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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."
Thank flying spaghetti monster. Flash is the only proprietary software I use. I can't wait for in browser ogg theora support to take off, and the online video market to embrace it. As soon as I see it working, I'll delete my google video account and self-host all my videos.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I'm really not sure if google pays flash licensing fees. If they do, the fees may not decrease if X% use open standard players and 100-X% use flash. Until google can cut flash loose, those flat rate fees may not decrease. (I.E. Adobe says "Google, pay me $250K per year and I'll let you use all the flash you want").
However, adobe may not charge for flash applet generation and google may not pay a single penny to adobe for the flash portion. If that is the case (which is more likely as a "free" media standard would make flash the ubiquitous "standard" it is to day), Google may only offer the firefox HTML standard flash player as an option.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
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.
Ohh wait a minute...There is a Slashdotter who noted this as well.
Frankly, it bothers me big time. Why not wait until the standard is "up to par" with the likes of Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe's Flash?
You must have missed the retraction that was done when it was shown that they were calculating PSNR wrong for x264. Theora is nowhere near the quality of even a low-range h.264 codec.
I read that part. VP3 was garbage, as was the alpha version of Theora included in ffmpeg2theora 0.19. But even the corrected graph shows that Theora has gone from garbage to only 3 dB behind x264.
Sort of related, because a lot of people have DivX on their PC or in their DVD player: how does Xvid (an MPEG-4 ASP video encoder) compare to recent Theora and x264?
http://www.youtube.com/html5
I read that part. VP3 was garbage, as was the alpha version of Theora included in ffmpeg2theora 0.19. But even the corrected graph shows that Theora has gone from garbage to only 3 dB behind x264.
Yeah, on one single clip using the default settings of x264 which hardly give the highest attainable quality.
Sort of related, because a lot of people have DivX on their PC or in their DVD player: how does Xvid (an MPEG-4 ASP video encoder) compare to recent Theora and x264?
Theora can't beat XviD and XviD is inferior to x264.
Safari supports the HTML5 video tag, but doesn't include Theora support because Apple considers it a patent lawsuit magnet.
Thus Safari users are shown better compressed, but definitely patented, h264 streams on those sites.
IIRC some other WebKit browsers use GStreamer as the back end for their video tag support, and thus probably support Theora.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
The video tag is great, but it has a fatal flaw (actually two fatal flaws, but one is much more important.) The attempt to standardize on a single codec was correct, but now that it has failed the video tag becomes much less useful. At least with flash you can host a video and be sure that most of your audience will be able to view it. With the video tag, even when browsers that support it become widely available, which codec do you encode the video in? Already the browsers are going in different directions, with Safari using Quicktime to play h.264.
Hopefully it gets sorted out soon. Personally I would like to see h.264 adopted if the licensing issues can be sorted out.
I blogged about this issue a couple of days ago, if anyone is interested in a longer version of this comment.
(The other fatal flaw is that the video tag makes it easy for people to download the original video file - something none of the big content providers want. Yes, everyone knows how to do this with Flash videos, but the illusion of content protection is there.)
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
Theora can't beat XviD and XviD is inferior to x264.
Nothing beats Xvid for low bitrates. (The bitrates which create ~350MB videos)
It blurs more details than some other codecs, which lets it save on space and put more detail into important stuff.
h.264 gets quite blocky well before Xvid does; mind you, it does a better job preserving details when a higher bitrate is allowable. h.264 is often the preferred format for raw video footage, since at high bitrates it comes remarkably close to totally uncompressed video. (which is usually too big to do anything with)
For static content, VP7/VP8 are quite impressive, but VP3... not so much.
A presentation with slides occasionally changing works wonderfully in VP7. It'll use a couple hundred kilobytes on the first frame, plus any frame where it suddenly changes, but aside from that it won't use much/any bandwidth. The result is a video that looks like a 32bit gif animation(perfect quality).
On2's algorithms for figuring out which pixels changed are quite advanced; a 10 second video showing a slide was a couple kilobytes smaller than a 4 minute video showing the same slide... with x264 and xvid, I didn't get results like that even after spending a day tweaking everything.
On2's encoder also automatically removes minor jitter/angle abnormalities, so if the camera was being held by a person, the difference in size will be even more pronounced.
Too bad last time I checked, their encoder was single-threaded. I'm also betting "Superior codec for lectures." isn't the kind of endorsement they wanted. :P
I have a really naive question.
Is there any License that will prevent transcoding original video produced by me, to another format, like .flv?
I'd like to make my videos open source only, including the "container".
it's easier to say "120 dB" then "a trillion"... " Then why not say 12 bel instead of that big 120 dB number?
Will you pay the 5 Million yearly license fees so firefox/mozillia etc can provide free legal support....
Thought not.
Oh and soon there will be a fee on *providing* content in h.264.
And I left out all the other parts of the license agreement that firefox would be forced to follow before they would be given a license. And this would make it incompatible with GPL or even open source in general.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!