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Ogg Theora In Firefox, With Wikimedia Support
An anonymous reader writes "Ogg Theora support for the HTML5 <video> tag is in the Firefox 3.1 nightlies. Theora is the only video format allowed on Wikimedia Commons, so Wikimedia people are pushing Wikipedia readers to download a nightly and try it out. Break it, crash it, report bugs, get it into good shape and nullify Apple and Nokia's FUD the best way possible. They may have gotten the words 'Vorbis' and 'Theora' removed from the HTML5 spec, but the market will tell them when their browsers are sucking."
With the way things are going this sounds like it's going to be quite a fight between the proprietary and open worlds. I can't think of anyone better than Noikia and Apple to play the side of proprietary. ... Not even Microsoft seems to be able to pull off, well, evil as completely as those two these days. And with Mozilla and Wikipedia on the other side it's not like either side of this fight is hopelessly out-gunned.
Of course, this is interesting to more than just Wikipedia, but few other players are both as important and have such a clear long-term vision.
Round TWO! FIGHT!
I keep hearing that Theora has problems. Does it really? Or are these rumors FUD?
Some of the "problems" seem to be misunderstandings. Like, someone encoding at a too low bitrate, and then complaining that the quality is poor. Perhaps encoding isn't very fast either. I know Theora isn't the best codec ever, but it's decent.
I've heard it's difficult to program for the Theora libraries.
But what I've heard the most of is unethical and unwarranted efforts to stop the use of Theora and Vorbis as well. In light of that, I regard reports of "problems" with a lot of skepticism.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Since the purpose of ffmpeg is to convert to/from many video formats, why isn't the conversion to Theora simply added as another codec to ffmpeg? I guess I don't understand why ffmpeg2theora needs to exist at all. (I've just used ffmpeg a few times, so I don't know too much about it, just curious.)
Developers: We can use your help.
The instructions you cite were originally copied from the English Wikipedia guide (and its associated talk page), which I wrote :)
My current solution is a bit more elegant than the ones on that page. I wrote a python script (which wraps around ffmpeg) to convert directories full of quicktime movies (which is what my camera creates) to ogg theora.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
There is another free codex that I heard was pretty good. BBC has the Dirac video format. Could this be an alternative?
To top it off, it also taxes the CPU more than alternatives, which is still important for really high bitrate videos.
Which most likely is lack of support for hardware acceleration in the video card drivers. Easily remedied if AMD or Nvidia can be bothered to step away from their Watt eating contests.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
I think you are misinformed. Older Theora was pretty bad, but the current builds are great. If you use ffmpeg2theora well you can actually get better quality with smaller file size than the equivalent h.264 if the content is animated (as in cartoons, CG, etc.). Theora does still suffer with sharpness issues, and in a case where I would need to preserve sharpness I would choose h.264 over Theora. But for web video, h.264 has some definite drawbacks. As for which CODEC is more "web suitable", I'd have to question what type of video you intend to embed. I think in many cases people will want small, easy to handle video (easy to make, easy to distribute, small file size) in which case Theora is in my opinion the superior CODEC. If you want to play DVD quality video in your web browser then h.264 is probably a "good" choice.
If we can use BOTH Theora AND h.264/MPEG4 with the video tag then I think everyone wins. Is that not the issue here?