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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."
How does ogv compare to say, mkv?
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.
ogg/theora porn?
Sounds like feature creep and bloat to me.
Don't worry, the pages that implement it will never get loaded into RAM because nobody will ever use it.
NO CARRIER
The bitstream format was frozen, not the code.
It's only feature creep if it's unnecessary. Youtube proves the contrary.
It's only bloat if they rewrite their own theora codec.
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
I'm wondering if the HTML5 DOM methods for controling video playback would be supported by XHTML 1.0 when video is embedded as an object?
Anyone?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sounds like feature creep and bloat to me.
Are you talking Firefox or HTML5 or both? I know it would be massively awesome if the blink tag was only supported through an addon or plugin.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
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.
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).
"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
What API? Tags do not have APIs, and the <object> can be extended with "params"s... This "video" tag looks a lot like an old Netscape HTML "extension" to me.
It's the only video format allowed on world #8 site Wikipedia.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
See:
http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo5.html
http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/ffmpeg2theora-0.22-thusnelda.exe
And this is only the start. Just look at what the Lame encoder was able to do with the MP3 format in quality.
"smaller random nerd sites and one big nerd site"
there, fixed.
factor 966971: 966971
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
Use Gstreamer as-installed on your existing system. Put this in a simple bash script and have-at:
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="$1" ! decodebin name=decoder { oggmux name=muxer ! filesink location="$2" } { decoder. ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! queue ! muxer. } { decoder. ! queue ! audioconvert ! queue ! muxer. }
Add the Fluendo codecs, and you have a properly patent-licensed, legal way to transcode most popular media to no-patent-royalties media types.
Judging by google results, it sounds like "video microblogging", a la Twitter.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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
Check it out. http://theorasea.org/ Right now they don't host video.
Oh, and to answer this question:
The answer is, yes, depending on the codec in question (for example, Microsoft would pay the MPEG-LA to distribute an MPEG2 video decoder). But keep in mind, a file format, in and of itself, isn't subject to patent. It's the methods used to create the file format that are the problem. So exporting to, say, DOC format is fine, since there's no magically algorithm necessary to do that. MPEG2, however, required implementation of patented algorithms, hence the licensing requirements.
[citation needed]
rewriting history since 2109
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.
Commons:File types - this is what is permitted by the WMF MediaWiki installation.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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
Thank you for retarding the progress of Good Technology like MPEG-4 H.264/AVC and MPEG-4 AAC.
If their creators hadn't made those codecs prohibitively expensive to license, W3C would probably be advocating them. You're getting mad at the wrong people.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
...but, according to the constitution, mathematical algorithms are not supposed to be patentable. I say that everyone needs to completely ignore these patents and force suits en masse to be brought to the supreme court. If a court orders you pay, refuse on the grounds that it is unconstitutional. If everyone did this, they couldn't put everyone in jail.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
EBML and XML are not exactly equivalent. EBML lacks an equivalent of namespacing, and an EBML-document is self-explanatory, since tag-names are integer-encoded.
IMHO, EBML with an extension to the standard to describe id:s used in sub-formats would kick so much ass. As soon as you make it possible to devise general editors for the format, all kinds of possibilities opens up.
I even took the effort a couple of years ago to jot up a SourceForge project for it, but as with most sourceforge-project I ran out of time soon after. :S http://runestone.sourceforge.net/
This then gets rewritten to java cortado for IE clients. Or if you don't like cortado and would prefer flash fallback:
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:
(uses ROE for the xml format) presently in use in blogs such as this one
Heh, getting a bit off-topic here, but Marc Anddddreeeeeeeeewhatzit of Mozaic/Netscape/Mozilla fame spoke at our local LUG the weekend after the Netscape code went public, and one of the things he mentioned was that the very first patch they received was...one to make blink tags work for images!
Open Source can be a power for great evil as well as for great good! :)
that's used on a site that gets over a million visitors each day
WP isn't a video server, a very small amount of their pages contain moving images. They can have as many visitors a day as you want, they all go there for text & images. Youtube is the #3, is 100% video and not a bit of theora there.
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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......
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?