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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."
I really want to like Theora, but it's really, really hard to get around the quality issues. VP3, which Theora is based on, just isn't competitive these days. It was subpar back in 2001 when it was donated to Xiph, and the contrast has only gotten worse over time. H.264, VC-1/WMV9, MPEG-4 ASP, even Adobe Flash 8 (which added VP6) are clearly capable of outperforming it.
If nothing else, free is good (both in terms of speech and beer) and a royalty free standard for video would be great, but it's too hard to ignore just how inferior this standard is. I'm a pragmatic person, I can't think of any reason why I'd want to use this over a better codec; free isn't all that enticing if the video quality sucks.
Sounds like feature creep and bloat to me.
Why? Ins't going to affect you if you don't visit pages with videos and, unlike Flash there's a browser preference to start all videos in paused state. The Theora binary library is only 250 kB on AMD64, even smaller on x86. The Flash plugin, is much, much bigger.
Video on the internet (think youtube, movie trailers, pr0n, etc.) isn't going away any time soon.
The current state of the art is to have a proprietary Flash plugin installed in almost every browser. Switching to native support for an open format directly in the browsers seems like an improvement to me. In the good ol' days, people considered image support in browsers as bloat too..
And Firefox isn't alone here: Opera and Safari will support it too (altough Safari will not support Theora out-of-the-box).
Just like MKV hardly anything will play it, but unlike MKV it doesn't actually add anything useful.
You've obviously never negotiated costs with MPEG-LA, or you wouldn't say that.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
"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"
I admit I don't know what the situation with Theora's licensing history is but this comment strikes me as rather worrying. We're being told to use it because no one's proven it's not likely to end you up with licensing troubles later on. Personally I'd rather before something "takes over the internet" that the burden of proof was on it to demonstrate that it is completely open. This should be as easy as showing use of a relevant open license no?
From what I can see it's under a BSD license and so should really be open. Is this the case? The way the article summary is written just really doesn't instil confidence in their intentions.
Giving this codec the benefit of the doubt I think the summary is just a case of carried away fanboyism having an adverse effect towards the neutral observers view of the situation much as seeing a forum war between a PS3 and a 360 fanboy might put someone off the idea of online console gaming.
Can someone a bit more grounded give us a better view of the concerns and realities of Theora licensing and it's suitability as a codec to "take over the internet"?
Yep, and Windows proves Linux is unnecessary as it is a widely accepted and usable solution for operating a computer.
Erik Dalén
Thats parents point. H264 etc are patent encumbered so Theora does add something very dam useful to the community just like MKV does. MPEG-LA is the group that runs the patent pool on mpeg/h264 etc while the OP was suggesting that Theora is without merit.
If we want h264/mpeg4 support in FF you going need about $3M+ donated per year for the license fees.
If you have ever needed to care about the licensing of things like codecs you would know the value of Theora and Dirac.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Only for certain definitions of easy. Let me know when you have a point and click version that my non technical friends can use.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Ummm, literally true, but your comment seems mostly unrelated to the post it is in response to. There was a discussion about container formats, AVI came up in part of that discussion as a container format, and then you told them it was not a codec.
As Wikipedia would say: "Citation needed".
Care to show an example of *any* MPEG-2 codec out performing the current Theora encoder on a typical web-video 500kbit/sec stream? Forget the new enhanced theora encoder, MPEG-2 can't even match the old crap. Plus mpeg-2 is patented to hell and back, you even have to pay for mpeg-2 decoding in Windows to play DVDs!
Can you cite a *single* example showing Vorbis to be glaringly inferior to AAC? At best the listening tests show AAC to edge out Vorbis only for speech samples at the lowest bitrates (where Xiph has Speex, which blows AAC away for those applications). And no multi-channel? wtf. Vorbis supports 255 channels.
I shouldn't expect better from slashdot, but could you at least find lies that are a bit less obvious.
Ogg high overhead? Okay, Ogg/Vorbis+Theora is something like 1% overhead vs a typical of 0.9% overhead for a movie in AVI. You win there. Then again, OGG provides frequent checksums so that a damaged OGG/Vorbis file will *never* break your speakers and damage your hearing. People who have had the misfortune of hitting a corrupted MP3 in their iPod playlist should be able to appreciate the advantage of this approach. What you consider a fault I consider a feature. Egads, room for design differences exists! who would have thought?
what good are 64bits in a console? what good are 64bit in a computer? why is generally bad to use a 32bit library wrapper on a 64bit app? why thunking doesn't work for the 32bit->64bit conversion?
why are we running flash in the same process as the web browser?
The parent post is not insightful, it's a blatant troll.
Thank you for retarding the progress of Good Technology like MPEG-4 H.264/AVC and MPEG-4 AAC.
Try playing H.264 on a 200MHz ARM.
Everything that Xiph has created is shit.
Look at any of the listening tests. Vorvis is very competitive.
OGG - hacked up container with high overhead, incompatibility with non-Xiph formats, and no new features over AVI or MKV.
All containers are incompatible with each other. And AVI isn't a streaming container, unlike ogg.
Vorbis - hacked up audio codec that doesn't do anything MP3 does and is glaringly inferior to AAC. No multi-channel support? No Spectral Bandwidth Replication?
Yet it does well in the listening tests.
No wonder nobody uses it.
Apart from so many high-end video game developers and by assosciation, anyone who plays the games? According to the wikipedia page "nobody" (your definition of nobody) uses speex either,
Theora - the newest in Xiph's line of crap. Except, this one doesn't even pretend to be useful. 1995 called. They want their MPEG-2 back.
Can you name a better codec with a decoding cost as low as Theora?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yes there are examples. Just ask the mplayer developers. Even in the EU its not as clear cut with software patents as /. will have you believe. Our lawyers said that your fine if you aren't selling it, probably, but don't push it with commercial (for profit) products and services. The idea of using codecs on the basis that "they won't do anything" is about as smart as claiming RIAA won't do anything for downloading music. Quite a few said that back in the napster days. You remember how that went.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Those legacy browsers are the same ones that don't even support SVG yet, and in some cases PNG. I'd have to argue with the assertion they need to be supported. If those users are interested in the 21st century web, they can upgrade to something decent.
So, it's not really like YouTube. Who's going to self-host their own videos? That is the whole point of YouTube!
I'd really like to give you an "Insightful" on this one, but I prefer to reward logged-in users with those few mod points I have.
You don't deserve any damn mod points whatsoever- it's assholes like you that ruin moderation systems.
Mod points are meant to highlight posts that are worth reading- even if you disagree with them- and bury the crap. It's not meant to signal approval/disapproval nor (in your case) should it be a self-indulgent reward for user behaviour that you happen to prefer. Yeah, tell me that's not how people use it in real life- that's exactly why certain moderation systems suck (last time I checked, the Digg one was worse than useless for this reason).
ACs start at 0 anyway- which makes it worthwhile logging in anyway- not as a "punishment" but purely because posting ACs makes troll/flamebait/drivel posts more likely. If an AC makes a good valid point that isn't reliant upon proof of identity, it's valid regardless.
What makes it worse is your inappropriately sanctimonious attitude towards the other user who (quite validly) chose to post AC, and your implication that your misuse (or lack of) mod points in this case was the reward for "good behaviour". *You* were the one in the wrong.
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