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Google Funds Ogg Theora For Mobile
An anonymous reader writes "Google has decided to fund the development of Theora optimized for ARM processors. The article on the Open Source at Google blog notes the importance of having a universal baseline video codec for the Web: 'What is clear though, is that we need a baseline to work from — one standard format that (if all else fails) everything can fall back to. This doesn't need to be the most complex format, or the most advertised format, or even the format with the most companies involved in its creation. All it needs to do is to be available, everywhere. The codec in the frame for this is Ogg Theora, a spin off of the VP3 codec released into the wild by On2 a couple of years ago.'"
This is awesome! Not to detract from it, but why is there so much more love for Theora than for Dirac?
Chris DiBona of the Google open source group claimed that "If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet."
This was shown to be false.
Mr DiBona then mysteriously vanished without trace.
Could he please manifest and either (a) support his claims or (b) concede his error?
Thanks ever so much.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Meh, getting 503s trying to log in. Sorry for the A/C Post.
XHTML was interesting and lovely, and no one gave a shit. Ideology loses to practicality in almost every case until ideology is reformed to conform to reality.
I think you'll find that if you look at HTML5, there's not a lot of presentational bits in it. Most of that is still reserved for CSS.
You'll also find that the cases where things are defined at least gives the web a unified a way to handle real web pages that exist *today*. Right now, a new browser would have to reverse engineer what Chrome, FF, IE and friends did in order to know how to render the web. HTML5 at least identifies the reality that exists.
You note that JS is being used to do things it shouldn't. On what grounds? Who are you to tell what should and shouldn't be done with a language and in a given environment? The practical fact is that folks *are* doing amazing things with JS. If you don't like the language, that's your problem. If you don't want it on your computer, don't use those websites. JS *does* lots of things today, and there's no reason to limit it artificially. You want something better out there? Come up with a solution and push it.
Your final comment notes that web developers aren't interested in quality and technical superiority. You're right. Why should they? What they care about is getting a product out. You're asking them to solve problems that they don't have.
Tks,
Jeff Bailey
(an employee of Google, not speaking for Google at all)
This is beyond awesome, it's a game-changer. Google is one of those rare companies that singularly has the power to move markets, and it is revolutionary to see it do so in favor of consumers as it has. I understand the reasons why it has preferred H.264 over Theora, but it is really nice to see that it also understands the reasons why we should be preferring an open format instead. It's especially nice in an age of companies wanting to lock everything down and be the gatekeeper to everything, the major player in technology is pushing yet again to open things up.
Sometimes I think that Google is about the only company that "gets it." They understand that more people using the Internet translates to more money in their pocket. Even if those people are not using Google's services directly, they are increasing the market such that collectively, it has more opportunity, which in turn translates into more $$$. They seem to not really care if other people are making more money as well, which really separates them in my mind from other companies, who are of the "it is not enough that I succeed, but everyone else must fail" mentality.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, one reason I've seen people regurgitate in why H.264 is the right way to go is because it is supported on hardware. Congratulations to Google on working to negate that argument.
XHTML is easy to generate, manipulate, and validate? Have you ever written software that tried to handle XHTML? It's as complex as writing an XML handler which is not trivial to do properly. Things like tag attributes add a whole extra layer of complexity to getting a machine to actually understand the document. Your contention that HTML5 is regressing with respect mixing presentation and content is ignorant and borderline stupid. It makes me wonder if you've even read the spec. HTML5 eliminates presentation tags like center, tt, and the font tag. It does add tags that make it easier for user agents to determine the context of different parts of a document.
For instance the header, footer, and article tags let the UA figure out in a search which parts of the document they ought to pay more attention to. Search engines can focus on text inside article tags and ignore text matches in the footer or nav tags for instance. Screen readers don't need to try to parse pages based on tag attributes like they have to with HTML4/XHTML. A screen reader can know that it doesn't need to bother reading the contents of the footer or it can more easily provide a verbal menu based on the sections of the document.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Neither Apple's or Microsoft's products support Flash out of the box either, yet Flash is fairly ubiquitous right now.
Really? The last two Macs I've bought have come with Flash preinstalled. Not sure about Windows, but someone mentioned a few days ago here that their new Windows machine had Flash preinstalled, although it's not clear whether this was done by MS or the OEM.
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Theora is perhaps better than H.263 and MPEG-2 (from the mid 90s), but does not come close to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC or VC-1. (The frozen Theora bitstream format is lacking many features found in H.264 and VC-1.) Results might be similar to H.263+/MPEG-4 ASP.
The Ogg container also has some documented flaws.
Note that there are many sites which perform misleading or flawed comparisons of the two; for example, they might compare the result from YouTube's H.264 encoder with a lossy source (which optimizes for encoding speed) to a locally ran Theora encode with a lossless source.
Since OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 come with H.264 decoding, and Windows 7 supports H.264 hardware decoding with compatible hardware from any source, I recommend sticking with H.264. (OS X 10.6's H.264 hardware decoding support appears to be limited to videos played in QuickTime X from MPEG4 or QuickTime container files on systems with nVidia 9400M GPUs or newer, even though Macs with capable GPUs started appearing in 2007.)
Theora lost because it wasn't as good as H.264 and it's still not as good as H.264 bit for bit. The only reason why the opensource world support it isn't because it's better, but because it's the only "open source friendly" option. Sorry, but that just because it fits an idelogoy doesn't mean much to the part of the world that uses the product. It's like suggesting that a professional 3D/video shop use Blender instead of Maya or Cinelerra instead of Final Cut Pro or Avid. The professionals are going to take a look at it for a while and go, "Nice toy, now I've got to get back to work."
If the opensource world wants Theroa to succeed, you're going to have to produce something that's better than H.264 end of story. Until then the people are working in Video are going to continue using H.264 because it's everywhere and is currently the best mainstream codec available.
I worked in Video production in the late 90's through about 2005. H.264 was a godsend when we finally had a single Codec that was adopted by pretty much all recording hardware and editing software. Before it was a Codec Hell. Nobody I talk to in the industry, and I still have a lot of friends who work everywhere from their basement to large production shops, have any interest in embracing Theora or anything else. They only want to support 1 Codec that works everywhere, and that's H.264. Even if it costs them a little bit of money. Because whatever it costs them is likely cheaper than the headaches of having to support multiple formats.
Now, if Theora or some other patent free format gets to the point where it can offer at least the same (really it has to be BETTER than H.264 in features and quality) only then will the production houses be interested in switching. And by better, offer at least the same quality as H.264 at a lower bit rate than H.264.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Tags like header and footer denote semantics which are part of the content (content denotes what is displayed, not how it is displayed). They don't say "the footer should be in a 10pt font" -- that is up to the CSS. They (and the other layout elements) denote the semantics of what is currently being done in an ad-hoc way. They allow things like search engines to identify relevant information (e.g. ignore the footer sections).
HTML5 is looking to be a great standard. Not perfect by any means, but it is a good step forward (giant leap?) in the right direction. Having a defined way of processing HTML5 and having an XML variant (XHTML) unified to the same DOM makes it easier to choose how you want to write/generate your HTML content.
There were some nice ideas in XHTML2, but it didn't pan out. That does not mean that some of those ideas cannot be integrated into HTML in the future like section has been.
It is also good to see Google seeking to improve video support.
Gradually, HTML5 support will improve, as will support for CSS3 as these standards get finalised. Also, audio and video support will stabilise as well. These, with all the advances in support for MathML, SVG, SMIL and other standards as well as performance improvements for JavaScript and hardware-accelerated page rendering mean that the web is only growing in strength.
As for JavaScript, it is just a scripting language -- you can do anything with it and hook it to anything. You do know that the "fetch more comments" feature of slashdot uses javascript? You do know that thunderbird and firefox make use of javascript for binding their UI together?
How does SVG handle sprite graphics? Far better than canvas does. To move a sprite, you can transform its position, with a canvas you have to re-composite the image. The sprite itself can be a traditional bit-mapped image if desired.
Pixel art editing is somewhat possible. Canvas can generate a bitmap of the output, but SVG can not without and external converter. As you add pixels (really rectangles in the DOM of the svg) you dramatically explode the size of the DOM tree causing performance issues. With good partitioning algorithms, this can be partially mitigated by combining adjacent like pixels into single DOM objects.
No web browser ever supported xhtml2, but then the only after the xhtml2 spec was shelved did browsers start to roll out any significant support for html5 either.
1. XForms are a huge improvement which currently does not work. Good or bad bad it is.
2. What? There already is a standard. Microsoft decided it does not need to do it the way it's written. Why would you think they'll implement something else?
3. XHTML5 (XML serialization of HTML5) can include MathML and SVG too. Your point is? HTML serialization will be able to do that or so I heard.
4. Predefined styles are backward compatibility. I don't like them either (aside from, maybe, b/i/etc) but I doubt browser vendors will do something about that. Otherwise users complain it's broken. And no, you cannot educate them on the issue. They do not care.
5. This is something I don't like myself (sometimes). However, you can't really make something about that either (same reason). Well, you can somewhat - use XML serialization of HTML. However it'll only check validity of XML. Good thing anyway, you don't want a browser to analyze if it's allowed to have one element in the other - you may need to introduce new elements someday.
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