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."
Containers... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Containers... (Score:3, Informative)
Mod me troll if you like, but I speak the truth.
Well... (Score:2)
Compared to avi it adds usefulness, though that's not saying much. I think it adds over wmv, but that again wouldn't be saying much.
I do agree that mkv currently has richer featureset implemented.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
So is MKV, just a container.
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:Containers... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Containers... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Containers... (Score:5, Insightful)
You've obviously never negotiated costs with MPEG-LA, or you wouldn't say that.
Re:Containers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Containers... (Score:2)
Re:Containers... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
That's not what "free" means. (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, you can consider it to be free, but boy is that ever not what free means.
And a publically available spec means little or nothing. Patents are publically available, but try implementing those and see if you manage to escape the long arm of the litigator.
Re:Containers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MPEG 4 LA terms (Score:4, Informative)
You are also forgetting the fees for producing content in H264 that come into effect later.
They are also leaving out a *lot* of fine print. In order to get a license you don't just have to pay, but you must agree to the license terms (aka hardware players must use zone flags, DRM etc). There is more than they tell you without NDAs. Not to mention all the lawyer fees in between.
They are not even going to let you pay a blanket fee for a product that others can use "free" in there own products. No matter what you pay. Because then there is no one else that needs a license and hence no one to tie into these extra terms.
Also what makes you think the fees won't increase at a latter date?
Encumbered means just that. Encumbered.
ps I have talked to them about a license......
Re:Containers... (Score:2)
ogv (aka ogg) and mkv (can be named mka for audio-only too) are containers. Theora is a codec. Like H.264 aka MPEG 4 AVC. Except that H.264 is an actual standard which compresses much better. (Theora is more "last generation".)
Unfortunately, H.264 ist patented, so for some applications it's out of question.
Oh, and in terms of containers, mkv kicks the shit out of ogg. ;)
I love the concept of EMBL, binary markup, behind it. It's like XML, but without the verbosity.
With a DTD you could perfecly convert between XML and EBLM, tag by tag. (I dislike XML for its extreme verbosity, but I like a common file format standard that everybody can understand and read/write.)
I, for one, will still use mkv plus x264 and 5.1 vorbis (or the original AC3-track) for encoding my videos. If I make no money with it, I will not pay money for using it, because they lost nothing.
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:2)
I think that in theory, the "free" part could be extremely enticing, after all, Opera, Safari, and IE could all just integrate this, no questions asked, and in this magical wonderland we could have cross platform video embedded in websites that "just works". Realistically though, that'll never happen. IE will support WMV and Safari will support Quicktime, and both will support theora through 3rd party plugins which will only be installed by people who know well enough to use firefox anyways.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:4, Informative)
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:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:3, Informative)
The question is, can free-as-in-beer, inferior open source compete against free-as-in-beer, superior closed source?
x264 is open source and gives way better quality than Theora - but it is also a patent minefield and you will need to get in contact with MPEG-LA if you plan on doing commercial stuff etc.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:5, Informative)
There's certainly better quality codecs out there, compared to 1.0. Take a look at the work happening now on 1.1, though, it gets very competitive:
http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo5.html [mit.edu]
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:2)
The result on those sample frames are great. The new version at 240kbps compares to the old one at 580kbps.
This should be more exposed, to reduce the impact of the first impression on this quality gap of the 1.0 and the competition.
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:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:4, Informative)
http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html
Note that this is before the major changes made this summer and the major changes still coming (in the encoder). The VP3 technology actually puts it between MPEG-4 ASP (xvid/divx) and H264 in theoretically achievable quality, it's just that the encoder has been extremely badly tuned up until this summer, because of lack of interest. If Theora can catch up to MPEG-4 ASP codecs and perhaps even close in on H264, it would make for an excellent patentfree codec.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:3, Insightful)
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, Interesting)
The fact that the quality improvements for theora 1.1 put it on par with a base mpeg4 implementation while not on par with the most recent h264 encoders is not really relevant in the larger sense.
Once a free codec becomes widely adopted the chance of some proprietary codec coming along afterwards is near zero. Its just like today we can't imagine someone coming out with a proprietary image format and expecting people to adopt it.
Its relatively easy to add in support for Dirac or some future free codec once there is support for a free codec ecosystem. No one will pay h264 licensing costs when quality free alternatives are vibrant. The entrenched proprietary systems are being pushed aside for free alternatives. This 1.0 release is a step towards that direction, not as big of a step once firefox 3.1 ships but an important step ;)
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.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:3, Informative)
'Its just like today we can't imagine someone coming out with a proprietary image format and expecting people to adopt it. ' ... you do realize that the most popular image formats are proprietary right?
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:3, Informative)
ASP is not obsolete in any kind of sense.
Apple didn't support Mpeg-4 ASP, they jumped from mpeg-4 SP to h264 directly. So that is probably why your iPhone can display h264 but not mpeg-4 ASP. People think Apple does the best mpeg4/h264 apps on planet, it is not true. They support them, they help them take off but it doesn't mean Quicktime or devices based on it (iPhone) is some benchmark/test devices to help you choose what is obsolete or not.
There are major 2 profiles in mpeg-4 (except h264/part 10). One is SP and other is ASP. If you target Quicktime people or low speed CPU devices, you stay away from using ASP forcing features. If you target Sony PSP people or anyone with a decent smart phone, you use ASP features. On 3G, you better stay away from anything having "advanced" in its name :)
BTW mpeg4 isn't proprietary, it is open. It is just patented by lots and lots of vendors/organisations.
Theora is much more flexible than VP3! (Score:2, Informative)
See:
http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo5.html [mit.edu]
http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/ffmpeg2theora-0.22-thusnelda.exe [v2v.cc]
And this is only the start. Just look at what the Lame encoder was able to do with the MP3 format in quality.
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:4, Interesting)
Theora quality is good enough. You may be able to see a difference under a microscope but not to the human eye.
To get a good quality video, from A to Z must be quality, not just one step.
Many convert a MPEG video into Theora and say Theora video is not good quality. MPEG means video is already compressed and data is dropped as part of the encoding process. You don't take a such a video and convert the format to Theora and drop data again as part of the Theora encoding process. Its of course not good quality then, because data is dropped twice.
To get real quality video in Theora, you should get a raw video and convert to Theora. I have converted a raw video footage shot by a RED camera (http://www.red.com/) into Theora, I don't see any quality issue. Its crisp clear.
In digital camcoders this is what is done inside, ie. it first shot in raw and then convert to MPEG. I have not come across a video camera that convert to Theora natively inside the camera. If it does, there should not be any quality difference compared to MPEG.
Sagara
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:2)
Re:Free Is Good, But Quality Is Lacking (Score:2)
The performance at youtube bitrates is quite comparable to current youtube quality. But I won't argue that H264 is a winner here, if you don't have to pay for it that is.
How long until... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How long until... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How long until... (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ejaculation_Educational_Demonstration.OGG [wikipedia.org]
Pretty slow there buddy.
What good is a sub patent ... (Score:2)
Dirac (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:Dirac (Score:2)
Actually, no. Tarkin WAS the mistake and it was quickly dropped. Wavelet-based codecs have several problems. For info look into JEPG 2000 and why it failed so miserably.
And yet Dirac [wikipedia.org] seems to be going strong. Go figure.
Re:Dirac (Score:5, Informative)
They're aimed at different markets. Dirac is a very high-quality CODEC, but it is incredibly CPU intensive. Remember what MPEG-4 was like when it was introduced? A couple of days to encode a film, and you could only just decode it in realtime on a fast computer? Dirac is like that. It will be a few years before you start getting Dirac support in something like an iPhone. If you want to stream HD content, Dirac is a good choice.
In contrast, Theora is very cheap in terms of CPU power. You can run it on very low-power devices. This makes it a good choice for Internet video, where the viewer might be using a massive desktop computer, a mobile phone, or anything in between. You wouldn't want to use Dirac here, because even fast laptops would struggle not to drop frames, and handhelds would just fail.
That said, my mobile phone now has about as much CPU power as the PC I had when I first got an MPEG-4 video, so eventually it will be feasible to run Dirac in low-power devices (sooner if they have dedicated ICs), but in the short term it's not ideal.
christ, not another "cool word" (Score:2)
vlogs, blurts and idle nonsense
What the hell is a "blurt"?
Re:christ, not another "cool word" (Score:3, Informative)
Judging by google results, it sounds like "video microblogging", a la Twitter.
Why not using the "object" tag? (Score:2, Interesting)
Does anyone know the rationale of not using <object> for including video? It would have been perfect for that usage, and completely standard...
Re:Why not using the "object" tag? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why not using the "object" tag? (Score:2)
Why does it need knowledge of the plugin? Why not just:
<object data="file.ogv">Alt text goes here</object>
The browser/toolkit/OS is responsible for then loading any appropriate player based on the content-type of whatever file.ogv is. What else is needed?
Re:Why not using the "object" tag? (Score:3)
What API? Tags do not have APIs, and the <object> can be extended with "params"s... This "video" tag looks a lot like an old Netscape HTML "extension" to me.
Re:Why not using the "object" tag? (Score:2)
What API? Tags do not have APIs
Someone hasn't heard of the DOM...
Because it's better specified, and it's in HTML 5 (Score:2)
What API? Tags do not have APIs, and the <object> can be extended with "params"s
If you think about it, you answered your own question. The API to a plug-in that renders an <object> element is the interpretation of its <param> elements. But each video playback plug-in needs a different set of <param> elements to define a particular behavior. The <video> element specifies the behavior more strongly than <object> and <param> ever did.
This "video" tag looks a lot like an old Netscape HTML "extension" to me.
If it's in the HTML 5 draft [whatwg.org], can it really be called an extension?
Royalties for video format? (Score:2)
I'm clueless on the topic... so I will just ask the question. What royalties are their for file formats? Does this basically mean that Microsoft pays for the different codecs that are included in Windows Media Player and that Adobe pays for the different formats that it can export to?
Re:Royalties for video format? (Score:2)
What royalties are their for file formats?
It has nothing to do with the file format and everything to do with the codec used to encode/decode the contents of said file. Specifically, the various MPEG-based codecs are all subject to patents and thus require license fees be paid to the MPEG-LA in order to legally distribute encoders (and I believe decoders, though don't quote me on that, I don't recall the precise fee structure).
Theora, like Vorbis, has the advantage of being unencumbered by patents, and this free for implementation by anyone.
Re:Royalties for video format? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, and to answer this question:
The answer is, yes, depending on the codec in question (for example, Microsoft would pay the MPEG-LA to distribute an MPEG2 video decoder). But keep in mind, a file format, in and of itself, isn't subject to patent. It's the methods used to create the file format that are the problem. So exporting to, say, DOC format is fine, since there's no magically algorithm necessary to do that. MPEG2, however, required implementation of patented algorithms, hence the licensing requirements.
Isn't it funny... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Royalties for video format? (Score:2)
I'm clueless on the topic... so I will just ask the question. What royalties are their for file formats? Does this basically mean that Microsoft pays for the different codecs that are included in Windows Media Player and that Adobe pays for the different formats that it can export to?
Yes. Each codec that is licensed and due royalties require payments to the owner. So MPEG, MP3, Quicktime, DiVX etc. all require a payment or the creator of the product runs the risk of ending up in court and having their product withdrawn. The open formats do not.
Re:Royalties for video format? (Score:2)
What royalties are their for file formats?
Some common containers, such as ASF (used in .wmv files) [wikipedia.org], are patented. Otherwise, Microsoft couldn't have threatened the VirtualDub maintainer [wikipedia.org] in the 1.3 series.
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:Uh? (Score:5, Informative)
Xiph had the Software Freedom Law Center help establish that Nokia's claims were untrue. Mozilla sought counseling from lawyers before supporting Theora. Is that enough?
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:Uh? (Score:4, Informative)
That "nothing has been proven" comment is pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek, just like the "take over the Internet" part.
The video encoding field is crowded with patents, so it's probably impossible to do something like Theora without needing a patent license. But Theora is based on some patented technology (VP3) whose patents have been donated for free use, irrevocably forever. And Theora is free, open source software with a BSD license. If you use the Ogg container format, Theora video, and Vorbis audio, you have a completely free media format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora [wikipedia.org]
So, you can use Theora for any purpose, without needing to pay royalties, without needing to get permission. That's why it's so funny that Nokia claimed Theora is "proprietary"... I do not think that word means what they think it does.
steveha
Who needs ffmpeg2theora? (Score:2, Informative)
Use Gstreamer as-installed on your existing system. Put this in a simple bash script and have-at:
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="$1" ! decodebin name=decoder { oggmux name=muxer ! filesink location="$2" } { decoder. ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! queue ! muxer. } { decoder. ! queue ! audioconvert ! queue ! muxer. }
Add the Fluendo codecs, and you have a properly patent-licensed, legal way to transcode most popular media to no-patent-royalties media types.
Video editing (Score:2)
Now, if there are decent (freeware?) applications that can encode the format that would be great. You have to pay for Flash video encoding, and even if you can pay, asking about a Flash video encoder [swishzone.com] for Linux.. who cares about Linux. If you use MPEG4, some players are picky on the type of MPEG4 codecs you used to encode a video when you play it back. . Microsoft video format is just a pain in the backside.
A video format without the security problems of Flash, bring it on.
Re:Video editing (Score:2)
This demo [eyepub.co.uk] is only available for the next hour !
A youtube like Theora posting Website (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A youtube like Theora posting Website (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Command line is not easy for most users (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Native Video in Firefox (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like feature creep and bloat to me.
Don't worry, the pages that implement it will never get loaded into RAM because nobody will ever use it.
Re:Native Video in Firefox (Score:3)
It's only bloat if they rewrite their own theora codec.
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:Native Video in Firefox (Score:2)
Exactly. If I didn't have a use for Windows, I wouldn't have a use for Linux either.
Re:Native Video in Firefox (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds like feature creep and bloat to me.
Are you talking Firefox or HTML5 or both? I know it would be massively awesome if the blink tag was only supported through an addon or plugin.
Re:Native Video in Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
Heh, getting a bit off-topic here, but Marc Anddddreeeeeeeeewhatzit of Mozaic/Netscape/Mozilla fame spoke at our local LUG the weekend after the Netscape code went public, and one of the things he mentioned was that the very first patch they received was...one to make blink tags work for images!
Open Source can be a power for great evil as well as for great good! :)
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:So you prefer Flash installed on every browser? (Score:2)
Those are all good points. However the choice of Theora, with its apparent quality problems and very low use on the internet, means none of those things will matter. Even if it is in the browser, Theora will not solve the problem.
Apple is never going to use Theora, neither is Microsoft, and with good reason they both have better codecs. Even flash now supports h264 within the plugin, and thats the direction almost everything else is going right now, not Theora.
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:So you prefer Flash installed on every browser? (Score:2)
Re:Long test cycle? (Score:5, Informative)
The bitstream format was frozen, not the code.
Re:Video tag is superfluous (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm wondering if the HTML5 DOM methods for controling video playback would be supported by XHTML 1.0 when video is embedded as an object?
Anyone?
Re:Horray (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Horray (Score:4, Funny)
"smaller random nerd sites and one big nerd site"
there, fixed.
Re:Horray (Score:2)
Re:Horray (Score:2, Funny)
[citation needed]
Re:Horray (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Horray (Score:3, Interesting)
WP isn't a video server, a very small amount of their pages contain moving images. They can have as many visitors a day as you want, they all go there for text & images. Youtube is the #3, is 100% video and not a bit of theora there.
Re:Back to the better! (Score:5, Informative)
People and companies likes flash players because it usually just works. The days of embedding video objects are dying because in practice this is what would happen:
1. WMV files would lock up or you would have to spend 20 minutes at windows update downloading the newest wmp or reinstalling the plug-in.
2. Mac users would complain that WMV files arent working.
3. Realplayer would do the same, except the install would crap up your computer and ruin all your file associations. You would also have to troubleshoot plugin issues.
4. Quicktime files would crash the browser and then you would have to install the newest version usually along with itunes in a 60+ meg download. Windows users would complain how crazppy quicktime is.
5. Someone would embed an avi and no one would be able to play it because end users have no idea what codecs are.
6. Some plugins would work in IE but not in Firefox.
What flash did is put all video in one cross-playform container and player. Turns out people like it this way.
Re:Thank you very much, Mozilla Corp. (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you for retarding the progress of Good Technology like MPEG-4 H.264/AVC and MPEG-4 AAC.
If their creators hadn't made those codecs prohibitively expensive to license, W3C would probably be advocating them. You're getting mad at the wrong people.
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: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:the new HTML5 element (Score:3, Informative)
This then gets rewritten to java cortado for IE clients. Or if you don't like cortado and would prefer flash fallback:
Or if you want to make the video accessible with multiple downloadable video formats and multiple timed text tracks (annotations, multiple subtitle languages and what have you) all pulled from xml via JSON request (to support remote embedding) all auto-scrolled/updated with javascript based on whatever underlining playback system your browser supports:
(uses ROE [xiph.org] for the xml format) presently in use in blogs such as this one [blogspot.com]
-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.