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."

Comments

Theora

[ardor]

Unfortunately, Theora will stay irrelevant where it matters most. In sites like Youtube, h264 will prevail. And this time, h264 is the (much) better tech as well.
To get the same quality as h264 video, Theora video needs higher bit rates, which translates to higher traffic, and in the end costs more money. The much higher popularity of h264 compared to Theora doesn't help, either.

Re:Theora

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. And the OP linked article has a joke-of-a-comparison. I encoded the same video, same dimensions, same frame rate, and was able to widdle h264+AAC bandwidth down to 260 kbps and it still looked better than Ogg/Theora+Vorbis especially where the scene zooms towards the dark cave with sleeping bunny.

Re:Theora

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:Theora

[Anonymous Coward]

And staying with that kind of thought process, one wonders why anybody bothered with Linux development from the mide 90's.

Re:Theora

[FrostedWheat]

Not to mention the lack of hardware acceleration makes it pretty much a non starter

You say this, but nowhere do you say why it needs hardware acceleration. Have you even tried it? My fairly old machine plays a 1080p Theora video just fine. A completely unscientific test with top shows about 33% CPU usage, peeking at about 40%. The same machine cannot decode 1080p H.264 video in real time.

Theora just isn't as CPU greedy as H.264 -- it doesn't need hardware acceleration. Although it wouldn't hurt ;-)

Re:Theora

[TheTurtlesMoves]

The relevance of Theora was and is like the relevance of ogg. Sure its not going to take over. But without it, the other codec owners (apple, MS etc) would have no "license free" completion to keep them honest. Instead of a debate about licensed and unlicensed codecs, it would have been a debate on how the hell could we afford these kind of license fees to claim any kind of standard in the first place.

As for the higher bitrates arguments. Honestly you tube and co look like such crap I can't believe people ever bother, theora dose not look worse that these bit rates. I have decided most people are in fact blind.

Where are we winning?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

FTFA: Ogg Theora is becoming a big deal

I have worked at various companies, from small ventures up to well-known large corporations and have found the same thing at each. Employees think that their company is pretty well-known in their respective fields. While it may be true of some companies (IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Johnson & Johnson, just to name a few), most third party vendors are mere gnats on the backs of those wildebeests.

This is myopia caused by too much focus on a specialized area. Yes, maybe within a very limited sector your technology may be making inroads, in general you are nothing more than a butterfly flapping its wings. Theora is not becoming a big deal. It is just another codec, and one that isn't particularly popular.

There are technical issues that need to be addressed technically, not simply (as the author of the article does) waved away as a future feature to be implemented when the codec becomes more popular. It will never become more popular until it can offer sufficient reason to switch. Relying on the negative influence of patent encumbrance to drive people towards the codec is a losing proposition. It is a reactive strategy that cannot eventually win.

What struck me most about this article was how even the FSF is not particularly behind Theora, per se. They are for "patent unencumbered" codecs, so they have no real inclination to push Theora in the marketplace. Without a proactive strategy to push Theora both in a business sense as well as technically, it will flounder.

Another codec bites the dust. Big deal.

Theora 1.1

[Torrance]

Monty from Xiph has provided an update on the state of the upcoming 1.1 release. It makes for interesting reading.

Re:Google behind HTML5... Not behind Theora

[David Gerard]

Yes, and when he was called out on his BS and FUD ... he promptly disappeared.

Re:Subtitles

[FrostedWheat]

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

Re:... wait we already lost!? When did that happen

[TheRaven64]

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.