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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."
The bitstream format was frozen, not the code.
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
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).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's the only video format allowed on world #8 site Wikipedia.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
So is MKV, just a container.
factor 966971: 966971
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca