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Theora 1.1 (Thusnelda) Is Released
SD-Arcadia writes to tell us that Theora 1.1 has officially been released. It features improved encoding, providing better video quality for a given file size, a faster decoder, bitrate controls to help with streaming, and two-pass encoding. "The new rate control module hits its target much more accurately and obeys strict buffer constraints, including dropping frames if necessary. The latter is needed to enable live streaming without disconnecting users or pausing to buffer during sudden motion. Obeying these constraints can yield substantially worse quality than the 1.0 encoder, whose rate control did not obey any such constraints, and often landed only in the vague neighborhood of the desired rate target. The new --soft-target option can relax a few of these constraints, but the new two-pass rate control mode gives quality approaching full 'constant quality' mode with a predictable output size. This should be the preferred encoding method when not doing live streaming. Two-pass may also be used with finite buffer constraints, for non-live streaming." A detailed writeup on the new release has been posted at Mozilla.
From the FAQ on the website:
Theora is an open video codec being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation as part of their Ogg project (It is a project that aims to integrate On2's VP3 video codec, Ogg Vorbis audio codec and Ogg multimedia container formats into a multimedia solution that can compete with MPEG-4 format).
Theora is derived directly from On2's VP3 codec; currently the two are nearly identical, varying only in framing headers, but Theora will diverge and improve from the main VP3 development lineage as time progresses.
This page seems to say they have been addressed : http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
I'll just have to ask... why? Except for some holdouts from Usenet I think pretty much everyone uses torrents without any rar/zip compression. And even those are automatically decompressed if you set up something like hellanzb. It certainly doesn't save you any space, it's just for grouping files together and intgrity checking. Except torrents already do that, same with PAR on the Usenet side. It's completely redundant these days.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You could try mounting the archive(s) using FUSE, and then play the contents with whatever you want.
That said, most handhelds can handle Theora, so providing both Theora and Dirac should cover most clients. Not the iPhone, of course, but if people will buy into a closed platform then they can't expect things to always work...
VLC has support for playing back Dirac streams.
The OS X builds prior to 1.0 had Dirac support, but 1.0 didn't and neither have any of the subsequent ones. No word on whether this is intentional or not from the VLC team, but playing a Dirac file now pops up an error saying 'dirac' is an unrecognised CODEC ID.
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But does it have hardware acceleration for .mkv out of the box?
You don't understand what MKV is... it's not a codec, it's a container format for holding the video & audio stream along with assorted other information. This could mean multiple video and audio streams as is common for many movies dubbed in different languages or alternate video scenes. The hardware acceleration applies to whatever codec is used to create the streams held within the MKV file.. and that could be many different things from MPEG2, h.264, VC1, etc. etc.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
The first claim of 5,214,742 states (in part): "the improvement comprising selecting the length of the respective window functions as a function of signal amplitude changes", all the other clauses are dependent on this one.
Libvorbis lib/envelope.c, line 87:
The code goes on to NOT select the window length based on a function of the signal amplitude.
Never mind the fact that block switching transform codecs pre-dated that patent significantly and that switching based on amplitude changes is the most obvious criteria since the primary purpose of block switching is to reduce movement of signal energy from high amplitude parts into previous low amplitude parts.
So, how much do they pay you to spread bullshit? Are there openings available? My soul is also for sale, at the right price...
You don't understand how acceleration works.
It's up to the media player to ensure the streams are accelerated by picking a proper codec. It's also up to the media player to understand the container format. These things aren't very difficult, because of the codec frameworks that exist. On Windows, the most common one is DirectShow. (or whatever they've renamed it in Vista/Win7)
The media player has to pipe the stream data through to wherever it has to go - the Codec handles this, so once the media player picks a hardware accelerated codec, you're set!
VLC usually just sends it to its own CPU-based codecs, but other media players (like MPC, loaded up with directshow codecs for different formats) will send parts of it to the GPU to be decoded/accelerated. MPC-HC also has GPU shaders that can enhance the quality, regardless of the codec.
H.264 will be accelerated in .MKV, .MOV, and .MP4 unless your media player doesn't know what to do, which is unlikely because of the codec frameworks. The biggest issue is either going to be a missing codec(solved by using a pack like the klite mega codec pack) or your media player of choice(VLC) favouring compatibility over performance. VLC likes to choose CPU-decode codecs rather than GPU-decode ones. As far as I know, it also lacks GPU shaders.
Side-note: Recently I was uploading H.264/AAC to Youtube. There was a glitch on Youtube's end that it thought VBR-AAC was longer than it really was, so it rejected the video. After switching to .mp4(h.264/mp3), I had problems with audio desyncing. Then I switched to .mkv(h.264/mp3), and it worked fine. Seems like youtube has solid mkv support, just like most desktop software I've tested.