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.

Comments

What every player is missing

[sopssa]

The one thing I'd like to have with players is good support for playing files off from compressed (rar/zip etc) files. And I mean good support, not just something that works like a stream, but where you can seek and do everything like you can do with actual files.

Other than the not so much interest in it, is there some actual reason this haven't been done good yet? VLC had some support for it in early days, and I understand it got better too. But it's still not the same. For example loading subtitles etc is impossible.

Please develop this aspect too, as many.. MANY people look and want it.

Re:What every player is missing

[TimTucker]

Why? If the video and audio are compressed already, are you really gaining much by trying to compress them again? As for subtitles, aren't you better off with a container that supports them (i.e.: mkv)?

Re:What every player is missing

[Ant P.]

What kind of ass-backwards player are you using that doesn't support compressed formats? Are you saying you're incapable of playing anything but raw DV and WAV and want to use inferior general-purpose compression for them, or what?

Re:What every player is missing

[petermgreen]

And I mean good support, not just something that works like a stream, but where you can seek and do everything like you can do with actual files.
Afaict the only way to read a portion of a file in a zip is to read and decompress the whole file up to the portion wanted so seeking is going to be pretty damn slow.

Re:What every player is missing

[Kjella]

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.

Re:What every player is missing

[negRo_slim]

Why? If the video and audio are compressed already, are you really gaining much by trying to compress them again?

Perhaps he's using the zip/rar as a simple container file.

Re:What every player is missing

[sopssa]

Yep. They are actually zero-compressed files, but still inside multi-archived files. But the subtitle files are as separate. I can load a video file just fine on vlc, but I cant load subtitles in it unless I decompress and they have the same filename.

Re:What every player is missing

[Vahokif]

You could try mounting the archive(s) using FUSE, and then play the contents with whatever you want.

Re:What every player is missing

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with using mkv?

Re:What every player is missing

[TheRaven64]

Mod parent up; exactly what I was going to say. If you want to be able to treat archives as directories, this functionality belongs in the OS, not in every application. Windows has done this automatically for ZIP files since XP and other operating systems that support FUSE (including OS X) can do it for a variety of different archive formats.

Re:What every player is missing

[h4rm0ny]

I can't see much reason for that. I can only guess that he's downloading TV programs or something off free file hosting companies. With a limit of 100MB for example, people break larger media into rar archives so that they can be downloaded piecemeal.

Re:What every player is missing

[Shikaku]

VLC does. And it doesn't suck anymore.

Re:What every player is missing

[The MAZZTer]

Umm video/audio files are compressed, so technically we have this already. What you are proposing is compression inside of compression, which is quite useless. If you actually are getting good compression ratios from the RAR or ZIP then the video wasn't encoded with a good compression algorithm to begin with.

Re:What every player is missing

[The MAZZTer]

Folders/Directories are a much simpler container that is more widely supported.

Re:What every player is missing

[The MAZZTer]

Well unless you don't compress the file in the ZIP (STORE). Then you can just seek directly from the file's offset.

Re:What every player is missing

[ThePhilips]

CCCP

Anime went MKV way (x264+Vorbis) for HD release quite some time ago.

Also I hear recent DivX supports MKV files too.

Re:What every player is missing

[phillips321]

the fact that my bloody PS3 doesn't play it!!!! Drive's me inasane!

Re:What every player is missing

[JackieBrown]

LG BD 370 Network Blu-ray Disc Player

http://www.lge.com/products/model/detail/bd370.jhtml

Also supports Netcast, Cinema, Netflix ,Youtube

Re:What every player is missing

[Kagura]

And it's also a pain to transfer a "folder" of files to someone over the net. Torrents are the only remotely usable solution and that requires making a torrent, uploading it to a site, and then finding a user you want to give it to who also understands bittorrent...

Re:What every player is missing

[AndreR]

Parent (sopssa) most likely obtains 'legal' movies from scene releases, which come packed in ~40 MB rar files.

Re:What every player is missing

[CajunArson]

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.

Re:What every player is missing

[TheRaven64]

But does it have hardware acceleration for .mkv out of the box?

No, because mkv is a container format. Hardware acceleration for a container format makes no sense. Other than to demonstrate that you don't know the difference between containers and CODECs (or between Gb and GB) was there a point to your rant?

Re:What every player is missing

[xded]

Except for some holdouts from Usenet I think pretty much everyone uses torrents without any rar/zip compression.

Funny how these days noone knows how the real Scene works. But it's surely better this way.

Regarding GP's post, just look around and you will find that it's not the most publicized feature in players, but many of them work OOTB with RARs. If you're lazy, one name for all: BSPlayer. And yes, it does support subs. Both internally or via VSFilter.

Too many glitches in BSPlayer? (I know, some are annoying.) Then go for XBMC, first RAR support I've seen and probably the best one.

Still not satisfied? Try WinMount, to mount with one click any set of compressed files to a new virtual drive. And then use your favorite player.

-xded

Re:What every player is missing

[NotWorkSafe]

Is there an OS X version of this?

Re:What every player is missing

[drinkypoo]

The one thing I'd like to have with players is good support for playing files off from compressed (rar/zip etc) files. And I mean good support, not just something that works like a stream, but where you can seek and do everything like you can do with actual files.

There's really only one graceful way to implement this, which is to decompress it to disk well ahead of time to avoid getting I/O bound. Maybe you can do it in blocks. The best option is to only support uncompressed files in archives; compressed files get decompressed wholesale. And really, anything compressed in there is probably small enough to just decompress too.

Re:What every player is missing

[modecx]

And it's also a pain to transfer a "folder" of files to someone over the net. Torrents are the only remotely usable solution and that requires making a torrent, uploading it to a site, and then finding a user you want to give it to who also understands bittorrent...

Totally. Someone should get on this immediately. It would be totally cool to have a program which is able to string a number of files and their associated directories together, and just dump them into one file for ease of distribution! And then, on the other side of the internets, the recipient could use the same program to take all of that stuff from the file he received, and dump it back out, directories and all.

Re:What every player is missing

[ThePhilips]

No. On Mac OS X best shot is the the MPlayer OSX Extended. At H.264 playback it's better than vanilla CCCP, but not as good as commercial CoreAVC.

VLC sadly is as hopeless as it was before. When I heard that they finally supported ASS subtitles I was excited to try it out - only to find that it still sucks at any contemporary media job.

Re:What every player is missing

[Tacvek]

The really screwed up thing is that it is very rare for people to differentiate between coders, decoders, codecs, and encoding schemes.

DivX is a codec. A codec is a specific piece of software for converting between video and a specific encoding scheme. It is actually a terrible term. There is no such thing as a codec. There are encoders and decoders. They are often distributed in pairs. When doing so, the decoder will always support the output of the encoder, but might also support video using encoding scheme features not used by the encoder. The only reasonable definition for codec is an encoder-decoder pair distributed together, but the term is very frequently used to refer to just a decoder or to an ecoding scheme.

"ISO/IEC 14496-2 ASP profile", sometimes shorted to "MPEG-4 Part 2 ASP" or similar, is a video encoding scheme. A subset of this format is supported by the DivX decoder. Any decoder that fully supports this encoding format can play any stream that conforms to it. So any decoder for this format can play any video encoded by the DivX encoder.

AVI is a container format. It happens to the container format traditionally used for MPEG-4 ASP videos encoded by DivX.

Unfortunately it is very common to use codec names to refer to encoding schemes, even among the people well aware of the codec/container-format separation. Part of the problem is that very little implements all of an encoding scheme. I mean there is no formal name for the MPEG-2 ASP subset that the DivX decoder supports. So people just call it DivX.

The whole situation would be much better if nobody ever used encoding scheme subsets, without formally defining them, and given them a specific name. Then we kill off the codec idea, and just have decoders which handle a specific encoding scheme (or multiple encoding schemes) fully, and thus any decoder that supports a specific scheme is fully interchangeable. Container formats would not have a codec field, but merely a feild that describes what scheme is used.

Enocders would be a completely seperate thing. They generally are today anyway. It is not terribly common to use the encoder portion of codecs, but rather specialized software for encoding into the format.

One would identify files by listing the container format, video encoding scheme, and audio encoding schemes. For example: an AVI-ASP-AAC movie. Common combinations might be given unique names as a shorthand.

The most important part of this idealized scenario is that all encoding schemes, combination shorthands, decoders, and encoders have seperate names. Having an encoding scheme, encoder, and decoder with the same name only leads to confusion.

Just look at the Wikipedia articles for codecs currently and you will see articles very confused because they fail to distinguish between a codec and an encoding scheme.

Re:What every player is missing

[Tacvek]

Indeed, both torrents and Usenet are secondary distribution systems. The original scene releases work through a completely different system of topsites and PREs, etc.

Of course, I've definately downloaded a torrent before consisting of many rar files, inside which was a zip file, inside which were the original scene rars, insider which was the content, plus some supplementary material in a zip file.

That means that some files have had 4 layers of compression. That drives me nuts personally. I far prefer that after the initial scene release, the files be extracted, and torrented as-is, or at worse as one large rar file.

Re:What every player is missing

[Kjella]

Funny how these days noone knows how the real Scene works. But it's surely better this way.

The old scene follows obscure rules to be l33t like ftping around rars, but they're a fraction of a fraction of the people downloading. There's also a new scene that's not so lame, I can tell you there's original releases that go on private torrents first but are packed up to make the old scene happy. Or they stay as internals, which is just fine with me.

Re:What every player is missing

[xded]

The old scene follows obscure rules to be l33t like ftping around rars, but they're a fraction of a fraction of the people downloading.

Sure. But they are supplying 95% of what other people are downloading.

The topsite network was never meant to supply a large number of people, but was and is a *fast* and *secure* distributed exchange system for those who are in, *and* are contributing.

There's also a new scene that's not so lame, I can tell you there's original releases that go on private torrents first but are packed up to make the old scene happy.

Sure, I know and I respect them. They often fill the many holes left by the old scene these days. But still, these new scenes are *mostly* supplying mp3/cam/ts/scr/rips. No technical knowledge in there, just a matter of having fresh meat working for you. Yes, I also know exceptions to this, but these can be counted on your two index fingers...

The Scene is dimming. People in get older, get real life. New people are not allowed to get in for security reasons/are not motivated to do so with all the easy-to-get-into p2p stuff.

But it still is the real deal.

-xded

Re:What every player is missing

[Goaway]

Anybody who uses Vorbis and h.264 together deserves to be smacked.

Re:What every player is missing

[Goaway]

Just use http://www.perian.org/ instead.

Re:What every player is missing

[Kjella]

The point was that there's relatively few people that get rars from the topsite system. Once you get past the fan-up and fan-out and start sharing in any form of peer group it's more effective to put up a torrent. I've never felt the need to view anything inside rars, and I'd say my hookup is stellar. But then I probably know one of the two exceptions you speak of.

Re:What every player is missing

[moon3]

This is not a very bright idea due to the fact that it severely limits the seeking and rewind abilities of video stored this way, rar/zip archives are not designed to be seekable.

Re:What every player is missing

[BikeHelmet]

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.

Re:What every player is missing

[nxtw]

Lets say I have a video that is....lets say H264 in a .mkv format. Now will any hardware accelerators actually recognize what it is through the mkv "wrapper" and accelerate it?

Hardware accelerators don't know what a mkv "wrapper" is. They don't care about the container format at all, and don't know anything about an AVI file, a MPEG transport or program stream, RTSP, etc. The software just reads the H.264 bitstream from the container and feeds only the H.264 stream to the decoder.

This is why various set-top boxes can play video from a combination of sources - satellite, Internet, Blu-ray, LAN, USB, internal HD, etc. And if the software on these devices supports the MKV container format and the file contains a compatible video stream, they will play the file.

On Windows 7, mkv files containing H.264 will work with hardware acceleration once you install a mkv splitter, even using Microsoft's built-in H.264 decoder.

Re:What every player is missing

[evilviper]

So I stand by my question: Do .mkv or Theora even HAVE hardware accelerated anything? At all?

Your question is just as stupid the second time around... MKV is a container, just like AVI, MOV/MP4, etc. You can put any codec in it that you want, including H.264.

Re:What every player is missing

[Jurily]

Yep. They are actually zero-compressed files, but still inside multi-archived files. But the subtitle files are as separate.

This is wrong on so many levels it's not even funny. Why the hell would you want to keep an already compressed file format in a zero-compressed multi-archive?

I can understand if you want to seed your torrent, but in that case that's not the video player you're having trouble with. Why don't you ask for a torrent client that automatically decompresses them when the download is complete?

Re:What every player is missing

[hairyfeet]

Fine, if you wish to be pedantic, I'll word it so you can understand. if I have a h264 file in a mkv "container" will it fucking be accelerated or not? Is that really so damned hard to understand? mark me as troll all you want mods, i got karma from hell baby, yeah! That doesn't answer my fucking question, which is there ANY of the current devices that will accelerate any damned thing in a mkv "container".

And can we PLEASE get off this "container" bullshit already? it is the same bullshit as "avi is a container" even though we all fucking know that when John Q Public is talking avi he is talking MP4, usually DivX. But this pedantic bullshit is just as fucking pointless as the asshats that say "Linux is a kernel" everytime someone posts a problem they are having with Linux. Get off it grammar nazis, as you have lost. To the public Linux is Linux, be it Ubuntu Linux or Red Hat Linux or PCLinux, okay? And nobody cares whether it is a fucking container or not with regards to mkv, all they care about is it gonna suck the battery dry, that's all.

So seriously, is this question that fucking hard to understand? it is just a yes or no question folks. Will a normally accelerated codec, be it WMV, DivX, MPEG2/4, H263/264, when wrapped in a mkv "container" be accelerated or not? yes, no maybe, what?

Re:What every player is missing

[ultranova]

mark me as troll all you want mods, i got karma from hell baby, yeah!

You keep getting modded down because you keep on ranting and not listening what you're being told.

That doesn't answer my fucking question, which is there ANY of the current devices that will accelerate any damned thing in a mkv "container".

The answer to your sexually mless frustrated than you question is would be obvious if you knew what a container file is. That's why people keep on trying to explain it to you. However, to keep you from having an aneyrism, the answer is "yes": any video stream that's accelerated when it's contained in any other container file should be accelerated when it's contained in Matroska file.

And can we PLEASE get off this "container" bullshit already?

it is the same bullshit as "avi is a container" even though we all fucking know that when John Q Public is talking avi he is talking MP4, usually DivX.

No, he's talking about video container files with end with ".avi". He neither knows nor cares about the format of the video contained in them.

The very fact that you said "usually" should make it quite clear that "avi files" can refer to multiple different files, so in a technical discussion it's vital to distinguish between them.

But this pedantic bullshit is just as fucking pointless as the asshats that say "Linux is a kernel" everytime someone posts a problem they are having with Linux.

Linux is a kernel. The graphical subsystem is usually X.org nowadays, while the desktop environment is likely either Gnome or KDE. Browser tends to be Mozilla Firefox. Various background stuff comes from GNU. These are all separate projects, so if there's a problem with one of them, it needs to be routed to the proper place to be taken care of.

Get off it grammar nazis, as you have lost.

A grammar nazi is someone who complains about what he perceives as incorrect language usage even when the text in question is easy to read and its meaning obvious. On the other hand, not differentiating between codec and container or the kernel and other components of a system make the meaning ambiguous, at least in a technical discussion such as this.

To the public Linux is Linux, be it Ubuntu Linux or Red Hat Linux or PCLinux, okay? And nobody cares whether it is a fucking container or not with regards to mkv, all they care about is it gonna suck the battery dry, that's all.

That's nice. You said above that you "build desktops" to your customers, which I presume means you do it for money, so excuse us for presuming that you might actually know or at least want to know something about what you do for a living.

Re:What every player is missing

[hairyfeet]

What the fuck is "mless"? Is that French? Damned if I know what you are trying to say there. As for what I do, I may a damned good living making rock solid desktops and customized laptop installs that run for years without a bug and the only thing the user has to do is push a switch. I don't have the time to learn every little piece of pedantic bullshit when a simple yes/no answer would have been sufficient. Why is that so fucking hard?

And I take it you have never had to actually deal with the public, as the ONLY thing any John Q Public is gonna show you if you ask him to hand you an avi is a DivX file. I only put down "usually" because there are some seriously fucked up codecs out there that will "wrap" an mp4 file in an avi container. And guess what? They tend to glitch, skip, and generally run like shit. The ONLY formats I have ever seen run worth a crap in an avi container is DivX and Xvid, which of course is just a DivX ripoff.

And I hate to break the news to everyone, but it looks like the same damn thing is happening to MKV. Go and download any BD rip, or web video, or hell anything you can find in mkv. While as you say you can put anything in them, just like with avi, I'm afraid that the mods here being pedantic notwithstanding you ain't gonna find anything in a MKV except H263/264. That's it. No MPEG, DiVx, WMV, etc. Just H263/264. And THAT is what I meant about being pedantic. If 99.9995% of the population call something A and you call it B, it doesn't really matter if B is the correct definition or not, as to 99.9995% of the population it is A.

Just as folks say "Linux this" or Linux that" and they are NOT talking about the kernel. Hell I'll be happy to give you three different links from this very site. Notice how EVERY DAMNED SINGLE ONE is NOT talking about the kernel,mmkay?

So waste mod points ALL you want, as I got enough karma to burn through until judgment day. It won't turn blue into green, four lights into five, or change the speech patterns of the entire population. When folks ask "will this work on Linux" you and I both know they are not talking about the kernel, just as I shouldn't have had to argue for 4 posts just to get a simple yes/no answer. Instead I got a bunch of "mkv is a container" bullshit which does NOT answer the only fricking question I had, which was "will it accelerate or not?". Out of all the posts you were the ONLY one so far that could answer a question with a yes/no, so even if you wanted to be a smartass about it thanks. Now I know I can allow mkv files on my customers machines without getting the "why is this so skippy?" bullshit, which is all me and my customers want to know.

Re:What every player is missing

[benwaggoner]

On Windows, the most common one is DirectShow. (or whatever they've renamed it in Vista/Win7)

DirectShow is alive and well on Vista and Windows 7. There is a new media API called MediaFoundation, which is used by default in WMP for Win 7. It's quite different and improved in many ways over DirectShow, but can interoperate with existing DirectShow decoders.

Re:What every player is missing

[SD-Arcadia]

Having recently struggled with some 1080p AVCHD files, I know where you are coming from. Unless you're running something like a i7, you need either some GPU dxva / Cuda magic or some multithreaded cpu magic to play back these high bitrate files. In the open source world, currently that means turning to MediaPlayerClassic-HC for dxva, or enabling the experimental ffmpeg-mt decoder in ffdshow for multithreaded decoding. I'm not sure about MPlayer. VLC is based on the ffmpeg stable branch, so hopefully when ffmpeg-mt becomes stable, VLC will take advantage of that. No ETA of this though.

Re:What every player is missing

[ThePhilips]

Yes. It's pathetic.

Why couple of guys can write in months commercial grade H.264 decoder which needs 1GHz CPU for 720p content - and the whole bunch of developers working on VLC/ffmpeg/libavc/etc can't?

Re:What every player is missing

[evilviper]

What the fuck is "mless"? Is that French? Damned if I know what you are trying to say there. As for what I do, I may a damned good living

What the fuck is "I may a damned good living"? Is that French? Dammed if I know what you are trying to say there.

Re:What every player is missing

[hairyfeet]

From the rest of the sentence it really isn't hard to figure out, but trying to figure out what mless was with the rest of the sentence is impossible. As for the occasional typo on my part, that is the fault of being able to type faster than this vintage 1988 Compaq clacky keyboard (which has followed me through a dozen jobs) can keep up with anymore.

One of these days I'll have to go and dig out my vintage 1984 IBM, but the sucker is in storage and I sure as hell don't feel like crawling through boxes for a day and a half to find it, not when I have PCs literally stacked 4 feet high in front of me right now waiting for me to get to them. There just ain't enough hours in the day when everybody wants you to fix/build/upgrade their computer. But considering the economy is in the shitcan I'm not gonna bitch about being overworked, not when I got a half a dozen checks headed my way next week and a cute little half Navajo to take to the state fair that I met while removing coolwebsearch from her desktop. Add to that all the free/cheap computers I get from customers having me build them new ones and life is pretty damned good.

So I apologize if I came off a little snarky, but after asking the same question FOUR times and getting marked as a troll by mods who just kept answering "MKV is a container" which of course didn't answer the fricking question in the slightest, tends to make one a little pissy. Why it was so hard for someone to simply answer "if the base format is accelerated the mkv will be too" is frankly beyond me. I've been lurking here for ages and frankly the quality of the conversations has gone WAAAY down. Between the militants, the astroturfers, the rabid fanbois, the trolls, and the pedantics it just don't have the same quality it did in the late 90s/early 00s. Damned shame as this used to be THE place for tech guys to come and exchange info. Now I find myself hanging out more on MSDN and Linux groups, as there I can actually ask questions and get answers in return.

Re:What every player is missing

[EdZ]

Except that it works within the odd Quicktime framework, and thus requires you to pre-buffer an entire mkv file before you can play it properly. And makes the use of Ordered Chapters pretty much impossible.

Re:What every player is missing

[Kagura]

You should read the rest of the thread before replying. :/

Re:What every player is missing

[modecx]

Was that a wooshing sound, or a sonic boom? I couldn't tell.

Re:What every player is missing

[skeeto]

Putting a properly encoded video or audio file in a rar or zip archive will only result in a bigger file, as the media is already well compressed. That is, doing this is absolutely pointless.

Would it be so tough

[ubrgeek]

to actually say what the hell the thing is in the summary without assuming everyone "just knows"?

Re:Would it be so tough

[oldhack]

Me, too!

Re:Would it be so tough

[gbarules2999]

You're on the internet.

I know that's no excuse for lazy Slashdot editors, I just thought you might need to be reminded.

Re:Would it be so tough

[Randle_Revar]

Please explain this "Linux" thing to me, everyone talks about it, but they assume that everyone "just knows" what it is.

Re:Would it be so tough

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

to actually say what the hell the thing is in the summary without assuming everyone "just knows"?

Everyone would have been perfectly happy if they just came out and said, "yes, it will support streaming porn."

That's all we need to hear, right?

Re:Would it be so tough

[ivucica]

Say what? You've been living under a rock for five years? Why would anyone do that? ... Oh. Ok. Whatever. Still seems stupid to me.

Re:Would it be so tough

[selven]

Linux is used by over 10 million people worldwide and is widely known among technical types (the demographic Slashdot attracts). Theora is much less known. (source).

Re:Would it be so tough

[drinkypoo]

can I get a what what

Re:Would it be so tough

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't derive "it's a video codec" from "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", I'd suggest being quiet about it. Better to keep your mouth closed and so on.

Re:Would it be so tough

[DaVince21]

to actually say what the hell the thing is in the summary without assuming everyone "just knows"?

There's been lots of news on Theora. At this point, it wouldn't make much sense explaining yet again what it is. Kind of like how the real news works, you know?

Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe now Google will use Theora instead of the patent-encumbered H.264 in their new HTML5 Youtube.

That is if the issues have been addressed.

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[koxkoxkox]

This page seems to say they have been addressed : http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[beelsebob]

A look at this comparison seems to suggest to me that 1.1 is actually worse than 1.0. Certainly it's no where near as good as x264 produced h264.

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[beelsebob]

Except that you tube uses a rather failtastic h264 encoder. This comparison seems to suggest that they really haven't been addressed. In fact, that 1.1 is worse than 1.0!

The version of x264 used here is even rather out of date, and misses a couple of major improvements.

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[beelsebob]

Also of note, the comparison you said, actually doesn't say what you claim... It says that it beats the h263 youtube version at a lower bit rate. Read the conclusions - they admit that the h264 version on youtube is better quality.

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would 1.1 be worse than 1.0? Such senseless results are usually an indication that the people who conducted the benchmarks did something wrong.

In that particular case it seems they've been testing a theora built from theora's svn revision r15534, whereas the current revision is 16583 http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/theora/

This benchmark seems outdated.

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[sam0737]

Even at ~500k, the Youtube version is clearly more blur on details.
And I thought I would need to download yet another codec to play the Theora video, but surprise to learn that my Firefox 3.5 does support it natively!

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[makomk]

The version of Theora used in that comparison is also rather out of date. Nearly a year out of date, in fact - it's an SVN snapshot dating from 2008-11-25, not the released version 1.1. I think the experimental Thusnelda encoder was known to have regressed slightly on video taken from Touhou games back then.

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[node 3]

Maybe now Google will use Theora instead of the patent-encumbered H.264 in their new HTML5 Youtube.

"Encumbered" implies some sort of difficulty. H.264 decoding is available, for free (and, if you must, for free as in freedom, as well), on every OS, including Linux.

So, where's the encumbering?

It seems to me that requiring only open standards, when *they* are not the norm and require going out of one's way is more encumbering than going with something like h.264. Not to mention being encumbered with a format that offers inferior quality.

Freedom is cool and all, and I'm supremely grateful for Theora's existence, but h.264 is the current king of codecs. Firefox (the fundamental source of requesting Google use Theora) needs to quit being a bunch of anti-user ninnies and support the codec their users are using. Support Theora in addition to h.264 if you want (in fact, I encourage it), but if a browser (or free OS or whatever) is going to support gif and mp3, you have no excuse for not support h.264 as well.

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you heard of a patent? You may want to try googling for it. It's pretty annoying stuff.

And licensing this shit is not free. Doesn't matter how many times you say it; it's not true. Most browsers don't even have MP3 support built in; I don't know where you're getting that from, either.

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[node 3]

Have you heard of a patent? You may want to try googling for it. It's pretty annoying stuff.

Yet somehow, everyone can decode h.264. Maybe you should try googling that first.

Just because there's a patent, doesn't mean there's any problem.

And licensing this shit is not free.

Sometimes, it is.

Doesn't matter how many times you say it; it's not true.

Same goes for your old tired bullshit. h.264 *is* available for free. On Windows. On Mac OS X. On Linux. And on just about any OS that has the capability to run C programs.

Most browsers don't even have MP3 support built in; I don't know where you're getting that from, either.

I never said they had it built-in, I said they support it. Firefox can play mp3's inline if the OS supports it, and all OS's support it (or can support it) for free.

You also left out gif, which was "patent encumbered", yet still supported by every major browser, built-in. Even the free ones, like Firefox.

The fact of the matter is that while patents can muck things up, that doesn't mean they will muck things up. There's no excuse whatsoever for not supporting h.264 playback other than pure ideology, and this is one of those situation where ideology makes things worse for no actual benefit. If the Firefox guys get their way, the web will support a codec that is worse than the alternative, and is by no means certain of being "patent-free".

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[PastaLover]

Doesn't matter how many times you say it; it's not true.

Same goes for your old tired bullshit. h.264 *is* available for free. On Windows. On Mac OS X. On Linux. And on just about any OS that has the capability to run C programs.

The fact that h.264 is available doesn't mean it's legal. By the same argument, just about every software program known to man under whatever licensing is available for free.

Your argument of "yeah we'd be breaking the law, but so is everyone else" is not the sort of thing all software developers will ascribe to. And it's definitely a problem for many of their users as well. Suppose someone sues the federal government for using firefox browsers that include a h.264 codec without licensing, what are they going to do? If they use IE or chrome on the other hand, they can rely on microsoft and google to license the codecs for them. This is the basic problem of h.264 for open source implementers.

Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind.

[DaVince21]

Um, so where is the Theora 1.1 comparison on that page, exactly? I only see 1.0...

Q. What is Theora?

[onionman]

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.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[AliasMarlowe]

Moreover, Theora is the only decent video codec which complies with the W3C's patent policy. There is no question or threat of demands for patent royalties or license payments for any use of the codec.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Kjella]

And the real A:

It's an outdated video codec that loses to H.264 in pretty much every codec shootout, and is in general ignored in HD media (H.264/VC-1), HD broadcasts (H.264/MPEG2), set top boxes, mobile players and so on. It's also pretty much completely ignored by the pirate community, preferring mkv/H.264. While possibly FUD, not everyone is willing to ship this codec because they fear submarine patents meaning it's lost its only real shot at relevance as the default codec for HTML5 video, which now also seems to be a mix probably dominated by H.264. The end result is that it might be used by a few geeks and internally in video games and such that provide their own player, but it'll likely have as much impact as vorbis had on the mp3/aac format. That is, none.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[WiiVault]

Sadly I agree. But the vorbis mp3 example is too kind. Ogg Vorbis was significantly better than mp3 at a given bitrate, and it still didn't get much traction. Theora on the other hand, like you said, doesn't compare to modern proprietary codecs. It's too bad, but it's true.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Anonymous Coward]

internally in video games

This is nothing to scoff at, particularly as independent games are growing. Even the AAA developers typically use Ogg Vorbis where in the past they'd use WAV or license MP3. Sadly, Bink video is still very much around, mostly for cross-platform reasons, I think. If Theora can squish them, that's quite significant.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[beelsebob]

Yes, but vorbis is somewhat inferior to AAC (Advanced audio codec, hint, it goes with Advanced video codec, aka h264), which was also highlighted by the parent.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[beelsebob]

The link on xiph.org (http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html I'm guessing you mean) doesn't show that it's better than h264, it shows that it's better than h263, at a low bit rate. In the conclusions it freely admits that the h264 video is better quality.

Here's another comparison that clearly shows that both 1.1 and 1.0 are worse than h264 â" the x264 encoder used here is actually pretty old, and missing a couple of major improvements too.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Anonymous Coward]

A few clarifications:

> outdated video codec
An arbitrary definition which, could very well apply equally well to H.264 in comparison to almost any other codec.

> loses to H.264 in pretty much every codec shootout
But not usually by very much; and in any case, countless codecs beat H.264 in pretty much every respect in turn - but since the issue is not some theoretical perfect codec but a cost/bandwidth/quality/encode-cpu-time/decode-cpu-time/features/etc tradeoff, this might still result in a net benefit if attributes like "unpatented" rank high enough on your individual requirements list.

> and is in general ignored in HD media (H.264/VC-1), HD broadcasts (H.264/MPEG2), set top boxes, mobile players and so on.
Which is typical, that is, for commercial implementors to prefer commercial rather than community standards, as often as not purely because of personal bias or lack of understanding, and speaking nothing of the benefits otherwise.

> It's also pretty much completely ignored by the pirate community, preferring mkv/H.264
A moot point, given that people who are misappropriating unpaid-for content choosing to use a misappropriated unpaid-for format is hardly surprising.

> While possibly FUD, not everyone is willing to ship this codec because they fear submarine patents meaning it's lost its only real shot at relevance as the default codec for HTML5 video
Which only proves that patents are so absurd generally that the whole industry is jumping at shadows, given that the nearly-two-decade-old Xiph Foundation has never once even been accused of violating patents across their dozens of published and implemented standards, let alone having actually been formally challenged (and something that no other format/provider under consideration can say).

> which now also seems to be a mix probably dominated by H.264.
The jury's still out on that one - I think most people expect the W3 to wash their hands of baseline video recommendations entirely (at least until a possible appropriate future format meets the requirements) and thus leaving a scenario of no de jure standard, and probably a de facto standard of, as you say, some semi-compatible mutant alternatives centering around semi-conformant H.264 implementations.

> The end result is that it might be used by a few geeks and internally in video games and such that provide their own player, but it'll likely have as much impact as vorbis had on the mp3/aac format. That is, none.
That is, an important and ALWAYS GROWING beachhead against unFree formats and bastardized non-standards generally (seriously, while not anywhere near de facto standard, vorbis, flac, speex, etc. usage has only ever increased - never decreased - and gets better with every passing year).

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Virak]

Actually, it's quality is better than H.264

Hahaha, no. Just no.

It just suffered from needing a higher powered processor to decode video for play back.

Also hilariously wrong. Hell, one of the advantages (what few there are) of Theora its proponents like to bring up is that it takes less resources to decode than H.264. I have no fucking clue where you got this idea from.

See www.xiph.org. I believe there is a link on there comparing H.264 and Theora. Theora is noticeably better

Wrong again. There have been several comparisons between H.264 and Theora by the Xiph folks and they've all come out in favor of H.264. They've only tried to argue that Theora isn't really that bad. The problem is it is, and the only reason Theora didn't get utterly murdered in their comparisons is they've compared default Theora to default x264 and YouTube's H.264.

Default Theora is pretty much as good as it gets unless you want to set custom quantization/Huffman tables. Default x264 falls far short of x264 with its settings set for maximum quality, mainly because when you set them like that it's slow as fuck and most people will take worse quality over sub-1 FPS encoding. I don't know what YouTube uses or how they set it, but I seriously doubt a site that huge goes for the maximum possible quality.

Furthermore, Theora is simply inferior technology-wise to H.264. Theora-the-specification is far behind H.264 and it makes it pretty much impossible for Theora-the-software to ever be better than a decent H.264 encoder, as any improvements could simply be copied by the H.264 encoder (though it's more likely it'd be the other way around).

My guess is Theora 1.1 should be noticeably better.

It is noticeably better than Theora 1.0, but remains noticeably worse than H.264 and will continue to be so.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Anonymous Coward]

> An arbitrary definition which, could very well apply equally well to H.264 in comparison to almost any other codec.
I don't think there are any relevant, modern video-coding specs that are newer than H.264.

> But not usually by very much;
Wrong, x264 beats Theora by quite a lot. Maybe you are comparing black frames?

> and in any case, countless codecs beat H.264 in pretty much every respect in turn
This is just wrong. I do not know of any lossy codec that delivers better bitrate/quality than current good H.264 implementations.

> but since the issue is not some theoretical perfect codec but a cost/bandwidth/quality
When talking about video quality, bitrate/quality is the only thing worthwhile to compare. x264 leaves Theora in the dust at this.

> encode-cpu-time/decode-cpu-time/features/etc tradeoff
Of course speed is another factor. Theora is quite unoptimized and slow. At fast settings, x264 quality and speed are still both much better than anything Theora can deliver. As for decoding, there are dedicated hardware chips to decode H.264. You will be able to play it on a phone. Theora will have to use implementations on general purpose CPUs, which will probably be much worse for battery life and performance.

> this might still result in a net benefit if attributes like "unpatented" rank high enough on your individual requirements list.
Maybe if it is your only factor?

> vorbis, flac, speex, etc. usage has only ever increased - never decreased - and gets better with every passing year
That is not because those are free, it is because those are actually pretty good.

Of course, I am probably wasting my time on a troll here.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[ShieldW0lf]

I would rather that community based projects with low budgets distribute video using an absolutely free codec if the alternative is that they don't distribute at all because they can't afford the fees. If the quality is a little bit worse, but it's still fit for the purpose, and it's free, then it has more value than superior technology that is not affordable.

People shouldn't be using YouTube as their distribution mechanism in the first place. They should be using their own devices.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Virak]

A moot point, given that people who are misappropriating unpaid-for content choosing to use a misappropriated unpaid-for format is hardly surprising.

Seriously? Do you work for the MPAA or some other group like that? People who pirate stuff aren't comic book villains who break laws just for the sake of breaking laws. They don't think "oh hey while I'm violating copyright I'll violate patents too, just because I can!" H.264 is more popular because it is better, not because the people who encode stuff get hard at the thought of breaking laws in a way nobody particularly cares about and they're never ever going to get in trouble for.

The AC above me covers the rest of your points quite nicely, so I'm not going to write something that would be much the same as his. Your post is utter nonsense, and you and the people who actually looked at your post and not only managed to not laugh, but modded you up need to pull your heads out of the GNU/sand and admit that Theora is simply inferior. If you think not having any patent problems is a big enough issue to prefer a technologically inferior codec, that's fine. But don't twist the facts and outright lie just so you can try to pretend Theora is otherwise a match for modern codecs, because it is not.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Virak]

Where in my post did I say that you can't choose inferior codecs for other reasons? All I did was respond to the absurd assertion that Theora is better than H.264. If you think using outdated technology is an acceptable price to pay to avoid patent issues, go right ahead.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[BitHive]

Did you even watch the videos at your second link? It's pretty clear to me that Theora is the better codec in that clip. Play them side by side and notice how much better the butterfly and the sky looks with Theora.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Your second link, as has been pointed out so often in this thread, is using an svn snapshot from a year ago. Try again with an actual 1.1 release.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[SanityInAnarchy]

They don't think "oh hey while I'm violating copyright I'll violate patents too, just because I can!"

No, but if they don't particularly care about violating copyright, they won't care much about violating patents, either.

H.264 is more popular because it is better

Because it's better, or because it's perceived as better -- in terms of quality per bit. But again, anywhere other than the pirate community, patents are likely to be an issue, and an open-but-worse format may be preferred over a closed-but-better format, especially if it's not that much worse.

admit that Theora is simply inferior.

I'm pretty sure that's what was meant by this part:

But not usually by very much; and in any case, countless codecs beat H.264 in pretty much every respect in turn

In other words, yes, Theora is inferior, but probably not by enough to care -- just as better-than-h.264 formats aren't better enough to care.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Virak]

No, but if they don't particularly care about violating copyright, they won't care much about violating patents, either.

Phrasing it as them using "a misappropriated unpaid-for format" is not saying they merely don't care. You really have to read that line very loosely and optimistically to interpret it in a way
that doesn't make it seem like the author was thinking "damn filthy fucking pirates" when he wrote it.

Because it's better, or because it's perceived as better -- in terms of quality per bit.

I don't see how "in terms of quality per bit" changes anything, as that's the regular definition of "better" when it comes to lossy compression. If merely quality is all you take into account, then uncompressed video wins easily. If merely size is all you take into account, then some hypothetical codec that just compresses anything to an empty file wins easily.

But again, anywhere other than the pirate community, patents are likely to be an issue, and an open-but-worse format may be preferred over a closed-but-better format, especially if it's not that much worse.

No, anywhere other than commercial uses nobody cares about patents. Unless you're saying ripping for personal use is piracy, there's an enormous amount of usage where patents simply don't matter.

In other words, yes, Theora is inferior, but probably not by enough to care

Saying "it's worse but not worse enough for anyone to notice" is not admitting it's inferior, it's saying it's just as good.

just as better-than-h.264 formats aren't better enough to care.

Better-than-H.264 formats arern't "not better enough for anyone to care", they're not existing. There's codecs on roughly the same level as H.264 and which use very similar technology (e.g. VC-1), and there's a few codecs in development that may turn out to be better (e.g. Dirac) but aren't yet mature enough for usage, but at the moment there's not really anything better than H.264, not even better enough to not care.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[SeaFox]

They don't think "oh hey while I'm violating copyright I'll violate patents too, just because I can!"

No, but if they don't particularly care about violating copyright, they won't care much about violating patents, either.

Nobody's saying they aren't violating patents either. That's not the topic here.

A moot point, given that people who are misappropriating unpaid-for content choosing to use a misappropriated unpaid-for format is hardly surprising.

You're dismissing the opinion of pirates on their choice of video codec because they're pirating content, implying they're somehow baised towards h264 because it's a patented codec. It's no suprise they use h264 because they have already shown they don't care about breaking the law, true. But they don't have any reason to proactively support h264, either. Ripping the content is their hobby, they will choose the tool they believe best for the job. They really don't care if it's Theora, h264, or even DivX. Their choice in h264 is still an endorsement for the format by people who in some cases know what they're doing when it comes to video encoding.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[SanityInAnarchy]

You're dismissing the opinion of pirates on their choice of video codec because they're pirating content, implying they're somehow baised towards h264 because it's a patented codec.

No, I'm not. I'm saying they lack a bias against that codec that would be present in legitimate use, and in evaluating what is the best tool for the job.

they will choose the tool they believe best for the job.

Which has often been divx, even when h.264 existed and had decent support. It was only once they started embracing HD video that h.264 saw any adoption, and you still occasionally see a 720p divx.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Kjella]

When you cut out the wishful thinking you pretty much agree with me that it isn't being used by those that do care about software patents or those that don't care about software patents. The former licenses H.264 or jumps at shadows, the latter uses H.264 without a license. Your futile attempts at counter attack against H.264 failed the save vs reality. Oh by the way, I also forgot one other big thing - modern digicams/video cameras record in AVCHD which is H.264, so unless they edit and transcode it that'll be in H.264 too. If you're doing something simple like posting a video of a speech it's easier just to trim and put it up there. That combined with all the other HD media means almost everyone has a H.264 decoder, the rest are GNU/special people like RMS.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Phrasing it as them using "a misappropriated unpaid-for format" is not saying they merely don't care.

Oh? I don't think so, but I'm not the one who phrased it that way.

You really have to read that line very loosely and optimistically to interpret it in a way
that doesn't make it seem like the author was thinking "damn filthy fucking pirates" when he wrote it.

You have to read it with quite a lot of prejudice to come up with "damn filthy fucking pirates".

I don't see how "in terms of quality per bit" changes anything, as that's the regular definition of "better" when it comes to lossy compression.

Really? You wouldn't at least consider performance?

And I do think patents are a valid consideration here -- that is, price.

anywhere other than commercial uses nobody cares about patents.

I'm surprised you don't consider "commercial uses" to be significant, especially when "ripping for personal use" often involves some sort of commercial software which had to pay that fee.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[gbarules2999]

Not enough to make a difference. Try a blind listening test sometime. The only reason why AAC "won" (though MP3 is the real winner here) was because of Apple.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Virak]

Oh? I don't think so, but I'm not the one who phrased it that way. You have to read it with quite a lot of prejudice to come up with "damn filthy fucking pirates".

Yes, I must admit I'm terribly prejudiced in favor of modern codecs that allow me to encode stuff at a reasonably bitrate without it looking terrible, and against people attempting to support their ideologies with blatant lies. However, "misappropriated unpaid-for format" is about a hair's width away from "stolen" and most certainly is not a favorable or even indifferent way to describe something. Unless you can provide evidence of widespread usage of "misappropriated" in anything but a negative way (which is going to be difficult considering it's part of the definition of the word), my complaint stands.

Really? You wouldn't at least consider performance?

No, a better codec is better even if it's impractical or even impossible to use it given current hardware. Most people would agree that Crysis has better graphics than Pong even if their computer isn't powerful enough to run it.

And I do think patents are a valid consideration here -- that is, price.

A better codec is better even if you can't afford it. For example, not being able to afford anything other than a thoroughly-used car that was likely made before the invention of the wheel and looks like it would explode given a particularly strong breeze does not make it better than other cars.

I'm surprised you don't consider "commercial uses" to be significant,

I'm surprised you consider shoving words in my mouth a reasonable thing to do. I was objecting to you greatly exaggerating how important patents are to users of video codecs. I never said anything about commerical usage being significant or not significant.

especially when "ripping for personal use" often involves some sort of commercial software which had to pay that fee.

No it doesn't. The most popular ripping tools are open source and use open source codecs and nobody gets paid a cent over patents. Even in the case of people who use commercial software for it, it's not like they'd care. The fee is so low that the price wouldn't be any different if they didn't have to pay it, and unless the user had to manually pay the fee themselves, they'd never even know it existed, price drop or not. For personal usage, few know about the patents, and nobody really cares about them except for the microscopically tiny minority who take the purity of the "freedom" of their software to near-religious levels.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[SanityInAnarchy]

However, "misappropriated unpaid-for format" is about a hair's width away from "stolen"

Which, like it or not, is still not a terribly inaccurate way of describing what's going on here. You could say "illegal unlicensed format", if you like, but I don't think it changes the tone significantly.

Unless you can provide evidence of widespread usage of "misappropriated" in anything but a negative way

Are you going to argue that patent infringement is a positive thing?

I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but let's be clear, because it sounds like that's what you're advocating.

a better codec is better even if it's impractical or even impossible to use it given current hardware.

It's come down to a semantic argument, but this seems pretty blatantly wrong to me. It's "better" even if it's impossible? In that case, might I suggest a codec that assumes we've solved the halting problem?

Most people would agree that Crysis has better graphics than Pong

BIG GIANT KEY FUCKING WORD there. Try it again like this:

Most people would agree that Crysis is better than Pong

I think many people would agree with you, still, but it becomes a lot less clear-cut -- for some people, Pong really is a better game. Here, let me make it even simpler:

Most people would agree that Crysis has better graphics than World of Warcraft. Most, not all.

How many people would agree that Crysis is automatically a better game?

Do you get it yet? "Better" is by definition subjective, and only has meaning relative to other concerns. There is no such thing as a "best" video codec, at least not yet. I'll give you another consideration: not only price of an encoder or decoder, but the ability to produce a file which anyone can develop a decoder for, for free.

The fact that you don't consider a concern to be important doesn't make the concern go away, because like it or not, Virak on Slashdot is not the arbitrator of What's Best for Everyone.

I'm surprised you consider shoving words in my mouth a reasonable thing to do.

To abuse the rhetoric even more, I'm surprised you thought I was doing that. I was merely interpreting what you said. Specifically:

I was objecting to you greatly exaggerating how important patents are to users of video codecs. I never said anything about commerical usage being significant or not significant.

I was pointing out that commercial usage is significant to users of video codecs -- therefore, focusing on users and ignoring commercial usage is distorting the picture, even if you only care from a user's perspective.

The most popular ripping tools are open source and use open source codecs and nobody gets paid a cent over patents.

These open source tools are illegal in the US, as I understand it -- that's why, for example, Audacity requires you to install an mp3 plugin, after clicking through something.

This significantly hampers distribution of these tools -- for example, Dell can't distribute open source implementations of codecs, or even of DVD playback, with their Linux boxes. Instead, they license from Fluendo.

Or maybe an example you'd care about: Firefox cannot legally distribute any non-free codecs. They basically have these options:

1. Mozilla could license the needed codecs. Aside from the amount of cash required, this would mean that anyone wanting to fork Firefox would have to pay the fee again. If you think forks aren't important, remember that Firefox began life as a fork.
2. Mozilla could say "fuck patents" and include the codecs. They could probably get away with it, in places where US software patents aren't enforced. But they'd likely get sued here, as would anyone trying to include Firefox in their product.
3. Mozilla could insist on u

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[Virak]

Which, like it or not, is still not a terribly inaccurate way of describing what's going on here. You could say "illegal unlicensed format", if you like, but I don't think it changes the tone significantly.

Violating IP laws is not the same as theft. Not even close. Were it merely claimed to be illegal, I never would've had a problem with its wording. Let us look up the definition of "misappropriate", shall we? "to appropriate wrongly (as by theft or embezzlement)" Saying merely that it's "illegal" is a neutral statement of fact. Using the word "misappropriate" expresses an opinion of the author that it is against morals or ethics, which goes a fair bit beyond that, and unless the author thinks doing things that they believe to be wrong is good (a rather safe assumption), one can thus conclude that they disapprove of it. This changes the tone very significantly.

Are you going to argue that patent infringement is a positive thing? I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but let's be clear, because it sounds like that's what you're advocating.

I'd say members of a society have no obligation to follow laws that harm society, or perhaps even that they have an obligation to expressly ignore such laws. Software patents are certainly such a case (and the patent system overall needs a pretty huge overhaul). So I suppose the answer is "very yes".

It's "better" even if it's impossible? In that case, might I suggest a codec that assumes we've solved the halting problem?

The qualifier "given current hardware" is pretty important there. A codec that requires solving the halting problem isn't simply "impossible on current hardware", but just plain "impossible". Though I would say it's better, even if a bit less than useful.

[snip lots of stuff about Crysis and Pong]

You seem to have grossly misinterpreted my intent with that comparison (and also completely ignored the other), rephrased it to more directly represent this (incorrectly) perceived intent, and then argued against that. Let me reword it in a way that more unambiguously represents the intent of my analogy: Most people would agree that Crysis's graphics engine is better than Pong's.

The fact that you don't consider a concern to be important doesn't make the concern go away, because like it or not, Virak on Slashdot is not the arbitrator of What's Best for Everyone.

Given the fact that pretty much every comparison of video codecs ranks them by better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, and all progress in lossy compression has been driven by the quest for better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, and all the video compression experts I've talked to use better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, and all the non-experts I've talked to use better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, I feel safe to say that except for a specific, tiny minority, most people would agree with me that "more quality per bit" is, in fact, what makes one compression method "better" than another.

focusing on users and ignoring commercial usage is distorting the picture, even if you only care from a user's perspective.

Again, putting words in my mouth. I never ignored commercial usage. You completely ignored personal usage; your wording was "anywhere other than the pirate community", and that's an exact quote. I pointed out that the only place patents matter is commercial usage and there is a large amount of usage of video codecs that is neither piracy nor commercial, and thus that your assertion that only pirates don't need to worry about the patents was blatantly false.

[stuff about Firefox]

Yes, it's the fault of all these big bad encoder meanies who refuse to make it easier for the developers of a specific program to implement a si

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[BikeHelmet]

I once claimed that xvid was better than h.264. Boy was I wrong! Slashdotters set me right almost immediately, and then I started researching it.

The h.264 4.0 profile isn't that good. I believe Youtube uses that, with optimizations like CABAC and B/Ref frames turned off, and motion estimation quite low. During my research, and after days of tweaking, I put together some ludicrously good x264 settings(very tweaked 5.1 profile) which yielded incredible results for FRAPS'd test vids. I was getting Youtube HD's quality(2mbit) at just 640-1280 kbit.

I started by uploading 4mbit version Youtube, for comparison.

One video was a low-motion RTS (Kohan II) with gaudy ground textures. It looked almost identical to Youtube at just 640kbit. 768-1024kbit was easily better quality. I noted that tweaking aq_strength in one direction led to massive blocking on the ground textures (distracting), and the other way preserved the details. (but then units and spells looked slightly worse) I've never seen a video before where aq_strength had such an impact on where bits are spent, but I suppose that's the nature of this one game.

Another video was of Left4Dead. High motion, somewhat gaudy textures, but lots of stuff moving around and quite a few bullet/fog effects. I needed roughly 1280kbit to match Youtube's 2mbit. At sub-1024kbit, blocking was noticeable on some textures. I also discovered that by increasing the gamma in L4D when recording from a replay, you can turn wall and ground textures into low-colour varients, while brightening the screen. This improved the quality of bullet/fog effects at ~1024kbit, but the walls really did look horrible.

All in all, I learned a lot - none of it conclusive, but all of it pointing to H.264 being far more awesome than I originally thought. Too bad Youtube's encoder favours speed over quality!

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[evilviper]

If the quality is a little bit worse, but it's still fit for the purpose, and it's free, then it has more value than superior technology that is not affordable.

MPEG-1 is completely free, in most areas of the world, due to patent expiration.

It'll also put Theora to shame in just about every respect. Encoding and decoding complexity is so low your digital watch could handle it, and h.264 offers practically no quality improvement at high bitrates, and only a small improvement at VERY LOW bitrates (what it was designed for).

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[howlingmadhowie]

> which now also seems to be a mix probably dominated by H.264. The jury's still out on that one - I think most people expect the W3 to wash their hands of baseline video recommendations entirely (at least until a possible appropriate future format meets the requirements)

the trouble is, theora does meet the requirements, and it's the only halfway modern codec which does. however the requirements for accepting a video tag for html from apple seem to be that it cannot be a royalty-free codec because that would allow firefox to continue to exist, which would slow market share growth for safari. instead, a patent-encumbered codec will make it impossible for free-software to implement html5 and manufacturers of proprietary software will have another string in their monopoly.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[makomk]

MPEG-1 is completely free, in most areas of the world, due to patent expiration.

Possibly - so long as you don't want any audio with your video.

It'll also put Theora to shame in just about every respect.

Unlikely - even the original VP3 can beat MPEG-1, despite its major flaws.

Encoding and decoding complexity is so low your digital watch could handle it, and h.264 offers practically no quality improvement at high bitrates, and only a small improvement at VERY LOW bitrates (what it was designed for).

Encoding and decoding complexity for MPEG-1 is... actually going to be quite close to MPEG-2. h.264 also offers quality improvements at *every* bitrate - due to CABAC (which provides better compression of the encoded data), better motion compensation that allows the available bitrate to be used more efficiently, and possibly even in-loop deblocking.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[ShieldW0lf]

Where in my post did I say that you can't choose inferior codecs for other reasons?

You didn't. But superior and inferior are value judgments, not technical ones. I submit that the legal encumbered codecs are inferior because the required diversion of resources necessary to use them causes them to have less practical utility.

It's similar to the way that code that runs on Windows servers has less practical utility than code that runs on Linux servers. It might be functionally identical or even superior, but you can't scale it out to billions of users unless you can entice those billions of users to pay the Microsoft tax, and construct and maintain the infrastructure they will use to make those payments.

Solutions that are easy for a single man to create and still useful to billions, but not useful enough to divert resources that would put food on the table... those solutions cannot be delivered on Windows servers.

That makes them less fit for purpose. That makes them inferior. Just like the legally encumbered codecs are inferior because of their legal encumbrances.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Let us look up the definition of "misappropriate [merriam-webster.com]", shall we? "to appropriate wrongly (as by theft or embezzlement)"

If you really want to play that game, you should've looked up appropriate:

1 : to take exclusive possession of

This is the definition you'd like to apply, and quite possibly the one that was meant. But look here:

3 : to take or make use of without authority or right

Which says nothing about exclusive possession, or depriving the others of said use. It seems to me that this is exactly what's happening here.

So I suppose the answer is "very yes".

Fair enough. But it's also only something which can be done at the individual level, or, very carefully, with open source. If I use h.264 for something, and a commercial entity wants to make use of that something -- be it source material or software -- they're going to have to pay some sort of fee, or risk lawsuits.

Which also means they'll be legitimizing software patents in the process.

If I instead use Theora, a commercial entity can just pick it up and run with it, to the extent that my licence allows -- that's my license, not mine plus h.264.

I don't think that choosing Theora for that reason puts me in the lunatic fringe of frothing-at-the-mouth FSF "free as in freedom" people.

Let me reword it in a way that more unambiguously represents the intent of my analogy: Most people would agree that Crysis's graphics engine is better than Pong's.

I wouldn't agree with that, either. Let's try again, with something more relevant: Would most people agree Crysis' graphics engine is better than Valve's Source Engine? From the games I've seen, the Source engine is much better at scaling up and down -- I don't know of any CryEngine-based games that will run on 256 megs of RAM and a DirectX 6 graphics card.

Or consider price -- if I'm wanting to build a free mod, what's the best engine? The Source engine may give me a free SDK, as will several other commercial engines. On the other hand, if I start with Nexuiz or Quake 3, I get source code. Depending on the game I'm trying to build, being able to modify the engine -- not to mention deliver a stand-alone executable -- may trump whatever technical features Source has over those engines.

Add to that the fact that Nexuiz and Quake 3 are both incredibly scalable, and Quake 3 almost certainly supports much older systems than Source, and you can see why one graphics engine is not necessarily "best", unless one presupposes (as you do) that the only criteria worth considering for making an engine "good" is "makes the most realistic graphics".

I understand what your analogy is trying to do, but no matter how you reword it, it's still not valid -- even when you get it down to "what's the best sorting algorithm?", the answer isn't always Quicksort.

except for a specific, tiny minority, most people would agree with me that "more quality per bit" is, in fact, what makes one compression method "better" than another.

Depends what you mean by "tiny". While I'm often surprised at the number of game studios who pay for MP3 support in their games, rather than just using vorbis, that is a valid concern for just about anyone who wants to include a video clip in their game. Or in any other software, for that matter.

That may still fit your definition of "tiny", though, I'm not sure.

your wording was "anywhere other than the pirate community", and that's an exact quote.

I also said "likely to be" -- but I suppose you have a point.

refuse to make it easier for the developers of a specific program to implement a single feature poorly.

Or make it possible for the developers of any browser to impleme

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[SanityInAnarchy]

You're confusing patents with licenses.

I don't think it changes my main point.

The issue with H.264 is the license and the fees (for large hosts) starting 2011.

These licenses only work because of patents. Without patents, no one would care -- we'd all just use x264 and ffmpeg and be done with it.

The alleged issue with Theora are third-party patents it might some day be accused of violating.

In other words, the issue with Theora is that it might someday have patent problems, whereas h2.64 already has patent problems.

The kneejerk reaction here seems to be because Theora isn't managed by a corporate entity -- but it was, and it was indeed patented. Those patents were released to the public domain.

Apple and Google got Theora dumped as HTML5's required codec with that argument.

Wrong. Apple used that argument. Chrome does natively support Theora.

It's just that Chrome also natively supports h.264, and Google refuses to use Theora for YouTube, as long as h.264 has better quality per bit.

As there is no way around Firefox's market share, Mozilla's decision keeps Theora in the game, hopefully long enough for Theora to improve until it's usable for HD streaming.

I hope not, actually. There are only a few possible outcomes:

• Theora eventually beats h.264. Nobody thinks this is likely, but let's pretend. In this case, we still have to convince Google that it's worth re-encoding all of YouTube yet again. And as you mention, there's all that existing content -- and that's going to be a generational loss for anyone who doesn't save all the original files.
• People agree to use Theora, even though it's worse. YouTube sticks to Flash, to save bandwidth. HTML5 Video fails before it even begins.
• The h.264 patents expire. Everyone adopts h.264, except Firefox, because Firefox committed itself to a non-pluggable architecture.

It looks to me that the sane solution would be for Firefox to support whatever native video codecs are available on a platform -- that means DirectShow on Windows, GStreamer on Linux, and QuickTime on OS X. If they want to install a codec for Theora out of the box, that's fine, but it makes sense to support h.264 if they can.

Or, to put it another way, mplayer would be significantly less useful to me without all the proprietary formats it supports. Firefox would be significantly less useful to me if I could watch YouTube without Flash in Chrome, but not in Firefox.

Even if the standards were to specify that you must use a certain codec, and even if it was a better codec... My cell phone -- a pretty standard, free-with-the-contract Motorola -- can record short videos. I can retrieve them via Bluetooth. They're tiny, and crappy, and I certainly don't want to make them worse with re-encoding.

They appear to be in a Quicktime (or maybe mp4) container, with divx video and some sort of Quicktime audio. They're also tiny, which means they're already decently web-sized.

So, it would be nice if I could just wrap these in a video tag, rather than having to re-encode them to Theora. That's why a pluggable, multi-multi-codec Firefox makes much more sense in the long run.

In the short term, as much as I dislike a defacto standard of h.264, I much prefer it to a defacto standard of Flash or Silverlight.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[evilviper]

Possibly - so long as you don't want any audio with your video.

MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio is patent-free as well. Sisvel/AudioMPEG has stopped asserting patent rights on the technology some time ago now.

It's only the slightly more recent MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer 3) which will get you into patent trouble... Which is a non-issue, since from the very beginning, just about EVERY hardware device or software player made that supports MPEG-1 video also supports MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio, but usually NOT MP3.

Encoding and decoding complexity for MPEG-1 is... actually going to be quite close to MPEG-2.

Complexity, and everything else about MPEG-1 is going to be IDENTICAL to MPEG-2. MPEG-2 IS MPEG-1, with just a couple features added, like support for interlaced video...

h.264 also offers quality improvements at *every* bitrate

At high bitrates, the improvements are absolutely nominal. It's a fundamental law of perceptual encoding. Here's my /. form-letter response:

You're also welcome to look-up subjective benchmark comparisons of H.264/AVC and MPEG-2, which, even if they've biased the test to use old and poor quality MPEG-2 encoders, at the very least, will demonstrate the diminishing returns of H.264/AVC at increased bitrates/quality.

And finally, there are inherent limits that audio and video codecs cannot possibly exceed... For audio, that limit is called "Perceptual Entropy" (PE), and was defined decades ago. Once you exceed PE, you no longer have any hope of reproducing an audio signal that cannot be distinguished from the uncompressed original... You can only hope to make it sound acceptable, the distortions non-obvious, and eliminate sounds that might seem like they don't belong, anyhow. MPEG-1 Layer II audio, as used in DAB, is already quite close to that limit, and 128kbps compression substantially exceeds the PE for 44.1KHz stereo audio.

For video, I will admit I have never heard of such a nice simple term and single study to exactly define the limit... Still, I'd be willing to make an educated guess that the figure is no more than 40:1, because (like PE with audio) a rather sharp tailing-off of improvements can be seen in subjective codec tests when nearing that level of compression, which spans the full range of codecs, no matter the technology used.

As with audio, even early lossy video codecs (like MPEG-2) are sufficiently close to that fundamental limit to make the development of better high-bitrate codecs largely pointless. Instead, the focus has been, and continues to be, on the low-end, where you're simply trying to make it look "good", rather than identical, and can flexibly discard perceptual information in a way that it isn't too... distracting.

There is still some room for debate on the subject, since MPEG-2 doesn't entirely hit the perceptual limits of lossy compression. Still, newer codecs don't have very much room to squeeze better compression out of video, while maintaining high-quality video that is close to being indistinguishable from the original.

But if you want to argue that point with me, you face two further problems... First, I've used H.264/AVC encoders and recent/advanced MPEG-2 encoders plenty, so I can speak pretty conclusively when I say there's not much improvement to be had at high bitrates (but like HE-AACv2, it does an impressive job at very low bitrates). Secondly, I know codec internals pretty well, so I can also attest that H.264/AVC is heavily based on the same technologies as it's predecessors (MPEG-1, MPEG-2), and that all the (terribly CPU-hungry) improvements that have been made (eg. qpel vs half-pel, multiple ref/anchor frames, in-loop deblocking, et al.) simply can't provide very much compressibility improvement with high quality (weakly quantized) materials... The amount of change and randomness is too high for such tricks to be effective,

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[sahonen]

Bink is still around because it's the best solution for game development, not because there aren't visually superior or cheaper-to-license codecs out there. It has low enough decoding overhead that you can do things like load your levels in the background while a cinematic is playing, or stream the video into a texture in your 3D environment, and has extremely friendly APIs and libraries that save developer time and headaches.

Re:Q. What is Theora?

[PybusJ]

It's also pretty much completely ignored by the pirate community, preferring mkv/H.264.

Well that's rather obvious. The entire point of theora is to create a patent-free codec, so content can be encoded and distributed without owing royalties. Movie pirates, by definition, are not going to worry about the IPR status of their activities.

While possibly FUD, not everyone is willing to ship this codec because they fear submarine patents

This is a shame, and it probably is FUD, some of the companies questioning Theora have an interest in their own proprietary codecs.

Re:You know..

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point? It's free, in both senses of the word.

Unlike H.264, you do not have to pay to use Theora.

Unlike H.264, you can use Theora in open-source software without worrying about being sued or shut down overnight.

Sure, if you don't care about freedom and don't mind paying for the privilege, go ahead and use H.264. But why would you want to, when you can use Theora however you want to, and without paying a cent?

Dirac isn't shabby

[jbn-o]

Dirac strikes me as another codec worth following. It's available to all developers, high-quality, and in production use by the BBC during the Olympics (they said so in their Dirac promotional video). VLC has support for playing back Dirac streams. I'd guessing other players do as well.

I expect Theora and Dirac to be of interest to all who want high-quality free video codecs.

Re:Dirac isn't shabby

[TheRaven64]

Worth following? Yes. Especially as a profile of Dirac is in process of adoption as VC-2 and so will be used a lot for digital masters. Worth deploying? Not so much. A decent (Core 2 or better) laptop can probably play back Dirac without dropping frames, but it will be at a very high CPU load. A handheld has no chance. There are a couple of GPU-based decoders which may be ported to run on OpenGL ES 2.0 hardware in a modern handheld and there is a hardware decoder under development that may help too (especially if it's licensed as an IP core for integration into ARM SoCs).

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.

Re:You know..

[Randle_Revar]

Mod parent up

Someone's gotta say it...

[jejones]

I hope that this version becomes widely used so that we can eventually read of the triumphs of Thusnelda.

(Oy vey, oy vey...)

Re:Someone's gotta say it...

[Kingrames]

It would be more popular as the Legend of Thusnelda.

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this.

smplayer allows arbitrary name subtitles

[KWTm]

I cant load subtitles in [VLC] unless I decompress and they have the same filename.

Just wanted to let you know that SMplayer lets you load any file as the subtitle file. Of course, Mplayer itself does, too, but some people get intimidated by the command-line. With SMplayer, you go to the Subtitles menu, click on Load, and then pick whichever file you want.

In case anyone doesn't know yet, SMplayer is a user-friendly front-end for the powerful Mplayer program. Mplayer is probably the next best thing to an omnipotent video (and audio) player, but it's a command-line program with a bewildering array of options guaranteed to intimidate the weak of heart. SMplayer is a very well done user interface, just as easy to use as VLC but allows use of most of the features of Mplayer. SMplayer is to Mplayer what Ubuntu is to Debian.

Now, it still doesn't work on zip files. I wish someone had written SMplayer with the KDE toolkit instead of GTK+; then you could use the zip Kpart and just dive right into the Zip file (or even specify the subtitle filename as "fish://mylogin@myhomemachine/mypath/mysubtitlefile" and just pull it off another machine on the SOHO net).

Re:smplayer allows arbitrary name subtitles

[ThePhilips]

SMPlayer makes sure that you never ever need to see command line.

On Linux and Mac OS X (where MPC + CoreAVC isn't available), Mplayer front-ends are your surest bet for HD video playback with soft subtitles.

As much as I wish for VLC to work, it is probably worst of all HD capable players, having all possible problems: subs sync, a/v sync, video jitter.

Re:smplayer allows arbitrary name subtitles

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wish someone had written SMplayer with the KDE toolkit instead of GTK+"
SMplayer is written using Qt and can be compiled with KDE options enabled. I do not know if it enables streaming from kioslaves, but there's bound to be some zip FUSE module for that.

Re:smplayer allows arbitrary name subtitles

[BikeHelmet]

SMplayer is the best MPlayer frontend I've tried. I still prefer MPC-HC + KLite for the GPU shaders, but I can't deny that SMplayer and MPlayer are quality software! Based on CPU usage when playing stuff, I'd bet that the GPU acceleration/decoding is fully enabled and working.

Re:smplayer allows arbitrary name subtitles

[richlv]

Now, it still doesn't work on zip files. I wish someone had written SMplayer with the KDE toolkit instead of GTK+

i was going to mod you up until i got to this. smplayer is written in qt (qt3 for older versions, qt4 for some time now).

Re:Great, but...

[Delkster]

Encoders such as Theora, DVD rippers, and GUIs for these are pretty much separate things. Normally an end user doesn't even end up in any kind of direct interaction with a Theora encoder, or an H.264 encoder implementation such as x264. The article is about encoders, not GUI applications that use them.

While I don't know much about MediaCoder, judging from screenshots on the site it's clearly a front-end that binds together these features -- ripping, decoding, processing (scaling etc.), and re-encoding, and gives end users a GUI for using them. It might use open source ripping and encoding libraries in its back-end for actually implementing these technical tasks, or it might have its own implementations (which I doubt). How it presents that functionality and workflow to the user in its GUI is independent of the details of how exactly the encoding etc. have been implemented -- or at least it should be.

It's true that most F/OSS GUIs for DVD ripping and encoding suck, Handbrake probably being the closest one I've seen so far to being both featureful and providing a reasonably humane GUI for general video transcoding. However, for actual encoder implementations efficiency is indeed the prime focus. (How easy the actual encoders are to use also has some importance, but that's mostly a direct concern only to power users who use the encoders directly and for developers who write software that uses the encoders as a back-end.)

Re:You know..

[ducomputergeek]

Because everyone else in the industry is using H.264. If you want your materials to play nice with others hardware, software, etc. you'd better damn well be using H.264.

Generally, the cost of the H.264 license is covered by the software/hardware purchased by the consumer, whether it's a business or personal use. It's licensed by Adobe/Apple/Google/whomever when you buy or use their encoder. I don't have to pay a licensing fee for every video I create in H.264.

I've tested Theora on a few occasions. Everytime, H.264 has beat it in terms of quality for file size plus I can send an H.264 file to anyone else in the industry and I guarantee it will play for them. And today, I can put it out on the web and be pretty much guaranteed that just about everyone can view it.

Not so much with Theora.

Re:You know..

[squiggleslash]

Unlike H.264, you do not have to pay to use Theora.

Unless it becomes popular, in which case the so-called "submarine" (actually they may not even be submarine) patents will come to the fore, and you'll have to pay.

I don't trust Xiph having read their comments about what exactly they mean by "Patent free", and having seen the silence over, say, Vorbis's apparent infringement of US Patent 5,214,742. Is Theora "safer" than Vorbis? Well, it's another DCT-based codec, just like 99% of the video codecs in use since H.261, and it's essentially doing stuff where everyone else is doing stuff. The chances of it not violating some patent somewhere is minimal to non-existent, as everyone and their brother is trying to come up with ways to improve DCT based algorithms that they can patent and then submit to MPEG or VCEG for incorporation into the next MPEG or H.26* video standard.

There are really only three standards that could be considered free of patent issues, and even then it's not entirely 100% certain. H.261 dates back to the mid eighties. The ITU lists no current patents applying to MPEG-1. (It's worth pointing out that Theora's predecessor, VP3, is considered to be somewhere between H.261 and MPEG-1 in terms of quality.) And finally, the BBC did an extensive search for anything that might hit their Dirac codec and came up blank, as well as proposing (and then withdrawing once published, so they count as prior art) some patents themselves, so Dirac is in the running too.

Theora? If I was a commercial concern, I would avoid it. I'd go for the predictability of a licensable codec ahead of one that almost certainly would be a target for patent lawsuits if it ever achieves critical mass, and possibly earlier.

I might feel differently if Xiph didn't play word games with the term "Patent free", and gave a straight answer on the issues of actual patents people have found, rather than turning around and saying "Yeah, we ran it by a lawyer, and they said we're OK, but we're not going to tell you why because it's our super secret defense we'll use if we're ever sued", which doesn't exactly inspire confidence, especially as nobody will ever sue Xiph anyway (Xiph just writes the software, they leave the packaging, compiling, possible selling, and actual using to everyone else.)

Re:You know..

[SanityInAnarchy]

Unless it becomes popular, in which case the so-called "submarine" (actually they may not even be submarine) patents will come to the fore, and you'll have to pay... I'd go for the predictability of a licensable codec ahead of one that almost certainly would be a target for patent lawsuits if it ever achieves critical mass,

Ludicrous FUD. Did concerns like this make anyone even pause, for a heartbeat, before considering H.264?

Nothing about Theora's "open-ness" makes it more likely to be hit by a submarine patent than any proprietary project.

And remember, it was originally proprietary, and is covered by a few patents, which have been released to the public domain -- so if your argument is that having something patented once means it's less likely to be infringing on someone else's patents, even if that was ever a valid argument, it fails here.

having seen the silence over, say, Vorbis's apparent infringement of US Patent 5,214,742.

The conclusion I find from a quick Google search is that, really, any corporation interested in these should be doing their own due diligence. So, I'd ask Google, since, among other things, Chrome distributes a Theora decoder.

I might feel differently if Xiph didn't play word games with the term "Patent free", and gave a straight answer on the issues of actual patents people have found, rather than turning around and saying "Yeah, we ran it by a lawyer, and they said we're OK, but we're not going to tell you why

So, I'd run it by a lawyer myself.

especially as nobody will ever sue Xiph anyway

Except whatever business model Xiph has, whatever credibility they have, would evaporate if someone was ever successfully sued over Theora. So, if their "we ran it by a lawyer" story isn't completely bullshit, they'd certainly share that secret the second anyone was actually sued.

But no one has been, even with a few relatively large commercial entities using Theora.

Re:No wonder Open Source doesn't catch on

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me troll all you want, it's fucking true.

You don't see real commercial companies releasing products with nerdy names like fucking Theora, Thusnelda or "Ogg".

Jesus fucking christ... "Ogg"... that sounds like a fucking grunt from a fucking caveman.

Re:You know..

[Antiocheian]

Informative? Of yes highly informative as a typical example of FUD against Theora.

Example: "The chances of it not violating some patent somewhere is minimal to non-existent"

Re:Great, but...

[Antiocheian]

Mediacoder is mencoder, ffmpeg ripoff -- it has (or had 2 months ago) an entry on ffmpeg's hall of shame.

What does being an astroturfer pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Vorbis's apparent infringement of US Patent 5,214,742."

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:

/* fairly straight threshhold-by-band based until we find something
      that works better and isn't patented. */

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...

CNN

[tepples]

Do you normally spend much of your time encoding shooter game footage where 1/3 of the screen is totally still uber high detail stuff and the rest is a sea of constant motion

Take out the "game" and you have a pretty good description of TV news coverage of foreign war with a bottom third.

Re:You know..

[CSMatt]

The MPEG-LA license only protects you against the MPEG-LA members. In no way does it provide any sort of guarantee that someone who isn't in MPEG-LA won't start suing at any point in time. The argument against Theora in this regard can really be made against any codec.

As for your "safe" codecs, MPEG-1 may not be patentable my MPEG-LA's standards anymore, but that doesn't mean someone hasn't patented some part of the format at a later time than the standard came out, thus making the patent still valid today. Would such a patent pass the test of prior art? It depends on what they patented, but even if it didn't all it takes is for a patent grant by the USPTO to allow a lawsuit, and the patent must be invalidated afterwards. You still can get sued, even if the claim can be found baseless.

The BBC may have done research about Dirac and came up with nothing, but are they more open about what exactly they did than Xiph? If they are, please give a link showing what you considered acceptable for Dirac but not for Theora.

Samples of current Theora, H.264, VC-1

[benwaggoner]

I made a few samples using the latest versions of x264, VC-1, and Theora, testing both offline VBR and real-time CBR encoding.

http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/Theora%5E_1.1

Theora is defintely improved, but I see a lot of basis pattern throughout these samples. Theora would be well-served by a postprocessing filter. Theora's 1-pass CBR encoding definitely needs a LOT of tuning before it'd be viable for real-world content; I don't think we'll see it used effectively for live encoding this version.

Re:You know..

[benwaggoner]

The MPEG-LA license only protects you against the MPEG-LA members. In no way does it provide any sort of guarantee that someone who isn't in MPEG-LA won't start suing at any point in time. The argument against Theora in this regard can really be made against any codec.

Well, the members of the MPEG-LA patent pools hold pretty much all the known-critical patents for video compression, so that's actually a pretty good real-world protection.

Hardware support?

[Shawn Parr]

I find it intriguing that in every discussion I see on tech sites like /., it is always the patents that seem to be what people focus on.

What about the built in hardware support for h.264 is millions upon millions of existing general computing and embedded devices? It seems like Google would want YouTube accessible on these devices, and on many it is. Being able to bring that support to phones, satellite boxes, cable boxes, TV, etc. etc. etc. that already have h.264 is probably a bigger motivator than the idea of a patent looming.

My iPhone has hardware acceleration for h.264, so does my TV, so does my BluRay player, so do many computers I use, so does my DirecTV receiver. Some of those (BR, TV, and DirecTV) don't have the resources available to play any arbitrary compression type. However all of them are from markets where integrating online services, especially images and video, is a strong focus.

Overlooking several markets of existing hardware to bring your services to seems like a bad business decision to me. And the real players that will determine what codec gets used: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, hardware manufacturers, media producers, etc., are all used to dealing with licensing.

Re:Hardware support?

[TheRaven64]

Hardware acceleration for Theora is overlooked because a modern handheld can decode it without needing custom hardware. It is much less processor-intensive than H.264. It is not overlooked for Dirac: The BBC is working with chip makers to get Dirac codecs implemented in hardware.

Re:You know..

[evilviper]

Unless it becomes popular, in which case the so-called "submarine" (actually they may not even be submarine) patents will come to the fore, and you'll have to pay.

If there were going to be submarine patents, they would have showed up when Xiph was selling the codecs... or their successors... or when AOL licensed them and used them in Winamp and AIM... or when Adobe licensed VP6 for Flash8 video... or...

Re:You know..

[evilviper]

That should be "On2", not Xiph.

Re:You know..

[evilviper]

that doesn't mean someone hasn't patented some part of the format at a later time than the standard came out,

Yes, it does. You have 1 year after publication to file a patent. After that, any patent is invalid.

Would such a patent pass the test of prior art? It depends on what they patented,

It would be trivially easy to demonstrate the patent is invalid in the specific case of a MPEG-1 video encoder/decoder, since people were doing that before the (later) patent was filed.

Re:You know..

[DaVince21]

We are still nowhere near finished with Theora, and the new features that are nearing completion just take it closer to the efforts of projects like Theora. h.264 is the industry standard, it is being used everywhere from cell phones and video conferencing to feature and television distribution and consumer content. Do yourselves a favor, contribute to Theora if you can as there are many areas where it can be improved.

Seriously, your entire paragraph could be flipped around like this.

Re:No wonder Open Source doesn't catch on

[DaVince21]

Yeah, because h.264 definitely doesn't sound nerdier.

They don't need to

[trawg]

They just bought the On2 VP6 codec, which will no doubt feature heavily in their future video plans.

Re:You know..

[notxarb]

I wonder if it is time for me to reconvert all my HD movies again into this now. It takes hours to rip them, and even more to convert them. It could be worth it if it can be higher quality at the same bitrate or same quality at a lower bitrate. Some of my movies get a little messy in the high motion areas, but I didn't have much choice if I wanted all of them to fit on the same 1.5tb drive.

Re:You know..

[BZ]

> And today, I can put it out on the web

Something that may cost you money starting 2011. MPEG-LA has indicated that it's likely to require royalties for streaming (not encoding; simply making available in a streamable fashion) H.264 starting then, with the final decisions on pricing and such to be made in December 2009, last I checked.

Of course for the next year or so you're ok.

The fact is, the video codec landscape on the web just doesn't look very good.