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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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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?