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Hardware-Accelerated Ogg Theora For Firefox Mobile
An anonymous reader writes "Matthew Gregan is working on bringing David Schleef's DSP accelerated port of Theora to Firefox Mobile. He writes on his blog: 'The C64x+ DSP is often found in systems built upon TI's OMAP3 SoC, such as the Palm Pre, Motorola Droid, and Nokia N900. Last year, Mozilla funded a port, named Leonora, of Xiph's Theora video codec to the TI C64x+ DSP. David Schleef conducted the port impressively quickly and published his results. The intention of this project was to provide a high-quality set of royalty-free media codecs for a common mobile computing platform. The initial focus is Firefox Mobile on the N900, so I am working on integrating David's work into Firefox. To experiment with other facilities Firefox could use to accelerate video playback, and test integration, I've been hacking on a branch of a stand-alone Ogg Theora and Vorbis player originally written by Chris Double called plogg.'"
Theora isn't bad. It's better than MPEG-1 and a MPEG-2, and similar quality to MPEG-4 part 2. It's not as good as H.264, VC-1, or Dirac, but that's not the same as being bad. It's perfectly acceptable for a lot of uses.
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I'll admit that Theora isn't the greatest video codec. But it's been explained many times that Mozilla simply can't use MPEG-4 AVC/h.264 because of the patents involved.
Mozilla and wider Open Source world has three options: (not mutually exclusive)
But no amount of whinging will make them use AVC/h.264. It's simply not an option at the moment.
the rest of the world plays grande ball with the H.264 format and the superior encoders available for it
Up until Dec 31, 2010 when the patent holders have stated that they're ending the royalty-free period and it becomes the GIF of the video world.
You can bet that with all the money youtube loses now, Google ain't going to pay for millions of H.264 videos and H.264 will literally disappear overnight. I'm sure Google is working overtime on getting that shiny new codec they just bought into chrome, if not firefox. Perhaps they'll write a flash player for it too.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Wow, so doing the same thing as H.264 isn't good enough? Now you demand silicon for Theora where H.264 uses DSPs?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
And Microsoft and Apple CAN implement Theora, then we can have a nice baseline and H.264 fans can still use it if they wish to.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Just to add to the other reply... Did you think that mobile devices just have random DSPs included for the purpose of eventual Theora support?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
If all internet use h.264 now, will still be using, and in far more ways, in 5. You now can move away with not so big effort, in 5 years will be impossible, and most of the internet content will be tied to the will of a single company wanting that you and everyone else in the planet pays them for every device and app that potentially connects to internet. Support it "by now",and will never be pressure to change till will be too late.
And open source somewhat follows the "shoulders of giants" idea, all have the source, so the experience could be used with another future open source codec if necessary.
They only way they can do as you suggest is by severely compromising Firefox.
Utter garbage. Firefox is *already* subject to any bugs in the underlying OS on an incredibly wide range of issues. Hell, just a few years back, Firefox was compromised thanks to an image rendering bug in GDI on Windows. So, what, *now* they've suddenly decided they're going to reimplement OS-supplied services for fear of security issues? Please.
On the bright side, at least the Mozilla devs *tried* to invent a technical excuse for not supporting H.264, now that people have realized there are no legal barriers to doing so. Of course, it's a stupid, irrelevant, indefensible technical excuse. But, hey, kudos for trying, guys.