Theora Development Continues Apace, VP8 Now Open Source

SergeyKurdakov writes "Monty 'xiphmont' Montgomery of the Xiph Foundation says the latest action-packed, graph- and demo-clip-stuffed Theora project update page (demo 9) is now up for all and sundry! Catch up on what's gone into the new Theora encoder Ptalarbvorm over the last few months. It also instructs how to pronounce 'Ptalarbvorm.' Ptalarbvorm is not a finished release encoder yet, though I've personally been using it in production for a few months. Pace on improvements hasn't slowed down — the subjective psychovisual work being done by Tim Terriberry and Greg Maxwell has at least doubled-again on the improvements made by Thusnelda, and they're not anywhere near done yet. As a bonus Monty gathered all Xiph demo pages in one place." Also on the video codec front, and also with a Xiph connection, atamido writes "Google has released On2's VP8 video codec to the world, royalty-free. It is packaging it with Vorbis audio, in a subset of the Matroska container, and calling it WebM. It's not branded as an exclusively Google project — Mozilla and Opera are also contributors. Builds of your favorite browsers with full support are available." An anonymous reader points out this technical analysis of VP8.

Comments

OT: Flash P2P vs. privacy

[crow]

So if you want to see who is watching a given YouTube (or porn site) video, just watch it yourself, and then watch your network while the flash player is still active.

Re:VP8 won't replace MPEG 4 AVC (H.264)

[djdanlib]

Well, if streaming media has proved *anything* over the years, it's that the general public doesn't care if the compression ruins the work as long as they can play it for free.

Reference the following:
* RealMedia
* Most Youtube videos, "fan reposts" aka re-encodes, and re-re-encodes
* Low bitrate MP3
* JPEG (ok, it's not streaming, but still - "needs more JPEG artifacts")
* Screeners, cams, and foreign translations from the DIVX Discount Theatre
* Webcams
* Most QuickTime videos
* Most AVIs
* Most streaming video on Flash today
* Cable and satellite delivered HD content

Really, the only thing you need to say is "free" and people will at least give it a try.

Re:Welcome, our new open codec overlords!

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Most video codec patents revolve around implementations of the discrete cosine transform, Huffman coding, chroma sub-sampling, and bilinear interpolation. All of these techniques are older than the patent examiners who approved the patents and indeed the judges who will try the cases. It's all mathematics, every last bit. These patents are all essentially equivalent to patenting the tetrahedron.

There is nothing the USPTO will not give a patent for. As such, there is absolutely nothing in the universe past or present which can be declared patent free wherever the authority of the USPTO is recognised.