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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."
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.
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.
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.
Ogg/Theora IS porn to the FOSS zealots. Anything at all encoded in said formats gives them a chubby.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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).
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
Matroska isn't an MPEG standard. It's patent and royalty free, and the standard itself is open for FOSS to implement (as many have).
"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
It's the only video format allowed on world #8 site Wikipedia.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
"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
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
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?
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.
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
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?
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?
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
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
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?