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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."
It would be nice if YouTube supported in-browser Theora once Firefox 3.1 is released. It would also be nice if Theora were a good enough codec for that to be practical for them.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Wikipedia doesn't have that much Theora content yet so if this is going to become more universal more work on the content side is probably needed.
I've put more Theora videos on Wikipedia commons than almost anyone else. The problem is, ffmpeg2theroa (which is the most direct way of generating theora videos, by transcoding them from other video formats) is not all that great. I've tried to get three features included in ffmpeg2theora with no success at all. The developers don't have bugzilla and don't respond to email. (For anyone interested, those three features are: [1] a command line option to use whatever resolution the target video uses rather than manually specifying it [2] the ability to rotate by 90 degrees, and [3] because many cameras (including mine) tend to set a couple of bits wrong when creating quicktime movies, ffmpeg2theora need to be less picky about following certain file specifications. Right now, it errors out without producing any output)
So yes, this is good news. But until there's more content to actually view using this - and that necessitates better production-side software - it's not all that big of a deal.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
And the constant Flash crashes in Ubuntu...
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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!
How would Mozilla developers fix a crash in closed-source Adobe code?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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"
How would Mozilla developers fix a crash in closed-source Adobe code?
They may not be able to fix the problem, but at the very least they should be able to prevent Flash from crashing Firefox.
... because it's patent-free. Quite a few games I see have vorbis.dll and therora.dll's about.
Yeah, it's not like anybody used the IMG tag either, all media on the web is in OBJECT tags.
Ah, nothing like Slashdot to bring out the best in humanity. The doom9 comparison is four years old... that would be like comparing something to the MPEG reference code. The latest work on Theora shows a pretty clear doubling of quality per bitrate vs theora from a few months ago... but since this is Slashdot, I'm sure that little details like that won't slow anyone down. Good job, Nokia.
The level of free-content zealotry that has infected the Wikimedia Foundation has done nothing but drive contributors away and remove useful content from their projects. They're a bunch of idiots shooting themselves in the foot.
How is "free-content zealotry" in an organization which exists solely for the purpose of developing free libraries of free content a bad thing?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Opera has also added support for Ogg Vorbis and recently released a build that supports video, 3D and their proposed file access: http://labs.opera.com/ Hopefully, Firefox and Opera can jointly tilt the scales in the favor of open video. Google should start using Ogg Theora instead of the proprietary bits they spew out now.
The truth is, Theora takes much more processing power to decode than h264. It can't match the quality of h264 when compressed to the same size. Beyond that, there are HARDWARE h264 decoder chips that require little power for use in mobile devices, not so with Theora.
Free and open formats are awesome. But sometimes, just sometimes, being free and open isn't as important as being efficient and portable. Its about priorities and usefulness in the broader market. Theora has no traction in the mobile space. there is no indication it will surpass h264 in quality at similar file sizes.
what good is a free and open video codec if it requires more disk space, more processing power, and has no ability to be offloaded to a specialized chip in a mobile device?
If you want companies to adopt Theora, fix those issues. That's the benefit of open and free software. You are free and open to make it better until it meets the demands of the marketplace.
After some time spent googling and figuring out how to use Mencoder and Ffmpeg to do the rotation and theora transcoding, I wrote a Python script to do the heavy lifting. So that takes care of my problem, but that won't work for 99.9% of people who have this problem.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
.
Blipverts, anyone?
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
There is another free codex that I heard was pretty good. BBC has the Dirac video format. Could this be an alternative?
And MPEG3? We should use a dead, patent encumbered, standard for HDTV that is designed for 25+mbit/sec for web use? Give me a break!
Many of the codecs people think are "free" are really quite expensive with per unit encoder, decoder, and encoded media costs. It's easy to ignore these when they are packed up as part of the "Microsoft tax" but their burden on content creators and society in general is pretty substantial.
When you're a Wikipedia, serving hundreds of millions of users per month on donations, this matters. Especially since a key part of their mission is making sure that everyone has the freedom to modify their works without paying tribute to middlemen like Apple and Nokia.
I am not sure whether Firefox 3.1 will ever be finished as most Firefox developers seem to be trapped without power in Canada... :-) See: http://planet.mozilla.org/
Those of us on x86-64 already have this, because Adobe doesn't feel a 64-bit flash is important and we have to run 32-bit Flash via nspluginwrapper. When flash crashes for me all that happens is that any flash objects on open web pages disappear and turn into empty white squares. I just hit reload and it starts up flash again.
When I was evaluating codecs for an embedded platform H.264 consumed three times the MIPS of the Theora decoder, on our target CPU architecture.
H.264 did win out on quality, but the licensing was very expensive... almost as costly as our whole CPU. The cpu load would have required us to add an expensive decoding chip. Because of those negatives H.264 was simply a non-starter.
Fortunately our application didn't require interworking with the outside world so Theora was a good fit. At the low bitrates we needed Theora's quality was far above our other options (MPEG1, for example) and reasonable enough.
As Theora adoption increases we can expect the pace of increase to increase. For many people the objective balance is already in favour of Theora but for most applications compatibility dwarfs all other factors. Few care about 10% differences in bitrate, and free has a huge advantage over the long term in terms of archiving ubiquity.
The HTML5 spec originally specified that, as a baseline, conforming implementations should include a minimum of Vorbis and Theora.
This would mean that web developers would have a reasonable baseline they could target that would work for all users, but still offer up 'higher quality' versions in more efficient alternative formats if the user had the right software.
Sadly, some of the MPEG video patent holders have big voices in the W3C and demanded that there be no baseline. (What a shock: they don't want to have have a more level compatibility playing field because they don't want to have to compete on quality and price).
W3C pulled the baseline due to those demands... but at least they didn't mandate useless or proprietary codecs.
No one proprietary format can gain universal adoption because some companies are always going to push their own, which is why we have this morass of incompatibility... FLV, WMV, Real, ugh. Apple pay Microsoft for a video format? Not if they can help it!
Companies like Apple are perfectly happy having their own walled gardens of incompatible formats since they've made quite a business out of it. The lack of a good standard suits them just fine.
So... providing good working web video becomes a numbers game and it's all up to us users to set things straight by making good choices, which is why this is such big news. Internet standards... protocols, formats, etc. should belong to the public. Anything less will make us perpetual victims to fighting between big companies and leave us subject to constant taxes on our internet use.
It's "available for Windows" in the same sense that all open source software is -- they provide the source, and (assuming you have a compiler on your windows systems) you do the job of compiling it yourself.
OK, that's techically true - you've just ignored the fact that most windows-compatible open source software has binaries freely available. I don't have any compilers on my windows box and I run dozens of free software packages (I practically live in PuTTY, for example).
That's so far from usable for the vast majority of windows users that I do not count it.
It sound like you are trying to say that the vast majority of windows users are incapable of following any written instructions. I don't think that's a useful observation and I don't think you have the data available to you to be able to make such a judgment anyway - though you are welcome to prove me wrong by posting the datasets from your experiments.
Or, to put this another way, my momma told me if I didn't have anything meaningful to say I shouldna say nothin'.
I really don't want to sound fanboyish, but, Opera implemented the attribute (though only for Windows at the time) at 8th November 2007 and it added the Mac and Linux builds at 18th July 2008.
But, as always, it didn't got the respectable place in /.'s front page.
I am also dissapointed in the fact that Wikipedia didn't even say a single word about Opera supporting the same spec. as Firefox even earlier than Firefox.
Yes, I do know they support free (as in free speech) software so they recommended Firefox, but not saying a single word about Opera makes me (and Opera's devs) cry.
[insert lame sig here]
It is old technology there are better alternatives that were free earlier. I would even support Ogg Tarkin more than Theora! Dirac (BBC), SNOW (Michael, FFMPEG) are by far better alternatives (wavelet) and they support lossless coding. That is what we want, especially for future generations.
Theora has always been overrated. Now with the C implementation of Dirac and the hardware implementations that existed before there is no reason to still use Theora. Next to this anyone having directshow filters have Dirac or SNOW embedded (I think they are both enabled now), likewise for ffmpeg/avcodec users.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
Ogg and Vorbis names of characters in Terry Pratchett novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld I'm not sure where Theora originated.
Ogg did not originate from Discworld, according to Wikipedia:
"It is sometimes assumed that the name Ogg comes from the character of Nanny Ogg in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. However, it derives from ogging, jargon from the computer game Netrek which came to mean doing something forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. At its inception, the Ogg project was thought to be somewhat ambitious given the power of the PC hardware of the time."
If Wikipedia is the only (major) site using Ogg Theora - and as far as I am aware, it is - then this announcement affects only people who visit Wikipedia and and play its media content. But, Wikipedia already has support for embedded Theora and Vorbis. About a year ago, Mediawiki introduced a java player so that ogg Theora and Vorbis videos could be embedded and played within pages.
The built-in Firefox player will effectively replace Mediawiki's java player (for people using Firefox, at least) but functionally it will not affect user experience. So like I said - this is a good step in the right direction, but it's not ground shaking.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Why do you need JPEG / PNG support in the browser? ... So it actually *works* for most users.
The whole "sit back and let a plugin handle it" approach has resulted in a pretty good chunk of the web locked up behind proprietary players and authoring tools. Since it's an explicit goal of the W3C to not propritarize the web by adopting non-royality-free technology some folks argue that they ought not to propritarize the web through inaction either! ... and a browser that can't support the basic functionality that people expect while browsing without a bunch of extra plugins isn't doing its job very well.
Opera has been working on video tag support for some time, their test build (a version of Opera 9.52) was released two weeks ago.
Article: http://labs.opera.com/news/2008/07/18/
Download links: http://labs.opera.com/downloads/
Well, yes, AMD and Nvidia will never write acceleration support for Ogg Theora, so it would be up to the open source community to do that, if at all possible? I had an idea (dangerous, I know, especially at night) that maybe GPGPU could be utilized for this? Maybe I'm just very, very silly...
My sig will be released in 2015 third quarter. Rating pending.
...and figuring out how to use Mencoder ...
I run Womencoder. It's nicer to look at, but verbose mode usually produces too much irrelevant nonsense. </snark>
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
"Of course the problem IS VLC and not Theora"
Fixed it for you. A video file does not leak memory nor does a codec specification. The implementation (VLC in that case) is the problem. But I did not read the Theora specification, maybe it says "After the frame is rendered allocate some memory and never free it", who know?