Theora Codec Ported to Java

fons writes "These guys have ported the Theora codec to Java. This means that ANY Java-capable browser can now be used to watch video streams on the net (clients don't have to download a player!). You can watch a demo showing some boring guys sitting in the office. At least the music is ok :) On their site you can find a link to an interesting interview with the boss, and it looks like more cool stuff is coming soon."

Comments

Seriously works!

[Anonymous Coward]

For some reason it seems to load faster than realplayer, quicktime or windows media player.

I am using Java 5 RC which for me GUI program feel faster than .Net apps like RSS Bandit! Its actually a real option for anyone wanting to stream video.

Also, please note I do feel dirty calling it Java 5...

And nice work putting a video stream on the front page! Thats nice and considerate /.

Re:Seriously works!

[Lisandro]

My first thought exactly. "Holy shit, it looks better and loads faster than a Realplayer stream!". This is on my work's terminal (a PIII 800mhz with 512mb) on Opera 7, and the stream is flawless.

Makes you notice how far Java has came peformance-wise lately. Ah, and kudos to the programmers. This is great work.

Its not futile!

[Ars-Fartsica]

Ogg Vorbis hasn't taken over the world, but people are using it and some vendors are supporting it. Theora will likely never slay Quicktime et al but that doens't mean a meaningful community of users can't emerge.

Don't discount the business value of these open formats - for a hardware or tools vendor it is one less license to pay.

clients still have to download a player

[Speare]

Clients still have to download the player, it's just that the player is now in a form which is downloaded with less effort.

Re:clients still have to download a player

[Tobias Luetke]

No, Huge difference, The player runs in a sandbox. That means everyone can be 100% certain that it won't install spyware of any sorts in the system.

This is very very good.

Looks great and loads quick

[spludge]

I just tried it in both Firefox and IE. It looks great (sounds good too) and it loads really quickly! I hope sites start switching to this rather than using real media or WMV streams for windows media player.

Re:Slashdotters will agree...

[mcrbids]

I do not agree. Having a java codec for browsers may as well be having no codec at all. Reasoning:

1) The only users that allow their browser to run java are those that either don't know how to disable it, or don't know what it is....<SNIP>

And I would put you squarely into the LATTER category. Or, were you not aware of what a JVM "sandbox" is?

2. Java is slow and gobbles up resources....

So is Windows. So is KDE. So is perl, PHP, Ruby, GLibc, and about a zillion others. Perhaps you should read up on the realities of so-called "BLOAT"?

The fact is that faster computers have not really resulted in us running the same programs faster. It's resulted in us running bigger, fancier programs at the same speed we always have.

It took about 3 minutes for my 20 Mhz 286 to boot up. It takes about that long for my 2 Ghz Athlon to do the same.

What's the difference? Go on back and USE that 80286 AT for a while, and tell me what that software "bloat" really got you...

Re:Slashdotters will agree...

[mabinogi]

Ok, so where are the JVM exploits?

Javascript is NOT java, so saying "Javascript is vulnerable, so Java must be" is pointless.

I'm not necesarily saying that java isn't a security hole, I'm just asking that if you're making the claim, then make sure the evidence you provide is relevant.

as for 2, what you said there applies to all media players.
WMP, Quick Time, Real One, they all eat memory and processor cycles.
Have you actually tried it? I don't think that you can claim that it will bog down the machine and be worthless until you try it yourself.
I haven't tried it either, so I can't say that you're wrong, but there is nothing in your post that gives any real evidence as to why this codec is worthless. Speculation is not evidence.