Slashdot Mirror
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.