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."

Comments

Theora quality; An exciting battle

[a nona maus]

I might claim that this event is unimportant due to Theora's quality compared to the leading-edge codecs, but it looks like that has been fixed, or soon will be. Obviously no one sane will knock Vorbis' quality.

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!

what are the technical probs with Theora?

[bzipitidoo]

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.

Re:Theora still lacks good creation software

[Raul654]

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.