Theora 1.0 Released, Supported By Firefox 310
YA_Python_dev writes "The Xiph.Org Foundation announced Monday the release of Theora 1.0.
Theora is a free/open source video codec with a small CPU footprint that offers easy portability and requires no patent royalties.
Upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera will play natively Ogg/Theora videos with the new HTML5 element <video src="file.ogv"></video>, and ffmpeg2theora offers an easy way to create content.
Theora developers are already working on a 1.1 encoder that offers better quality/bitrate ratio, while producing streams backward-compatible with the current decoder." Adds reader logfish: "Since its bit-stream freeze in June of 2004 there have been numerous speed-ups and bug-fixes. Although Nokia claimed it to be proprietary almost a year ago, nothing has been proven. So now it's time to help it take over the internet, and finally push for video sites filled with Theora encoded vlogs, blurts and idle nonsense."
Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:4, Insightful)
I really want to like Theora, but it's really, really hard to get around the quality issues. VP3, which Theora is based on, just isn't competitive these days. It was subpar back in 2001 when it was donated to Xiph, and the contrast has only gotten worse over time. H.264, VC-1/WMV9, MPEG-4 ASP, even Adobe Flash 8 (which added VP6) are clearly capable of outperforming it.
If nothing else, free is good (both in terms of speech and beer) and a royalty free standard for video would be great, but it's too hard to ignore just how inferior this standard is. I'm a pragmatic person, I can't think of any reason why I'd want to use this over a better codec; free isn't all that enticing if the video quality sucks.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:3, Insightful)
So you prefer Flash installed on every browser? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like feature creep and bloat to me.
Why? Ins't going to affect you if you don't visit pages with videos and, unlike Flash there's a browser preference to start all videos in paused state. The Theora binary library is only 250 kB on AMD64, even smaller on x86. The Flash plugin, is much, much bigger.
Video on the internet (think youtube, movie trailers, pr0n, etc.) isn't going away any time soon.
The current state of the art is to have a proprietary Flash plugin installed in almost every browser. Switching to native support for an open format directly in the browsers seems like an improvement to me. In the good ol' days, people considered image support in browsers as bloat too..
And Firefox isn't alone here: Opera and Safari will support it too (altough Safari will not support Theora out-of-the-box).
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Containers... (Score:5, Insightful)
You've obviously never negotiated costs with MPEG-LA, or you wouldn't say that.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:5, Insightful)
Can it though? Certainly part of the issue is definitely the encoder, but you're still constrained by the inherent limitations of the codec (and more to the point, the decoder). Theora can't be overhauled without breaking the decoder, and even if it was overhauled as Theora 2.0, it couldn't implement any of a multitude of patented video compression technologies already used in MPEG or other standards. And unless someone wants to hire a team of engineers for Xiph, the odds of someone inventing a revolutionary, non-patent-infrining video codec on their own is pretty slim.
From what I've seen with the work on 1.1, improving the encoder just isn't enough to nullify the deficiencies in the codec itself. It's like trying to improve Mac OS Classic when really you need to make a clean break and invent Mac OS X.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget, lots of nightmarish IE specific stuff also "Just Works" for "The Majority", And ask any 64bit linux user exactly how much they love adobe for their support. (I think they have it now, after something like 4 years of waiting or running in emulation, or running a 32bit OS on their 64bit machines)
The magical wonderland I think of is one where anyone on any system can easily watch video online, not just the majority.
Uh? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Although Nokia claimed it to be proprietary almost a year ago, nothing has been proven. So now it's time to help it take over the internet"
I admit I don't know what the situation with Theora's licensing history is but this comment strikes me as rather worrying. We're being told to use it because no one's proven it's not likely to end you up with licensing troubles later on. Personally I'd rather before something "takes over the internet" that the burden of proof was on it to demonstrate that it is completely open. This should be as easy as showing use of a relevant open license no?
From what I can see it's under a BSD license and so should really be open. Is this the case? The way the article summary is written just really doesn't instil confidence in their intentions.
Giving this codec the benefit of the doubt I think the summary is just a case of carried away fanboyism having an adverse effect towards the neutral observers view of the situation much as seeing a forum war between a PS3 and a 360 fanboy might put someone off the idea of online console gaming.
Can someone a bit more grounded give us a better view of the concerns and realities of Theora licensing and it's suitability as a codec to "take over the internet"?
Re:Native Video in Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, and Windows proves Linux is unnecessary as it is a widely accepted and usable solution for operating a computer.
Re:So you prefer Flash installed on every browser? (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple is never going to use Theora, neither is Microsoft, and with good reason they both have better codecs.
You can support more that one codec. E.g. both Apple and Microsoft support MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. The next version of Safari will support Theora if you have installed the Ogg Quicktime components, and IE will support it with a JS and a Java applet.
And maximum quality isn't the only factor for the success of a media format, software patents and actual implementations count much more IMO. Otherwise we will be all using JPEG2000 and not JPEG or PNG today.
Re:Containers... (Score:5, Insightful)
If we want h264/mpeg4 support in FF you going need about $3M+ donated per year for the license fees.
If you have ever needed to care about the licensing of things like codecs you would know the value of Theora and Dirac.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:2, Insightful)
"Just works for the majority" is exactly identical to "discriminates against minorities".
Command line is not easy for most users (Score:3, Insightful)
Only for certain definitions of easy. Let me know when you have a point and click version that my non technical friends can use.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:3, Insightful)
it gets very competitive
That might be true, but it isn't demonstrated by posting a link that compares Theora and Theora.
I'd like to post a clip that compares Theora to the formats and codecs it tries to compete against. I don't have elephants dream available at the moment, and I don't want to get slashdotted, but someone could reencode the high-resolution version of it and post links.
Then we can compare Theora to its competitors, to see exactly how competitive it is.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:5, Insightful)
- noise
- fire
- rain or snow
- smoke
These are the frames which have the highest amount of entropy and are easiest to visually illustrate the quality of a coder.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm, literally true, but your comment seems mostly unrelated to the post it is in response to. There was a discussion about container formats, AVI came up in part of that discussion as a container format, and then you told them it was not a codec.
Re:Uh? (Score:2, Insightful)
I did a post [metavid.org] on this issue a while back.
Key point is that even mpegla does not protect its clients from being sued..
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, just recently it works, the complaint the person was lodging was that for a relatively long time it hasn't.
Re:Thank you very much, Mozilla Corp. (Score:5, Insightful)
As Wikipedia would say: "Citation needed".
Care to show an example of *any* MPEG-2 codec out performing the current Theora encoder on a typical web-video 500kbit/sec stream? Forget the new enhanced theora encoder, MPEG-2 can't even match the old crap. Plus mpeg-2 is patented to hell and back, you even have to pay for mpeg-2 decoding in Windows to play DVDs!
Can you cite a *single* example showing Vorbis to be glaringly inferior to AAC? At best the listening tests show AAC to edge out Vorbis only for speech samples at the lowest bitrates (where Xiph has Speex, which blows AAC away for those applications). And no multi-channel? wtf. Vorbis supports 255 channels.
I shouldn't expect better from slashdot, but could you at least find lies that are a bit less obvious.
Ogg high overhead? Okay, Ogg/Vorbis+Theora is something like 1% overhead vs a typical of 0.9% overhead for a movie in AVI. You win there. Then again, OGG provides frequent checksums so that a damaged OGG/Vorbis file will *never* break your speakers and damage your hearing. People who have had the misfortune of hitting a corrupted MP3 in their iPod playlist should be able to appreciate the advantage of this approach. What you consider a fault I consider a feature. Egads, room for design differences exists! who would have thought?
Re:Who needs 64 bits? (Score:3, Insightful)
what good are 64bits in a console? what good are 64bit in a computer? why is generally bad to use a 32bit library wrapper on a 64bit app? why thunking doesn't work for the 32bit->64bit conversion?
why are we running flash in the same process as the web browser?
Re:Thank you very much, Mozilla Corp. (Score:3, Insightful)
The parent post is not insightful, it's a blatant troll.
Thank you for retarding the progress of Good Technology like MPEG-4 H.264/AVC and MPEG-4 AAC.
Try playing H.264 on a 200MHz ARM.
Everything that Xiph has created is shit.
Look at any of the listening tests. Vorvis is very competitive.
OGG - hacked up container with high overhead, incompatibility with non-Xiph formats, and no new features over AVI or MKV.
All containers are incompatible with each other. And AVI isn't a streaming container, unlike ogg.
Vorbis - hacked up audio codec that doesn't do anything MP3 does and is glaringly inferior to AAC. No multi-channel support? No Spectral Bandwidth Replication?
Yet it does well in the listening tests.
No wonder nobody uses it.
Apart from so many high-end video game developers and by assosciation, anyone who plays the games? According to the wikipedia page "nobody" (your definition of nobody) uses speex either,
Theora - the newest in Xiph's line of crap. Except, this one doesn't even pretend to be useful. 1995 called. They want their MPEG-2 back.
Can you name a better codec with a decoding cost as low as Theora?
Re:Containers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the new HTML5 element (Score:1, Insightful)
Those legacy browsers are the same ones that don't even support SVG yet, and in some cases PNG. I'd have to argue with the assertion they need to be supported. If those users are interested in the 21st century web, they can upgrade to something decent.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:3, Insightful)
Flash is a single click install (if not already came with OS). Nothing adds to startup, not a single case of spyware, no OS performance loss and a comical disk space required. Lets not forget that it is true multiplatform. Even Symbian high end phones displays it.
I keep saying that is the key to success of FLV container.
No nags, no technical knowledge required, easy (runs!). The genius is in its simplicity.
For the quality of videos: Their source is junk, they are transcoded from already compressed source, settings are wrong, 2 pass is still not widely known etc. FLV is VP6 and h264, both cutting edge codecs without anything more advanced around.
I am not a Flash fan, I despise using FLV but... There is the reality. The least annoying company (Apple) still insists putting that damned qt_task to users taskbar, offering them a complete framework rather than plugin+playback, try to add iTunes to download by 1990s tricks... So you go and put FLV files to your page.
Re:A youtube like Theora posting Website (Score:3, Insightful)
-1, Mod Point Favouritism (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd really like to give you an "Insightful" on this one, but I prefer to reward logged-in users with those few mod points I have.
You don't deserve any damn mod points whatsoever- it's assholes like you that ruin moderation systems.
Mod points are meant to highlight posts that are worth reading- even if you disagree with them- and bury the crap. It's not meant to signal approval/disapproval nor (in your case) should it be a self-indulgent reward for user behaviour that you happen to prefer. Yeah, tell me that's not how people use it in real life- that's exactly why certain moderation systems suck (last time I checked, the Digg one was worse than useless for this reason).
ACs start at 0 anyway- which makes it worthwhile logging in anyway- not as a "punishment" but purely because posting ACs makes troll/flamebait/drivel posts more likely. If an AC makes a good valid point that isn't reliant upon proof of identity, it's valid regardless.
What makes it worse is your inappropriately sanctimonious attitude towards the other user who (quite validly) chose to post AC, and your implication that your misuse (or lack of) mod points in this case was the reward for "good behaviour". *You* were the one in the wrong.
Re:Uh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Proof? Prove to me that H.264 doesn't violate any third party patents. Prove that this slashdot AJAX comment interface doesn't violate any patents.
You're asking the wrong question.
I don't know about Unreal. Halo uses Vorbis in Ogg. Then again I can't believe that I'm responding to someone who would even suggest that Ogg has patent problems.
Proving a negative is usually hard. With patents proof is not even possible. (but proving a violation is far more straight forward) What is relevant is the decisions of experienced engineers and attorneys and what we have is experienced engineers and attorneys advising their clients (I.e. Mozilla; Wikimedia) that Theora is okay to use. Meanwhile, can you point to anything more credible than a Slashdot comment saying Theora violates anything specific?
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:3, Insightful)
``Once a free codec becomes widely adopted the chance of some proprietary codec coming along afterwards is near zero.''
You mean like WMA, MP3Pro, AAC, and Talad knows what else coming along after Ogg Vorbis?
``No one will pay h264 licensing costs when quality free alternatives are vibrant.''
You mean like people _paying_ to be allowed to add support for MP3, WMA (and PlaysForSure) and AAC (and FairPlay) to their players, but not supporting the free Ogg Vorbis?
I am sorry to say it, but I think history contradicts your optimism.