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Working With Ogg Theora and the Video Tag
An anonymous reader writes "The Free Software Foundation's Holmes Wilson is just back from Berlin, where he participated in the Ogg Theora book sprint put on by FLOSS Manuals. Here is a broad look at Ogg Theora and how it fits into the push for free formats: where we're winning, what works, and what could be improved."
To stay irrelevant wouldn't Theora need to be removed from browsers that natively implement it? Please provide the references for such plans by Mozilla or Google.
Also, why do people always leave out any comparison of the Vorbis audio? Is it just as irrelevant? The tag is still in the specs.
With regards to the video tag, why not support both h264 and Ogg Theora?
The game.
Certainly we are allowed some leeway for hyperbole here on /.!
No, Theora isn't dead yet. But with no true proactive strategy to switch users away from other codecs, Theora must rely on users switching away on their own. Given that Theora is, technically, inferior in many ways to other popular codecs and has no clear industry support to improve the codec, it's not clear to me why they would expect users to accept it on a technical level.
Yes, it has the benefit of being patent-unencumbered. However, this isn't as big a deal to users seeking higher quality with better compression, better streaming ability, and wide end-user support.
Please note that "user" encompasses anyone who would use the codec, including companies like Youtube as well as end users.
Not to mention the lack of hardware acceleration makes it pretty much a non starter. My graphics card that cost a whole $50 (a 4650) came with H264, WMV9, DivX, and MPEG 2 & 4 out of the box. And with the rise of netbooks/nettops, green computing, mobile devices and high def video now more than ever hardware acceleration is the way to go. Is there even a beta driver for Theora that gives ANY acceleration?
Without hardware acceleration, preferably given to the big three (AMD, Intel, Nvidia) so they can integrate it into their drivers so users can get full acceleration easily and out of the box, I just don't see Theora gaining any ground. I know that those that support FOSS find this hard to accept, but Joe user really doesn't care if a codec is free or not, hell most don't even know what a codec is, they just want easy to use and simple. Theora need hardware support like yesterday if they want to gain traction. Although ultimately I think it will be like Vorbis VS MP3. Vorbis might work fine, but my MP3 player doesn't play Vorbis, in fact the majority don't. Folks don't care that MP3 is encumbered because it works for them. So while I wish the Theora guys luck it looks like a seriously uphill battle from where I'm sitting.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Try finding video editing software which can edit (not commandline like ffmpeg, I'm talking gui After Effects style) a Theora file.
Even on Linux where you would think ogg would be strongest is horrible in the ability to edit ogg files. I do screen captures from time to time and recordmydesktop only saves out ogg (ogv in later versions) files of the captures. I constantly have to run ffmpeg on the files and spit them out as png image sequences.
Outside the technical merits I don't know how you can expect to get traction on a format that barely anything if at all can edit the darn things.
Just my 2 cents.
Everything that is new starts out in the not particularly popular phase. Some things rise rapidly, usually because there is nothing else before them. Some things rise more slowly. And, of course, there are lots of failures that never make it. Just because something is new doesn't mean squat one way or the other. Everything was new at one point.
I do agree that if the promotion of Ogg Theora is done strictly on the basis of no patent encumbrance, then it won't gain any significant popularity. That's because most people don't know, and even if they were informed, would not care. They see the other codecs (usually without even knowing the word "codec") as working, and dirt cheap, or free (not knowing they paid for it in some way, either in the computer they bought, or the advertising they see). If Ogg Theora is to live on, it will have to be promoted in a way that is beyond the basis of its current talking points.
Dirac has at least the advantage that it has BBC backing. I personally would like at least one of Dirac or Theora to become widely used. But I'm not in the arena that needs to promote it, so I may not get my wish. But please don't knock it because it is new or not yet popular. OTOH, if it doesn't have any gains in a few years, then it should die off.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Try finding video editing software which can edit (not commandline like ffmpeg, I'm talking gui After Effects style) a Theora file.
I've never used After Effects so I'm not sure what features it has. However, if you want a GUI editor which can handle theora files, then try LiVES. It's rather better (in features & interface) than avidemux or kdenlive, neither of which can handle theora. It's cross-platform OSS for BSD-Linux-Mac-Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiVES http://lives.sourceforge.net/
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That's OggKate's job. It also works with any other Ogg embedded video codec.
Audio standardization is not only bigger than the Web, it's older, and it's MUCH more successful than any Web standardization to date, including HTML 5, which is still only 35% of desktops and 90% of mobiles.
I think until the Web development community actually creates and follows even just one of their own standards (maybe HTML 5 will be the one), browser makers and other principals should STFU about audio video standardization, which has been highly successful for 30 years.
During the 21st century thus far, you can't make one fucking Web page for all browsers. But the same ISO MPEG-4 audio video plays in both Adobe Flash and QuickTime Player; both iTunes and YouTube; both iPod and Blu-Ray; both iPhone and Blackberry. Camcorders from Sony and Kodak make the same MPEG-4 video format. Editors from Adobe and Apple edit and export the same MPEG-4 video format. Both NVIDIA and AMD GPU's have ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC decoders in them. There are MPEG-4 players from literally hundreds of manufacturers.
But consider that Linux and Windows can't play all of that audio video, and so we invoke Flash in a Web page, bring in a proprietary app with questionable security context and crashy history and also it changed owners twice already, just so we can make everyday standard audio video work in Linux and Windows!
And during the 21st century thus far, HTML has been static. The object tag bullshit from 2008 is the same object tag bullshit I used in 1998. The W3C and browser makers have contributed almost nothing to audio and video in the entire history of the Web. If not for the fact Tim Berners-Lee created the Web on a NeXT system that had 8-bit audio, maybe the Web would not have had audio at all from the beginning. The Web is turning 20 and still no consumer level audio, never mind pro audio. I produce music ... how can I express a 5 minute 24-track 24-bit 192kHz song made up of hundreds of synchronized audio clips in HTML so I can store it for posterity? You guys are not even getting started with what needs to be done with audio and video on the Web. And while HTML did nothing over the past 10 years, we got RSS and then podcasts, which are filled with ISO MPEG-4 audio video. Even MSNBC.com is MPEG-4 since podcasts, no more Windows Media. Set-top boxes with MPEG-4 decoders in them are downloading podcasts. These podcasts are viewable already in browsers. The browser today is interacting with a metric shitload of MPEG-4, but it's leaving it all to Flash and then ironically, the browser vendors complain that Flash crashes their browser! Incredible.
Think about the fact that Microsoft could not break MPEG-4 standardization in spite of using Windows and Internet Explorer to push Windows Media. That was years ago when MPEG-2 was changing over to MPEG-4. How is Firefox going to do it now, when all the media is MPEG-4 already?
Understand that music and movie makers are creating content for MPEG-4 in the way they used to make CD and DVD. Authoring tools have had MPEG-4 export for many years, it's extremely old news. And music and movies are not tolerant of format wars. The margins are too low. Most music albums and movies don't make money. A format war kills all the smaller artists who can't double up their production costs to make 2 products. Broken audio video standardization breaks artists. The media that is on iPod and YouTube and Blu-Ray is what is going to be on the Web servers. If Mozilla can't play it then Flash will be invoked perpetually. That is all Flash is used for now it seems, is to wrap MPEG-4 up to make it Linux and Windows safe.
Further, this is all political because there is no technical substitute for MPEG-4 that pleases Mozilla. Ogg is offered, but Google has already said that an Ogg YouTube would require more bandwidth than currently exists in the world today. Are you telling me that YouTube is not part of the World Wide Web? Ogg on iPod would get you one quarter battery life because there are no Ogg decoder chips. Should the audio from the Web not play on iPods
I'm afraid you are the one who is wrong on this one. While you are correct about high def I have found that the vast majority of my customers want to watch videos on their devices. With netbooks/nettops being so popular, and frankly the Atom being so shitty (I had a chance to play with a customer's Atom based netbook not to long ago. Honestly my 1.1Ghz Celeron from 2001 had more oomph than that little thing) you pretty much HAVE to have hardware acceleration to get any kind of decent framerates while keeping a decent battery life.
Think of it this way- Why does my Sandisk get 27+ hour on a dinky AAA battery, while my 3 year old Dell gets a little less than 5 on its big brick? Even with my screen and DVD disconnected? Because the hardware in the MP3 is specialized to do a single job-play MP3 files. Soon we will have ARM and AMD low power chips joining Via and Intel in the new ultra cheap mobile space. I have no doubt that AMD will pair their chip with one of their excellent low power Radeon chips, and the Ion platform looks to give us a HTPC that you can slip in your jacket pocket. But the ONLY way you are gonna get really good battery life out of these devices is to let the GPU, which is designed nowadays for decoding video as much as it is for gaming, to do what it was designed for and offload the video from the low powered CPUs.
Now why would you WANT to use a codec that is gonna use 33%+ of your CPU (in your example) while your GPU sits there twiddling its thumbs, when you could get much better performance and battery life by letting the specialized hardware do the job it was designed to do? And believe me the public does notice the difference. They can't tell you why they like it, but they do. Since switching my builds to the AMD 780v and Nvidia 8400 based boards I have had my customers raving about how smooth everything is and how nice their new machines are for watching videos while doing other tasks in the background. Having the GPU do the video heavy lifting leaves the CPU free to do whatever the customer wants and they notice the difference. So IMHO if Theora wants to really get into this game and make an impact then they need to step up and get hardware acceleration ASAP. Because Joe user don't give a crap about encumbered-they just want simple, easy, and smooth. That is what they get with today's GPUs and DivX, WMV9, H.264, and MPEG.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Well, the MPEG-LA is doing a good job with their plan to introduce per-download fees for people using H.264 next year. If you're still using H.264 for streaming video next year, for anything longer than a 10-minute clip, expect to be giving all of your profits away to the MPEG-LA. Or you could switch to some other CODEC like, for example, Theora, which doesn't have stupidly-expensive licensing fees.
To be honest, I'm more interested in Dirac than Theora. VC-2 is a profile of Dirac which, like Theora, is not patent-encumbered. It's based on wavelets and is much higher quality and has a lot more industry backing than Theora (the BBC, for example, are using it for archiving already). Currently, the CPU requirements for decoding Dirac are a bit high. Playing back the Big Buck Bunny example on my 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo uses 100% of one core (although I'm using a slightly old version of the CODEC, apparently the latest one is about 20-30% faster). The BBC is working with hardware manufacturers to get hardware decoders which should make it a lot more attractive. There's also a CUDA-based implementation and a GLSL version which are reported to be a lot faster than the CPU-based version (I've not tried either) and should work on most modern GPUs. Given that most modern handhelds now include an OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU, which means that they support GLSL, it's likely that Dirac playback on handhelds will work nicely soon.
Theora has much lower CPU requirements than even H.264, so using Theora for the low-quality version and Dirac for high quality sounds like a sensible approach.
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