Is there anyway to get Theora files to play with MPC? I thought that if I installed the Directshow Filters it may work but no such luck. This would be really handy because I use MPC for just about everything else.

I wrote that discussion paper...

[Goonie]

Streaming is not that big an issue for Wikipedia. As you'll note from the page, the majority of which seems to have been widely accepted, generally Wikipedia video clips should be short and available in low-resolution versions, so they can just be downloaded in their entirety rather than streamed. The more important issue for Wikipedia was that the bitstream was frozen a little while ago, so anything encoded with the present encoder will be readable into the future.

Quite frankly, however, nobody has actually sought to place video on the Wikipedia yet. I hope it will happen soon, but right now there's been a fair bit of talk but no action from any contributors.

As to your suggested topics, see the last section on legalitiesin the discussion paper. There's a whole pile of extra paperwork you need to keep track of to legally post videos of the kind you wish to post...