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Firefox 3.5 Beta Boosts Open Video Standard
bmullan writes "Dailymotion, one of the world's largest video sites, announced support for Open Video. They've put out a press release, a blog post on the new Open Video site, and an HTML 5 demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5. (You can get the Firefox 3.5 beta here.) Dailymotion is automatically transcoding all of the content that their users create, and expect to have around 300,000 videos in the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats."
Firefox 3.5 Beta Boosts Open Video Standard
Well, bye bye karma... but..
How is this a Linux story/Firefox story? It's a new HTML standard. All browsers will support it, eventually.
Opera has supported for a while now. Stupid site says I'm not allowed to open it cause I'm not using Firefox.
Hmm, does this seem familiar to anyone?
How does the open video format handle styling the UI? One of the reasons sites love flash for video so much is that it gives them complete control over how the video is presented, e.g. available controls, positions, colors and themes to match the rest of the page, etc. Then you have the more intrusive things, like Youtube's overlay ads, text captions, and suggested videos after playback finishes.
If open video means a widget that site owners have no control over, like Quicktime video embedding, then commercial site operators aren't going to be too keen on it.
I would assume that most users would prefer not to have to download Flash plugins..
Most users are probably more inclined to download the flash plugin that happens automatically for them versus downloading a whole new browser to get HTML5 video tags to work.
Theora is great for embedded devices like cell phones since it is "cheap" when it comes to cpu cycles. For top quality video, Dirac should be used. I wonder when Firefox, Opera or Konqueror will have native support for Dirac.
In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.
But as of 2009, Thusnelda is coming soon. The Thusnelda encoder has already fixed some of the problems that Theora inherited from On2's VP3, thanks in part to the flexibility that Xiph added to the Theora bitstream format. Sure, it's still inferior to x264 (50% bigger rate for same distortion as of about a month ago), but it's improving.
Why not wait until the standard is "up to par" with the likes of Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe's Flash?
Because sometimes worse is better. For example, worse can be better because it's Free and thus more available for deployment on devices other than PCs.
The meaning of "3 dB" is "twice". Decibels are a logarithmic system, used for two reasons: 1) because for large & weird systems it's easier to say "120 dB" then "a trillion" (of course, this works in certain sciences only), and 2) because our sensitivity to light, sound and probably other sensory input is logarithmic so yes, "3 dB" taken in this context can intentionally be parsed as "small". But for pre-set algorithms (i.e. made to a predefined spec), "two times" is actually a lot of space to fuzz over. You can only do so much before you need to change the very spec that makes Theora - Theora.
-- Sig down
While I am happy to see that Mozilla and Firefox are setting the standards, let me remind readers that previous evaluations have found the Theora encoders inferior compared to contemporary video codecs. In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.
The important thing is that we move toward open standards, away from proprietary solutions, because open standards allow us to do more cool stuff with them.
Remember RealPlayer? Remember all the bitching about what a piece of crap it was? People had to have it, even though it sucked, because a lot of content was only available in RealAudio format. Today, RealPlayer is all but gone, and you can play the same type of content using whatever software you like. Why? Because when Apple added Podcast support to iTunes, Podcasts suddenly became hugely popular, and virtually all of the content providers that used to offer only RealAudio now offer Podcasts instead. This means that users are free to choose whatever software they want, and competition will drive the software to improve.
In the same way, if web sites move away from Flash video players to using HTML5's video tag, it will mean users will no longer be dependent on Adobe's plugin to access the content. Unfortunately we still have patent issues to deal with; Ogg is unencumbered, but better quality codecs will be supported by most browsers, and if we can get content providers to get used to the idea of making their video content freely available (instead of wrapping it up in Flash), there can be competition among codecs too.
It's not a perfect world, but it's one step closer.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
[smarmy]An objective evaluation of H.264, VP6 and WMV9 show that they are still not as free as Theora. While we hope that these codec's patent holders will continue to work on this defect and catch up, as of 2009 it is still premature to say that any of them will ever be "up to par" with Theora, which totally stomps those other codecs in all freeness tests. Why promote an "inferior" product?[/smarmy]
Now for a little less smarminess: we're talking about interchange formats, used on the fucking internet where you don't know what OSes and archs either side is using. I know Theora is portable to everything and usable by everyone. I don't know about those other codecs. If you want to use WMV9 for your internal security camera, that's totally fine, but on the internet how could something like that be useful? What's the use in serving video in a format that people can't play? Theora doesn't have that problem.
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