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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."
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.
That's OggKate's job. It also works with any other Ogg embedded video codec.
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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