Theora 1.0 Released, Supported By Firefox

YA_Python_dev writes "The Xiph.Org Foundation announced Monday the release of Theora 1.0. Theora is a free/open source video codec with a small CPU footprint that offers easy portability and requires no patent royalties. Upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera will play natively Ogg/Theora videos with the new HTML5 element <video src="file.ogv"></video>, and ffmpeg2theora offers an easy way to create content. Theora developers are already working on a 1.1 encoder that offers better quality/bitrate ratio, while producing streams backward-compatible with the current decoder." Adds reader logfish: "Since its bit-stream freeze in June of 2004 there have been numerous speed-ups and bug-fixes. Although Nokia claimed it to be proprietary almost a year ago, nothing has been proven. So now it's time to help it take over the internet, and finally push for video sites filled with Theora encoded vlogs, blurts and idle nonsense."

Comments

Re:Containers...

[iamdrscience]

Just like MKV hardly anything will play it, but unlike MKV it doesn't actually add anything useful.

Mod me troll if you like, but I speak the truth.

Re:Long test cycle?

[stevek]

The bitstream format was frozen, not the code.

Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking

[stevek]

There's certainly better quality codecs out there, compared to 1.0. Take a look at the work happening now on 1.1, though, it gets very competitive:

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo5.html

Dirac

[ast_rufio]

Dirac (see http://diracvideo.org/) probably has much more potential to become the next generation open video codec. From what I understand it is more cutting edge and than Theora due to e.g. the use of wavelets.

Re:Dirac

[TheRaven64]

They're aimed at different markets. Dirac is a very high-quality CODEC, but it is incredibly CPU intensive. Remember what MPEG-4 was like when it was introduced? A couple of days to encode a film, and you could only just decode it in realtime on a fast computer? Dirac is like that. It will be a few years before you start getting Dirac support in something like an iPhone. If you want to stream HD content, Dirac is a good choice.

In contrast, Theora is very cheap in terms of CPU power. You can run it on very low-power devices. This makes it a good choice for Internet video, where the viewer might be using a massive desktop computer, a mobile phone, or anything in between. You wouldn't want to use Dirac here, because even fast laptops would struggle not to drop frames, and handhelds would just fail.

That said, my mobile phone now has about as much CPU power as the PC I had when I first got an MPEG-4 video, so eventually it will be feasible to run Dirac in low-power devices (sooner if they have dedicated ICs), but in the short term it's not ideal.

Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking

[TheRaven64]

Think of Theora as a successor to MPEG-1 on the web. It works everywhere, is easy to support, and doesn't need much CPU to play back (so you can use it for mobile sites), and the quality is 'good enough' but not great. At the other end there's Dirac (which also went 1.0 recently), which provides amazing quality but at the cost of much higher CPU loads. If you're streaming films or HDTV episodes, you'd want to consider something like Dirac. If you're just showing little clips and you want them to just work, you'd use Theora (well, at the moment you'd use MPEG-1, but hopefully in the future you can use Theora).

Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking

[Godji]

Flash doesn't just work. It requires a proprietary plugin that crashes my browser all the time, and is not 64-bit.

Re:Horray

[David Gerard]

It's the only video format allowed on world #8 site Wikipedia.

Re:Back to the better!

[gad_zuki!]

People and companies likes flash players because it usually just works. The days of embedding video objects are dying because in practice this is what would happen:

1. WMV files would lock up or you would have to spend 20 minutes at windows update downloading the newest wmp or reinstalling the plug-in.

2. Mac users would complain that WMV files arent working.

3. Realplayer would do the same, except the install would crap up your computer and ruin all your file associations. You would also have to troubleshoot plugin issues.

4. Quicktime files would crash the browser and then you would have to install the newest version usually along with itunes in a 60+ meg download. Windows users would complain how crazppy quicktime is.

5. Someone would embed an avi and no one would be able to play it because end users have no idea what codecs are.

6. Some plugins would work in IE but not in Firefox.

What flash did is put all video in one cross-playform container and player. Turns out people like it this way.

Re:Well...

[doti]

So is MKV, just a container.

Re:Uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Xiph had the Software Freedom Law Center help establish that Nokia's claims were untrue. Mozilla sought counseling from lawyers before supporting Theora. Is that enough?

Re:Why not using the "object" tag?

[TheRaven64]

The object tag is not a great way of doing anything. It requires too much knowledge of the plugin that will be used to render it to be at all nice to work with. The big difference between the audio and video tags in HTML 5 and the object tag in HTML 4 is that they have a set of well-defined parameters. If you want to use an object tag for video, you need a set of param tags inside it giving parameters to the player. Each player (WMV, Quicktime, VLC, etc.) understands a slightly different set, and the set a generic plugin for video should understand is not defined by the standard.

Re:Containers...

[BrentH]

Many posters here are confusing two things here: codecs and containers. Theora is the videocodec, OGG the container (which has the extension .ogv). OGG (as per .ogv) is also the standard container for Theora, which Firefox supports. But, MKV being really a superior container on pretty much all fronts, could contain Theora equally well as any containerformat (actually, better IMHO). Just making sure everyone is talking about the same thing.

Re:Horray

[David Gerard]

Commons:File types - this is what is permitted by the WMF MediaWiki installation.

That's not what "free" means.

[Grendel Drago]

So unless you have specific examples of I-TU chasing down people who implement their (publicly available) specifications, I consider H.264 to be free...

Sure, you can consider it to be free, but boy is that ever not what free means.

And a publically available spec means little or nothing. Patents are publically available, but try implementing those and see if you manage to escape the long arm of the litigator.

Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking

[BrentH]

Here's a link that compares last years Theora with xvid and divx:
http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html
Note that this is before the major changes made this summer and the major changes still coming (in the encoder). The VP3 technology actually puts it between MPEG-4 ASP (xvid/divx) and H264 in theoretically achievable quality, it's just that the encoder has been extremely badly tuned up until this summer, because of lack of interest. If Theora can catch up to MPEG-4 ASP codecs and perhaps even close in on H264, it would make for an excellent patentfree codec.

Re:Uh?

[steveha]

That "nothing has been proven" comment is pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek, just like the "take over the Internet" part.

The video encoding field is crowded with patents, so it's probably impossible to do something like Theora without needing a patent license. But Theora is based on some patented technology (VP3) whose patents have been donated for free use, irrevocably forever. And Theora is free, open source software with a BSD license. If you use the Ogg container format, Theora video, and Vorbis audio, you have a completely free media format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora

So, you can use Theora for any purpose, without needing to pay royalties, without needing to get permission. That's why it's so funny that Nokia claimed Theora is "proprietary"... I do not think that word means what they think it does.

steveha

Re:the new HTML5 element

[bigmammoth]

you should take a look at the mv_embed script. Once included your embed line looks like this:

<video src="my_video.ogg">

This then gets rewritten to java cortado for IE clients. Or if you don't like cortado and would prefer flash fallback:

<video>
<source type="video/ogg" src="mymovie.ogg" />
<source type="video/x-flv" src="mymovie.flv" />
</video>

Or if you want to make the video accessible with multiple downloadable video formats and multiple timed text tracks (annotations, multiple subtitle languages and what have you) all pulled from xml via JSON request (to support remote embedding) all auto-scrolled/updated with javascript based on whatever underlining playback system your browser supports:

<video roe="my_roe_file.xml">

(uses ROE for the xml format) presently in use in blogs such as this one

Re:MPEG 4 LA terms

[delt0r]

Firefox would have to pay the maximum fee as would every derived product. Thats not so cheap (4Million+ freking dollars better spent *anywhere* else). And if you think it so cheap, will you donate that money please.

You are also forgetting the fees for producing content in H264 that come into effect later.

They are also leaving out a *lot* of fine print. In order to get a license you don't just have to pay, but you must agree to the license terms (aka hardware players must use zone flags, DRM etc). There is more than they tell you without NDAs. Not to mention all the lawyer fees in between.

They are not even going to let you pay a blanket fee for a product that others can use "free" in there own products. No matter what you pay. Because then there is no one else that needs a license and hence no one to tie into these extra terms.

Also what makes you think the fees won't increase at a latter date?

Encumbered means just that. Encumbered.

ps I have talked to them about a license......