Theora 1.1 (Thusnelda) Is Released 184
SD-Arcadia writes to tell us that Theora 1.1 has officially been released. It features improved encoding, providing better video quality for a given file size, a faster decoder, bitrate controls to help with streaming, and two-pass encoding. "The new rate control module hits its target much more accurately and obeys strict buffer constraints, including dropping frames if necessary. The latter is needed to enable live streaming without disconnecting users or pausing to buffer during sudden motion. Obeying these constraints can yield substantially worse quality than the 1.0 encoder, whose rate control did not obey any such constraints, and often landed only in the vague neighborhood of the desired rate target. The new --soft-target option can relax a few of these constraints, but the new two-pass rate control mode gives quality approaching full 'constant quality' mode with a predictable output size. This should be the preferred encoding method when not doing live streaming. Two-pass may also be used with finite buffer constraints, for non-live streaming." A detailed writeup on the new release has been posted at Mozilla.
Maybe now Google will change their mind. (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe now Google will use Theora instead of the patent-encumbered H.264 in their new HTML5 Youtube.
That is if the issues have been addressed.
Re:Maybe now Google will change their mind. (Score:5, Informative)
This page seems to say they have been addressed : http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html [xiph.org]
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Except that you tube uses a rather failtastic h264 encoder. This comparison [saintdevelopment.com] seems to suggest that they really haven't been addressed. In fact, that 1.1 is worse than 1.0!
The version of x264 used here is even rather out of date, and misses a couple of major improvements.
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The version of Theora used in that comparison is also rather out of date. Nearly a year out of date, in fact - it's an SVN snapshot dating from 2008-11-25, not the released version 1.1. I think the experimental Thusnelda encoder was known to have regressed slightly on video taken from Touhou games back then.
CNN (Score:2)
Do you normally spend much of your time encoding shooter game footage where 1/3 of the screen is totally still uber high detail stuff and the rest is a sea of constant motion
Take out the "game" and you have a pretty good description of TV news coverage of foreign war with a bottom third.
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Also of note, the comparison you said, actually doesn't say what you claim... It says that it beats the h263 youtube version at a lower bit rate. Read the conclusions - they admit that the h264 version on youtube is better quality.
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Even at ~500k, the Youtube version is clearly more blur on details.
And I thought I would need to download yet another codec to play the Theora video, but surprise to learn that my Firefox 3.5 does support it natively!
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A look at this comparison [saintdevelopment.com] seems to suggest to me that 1.1 is actually worse than 1.0. Certainly it's no where near as good as x264 produced h264.
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Maybe now Google will use Theora instead of the patent-encumbered H.264 in their new HTML5 Youtube.
"Encumbered" implies some sort of difficulty. H.264 decoding is available, for free (and, if you must, for free as in freedom, as well), on every OS, including Linux.
So, where's the encumbering?
It seems to me that requiring only open standards, when *they* are not the norm and require going out of one's way is more encumbering than going with something like h.264. Not to mention being encumbered with a format that offers inferior quality.
Freedom is cool and all, and I'm supremely grateful for Theora's exist
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Have you heard of a patent? You may want to try googling for it. It's pretty annoying stuff.
Yet somehow, everyone can decode h.264. Maybe you should try googling that first.
Just because there's a patent, doesn't mean there's any problem.
And licensing this shit is not free.
Sometimes, it is.
Doesn't matter how many times you say it; it's not true.
Same goes for your old tired bullshit. h.264 *is* available for free. On Windows. On Mac OS X. On Linux. And on just about any OS that has the capability to run C programs.
Most browsers don't even have MP3 support built in; I don't know where you're getting that from, either.
I never said they had it built-in, I said they support it. Firefox can play mp3's inline if the OS supports it, and all OS's support it (or can support it) for free.
You also left
Hardware support? (Score:2)
I find it intriguing that in every discussion I see on tech sites like /., it is always the patents that seem to be what people focus on.
What about the built in hardware support for h.264 is millions upon millions of existing general computing and embedded devices? It seems like Google would want YouTube accessible on these devices, and on many it is. Being able to bring that support to phones, satellite boxes, cable boxes, TV, etc. etc. etc. that already have h.264 is probably a bigger motivator than the
Q. What is Theora? (Score:5, Informative)
From the FAQ on the website:
Theora is an open video codec being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation as part of their Ogg project (It is a project that aims to integrate On2's VP3 video codec, Ogg Vorbis audio codec and Ogg multimedia container formats into a multimedia solution that can compete with MPEG-4 format).
Theora is derived directly from On2's VP3 codec; currently the two are nearly identical, varying only in framing headers, but Theora will diverge and improve from the main VP3 development lineage as time progresses.
Re:Q. What is Theora? (Score:5, Informative)
Dirac isn't shabby (Score:5, Interesting)
Dirac [diracvideo.org] strikes me as another codec worth following. It's available to all developers, high-quality, and in production use by the BBC during the Olympics (they said so in their Dirac promotional video [bbc.co.uk]). VLC has support for playing back Dirac streams. I'd guessing other players do as well.
I expect Theora and Dirac to be of interest to all who want high-quality free video codecs.
Re:Dirac isn't shabby (Score:5, Informative)
That said, most handhelds can handle Theora, so providing both Theora and Dirac should cover most clients. Not the iPhone, of course, but if people will buy into a closed platform then they can't expect things to always work...
VLC has support for playing back Dirac streams.
The OS X builds prior to 1.0 had Dirac support, but 1.0 didn't and neither have any of the subsequent ones. No word on whether this is intentional or not from the VLC team, but playing a Dirac file now pops up an error saying 'dirac' is an unrecognised CODEC ID.
Re:Q. What is Theora? (Score:5, Insightful)
And the real A:
It's an outdated video codec that loses to H.264 in pretty much every codec shootout, and is in general ignored in HD media (H.264/VC-1), HD broadcasts (H.264/MPEG2), set top boxes, mobile players and so on. It's also pretty much completely ignored by the pirate community, preferring mkv/H.264. While possibly FUD, not everyone is willing to ship this codec because they fear submarine patents meaning it's lost its only real shot at relevance as the default codec for HTML5 video, which now also seems to be a mix probably dominated by H.264. The end result is that it might be used by a few geeks and internally in video games and such that provide their own player, but it'll likely have as much impact as vorbis had on the mp3/aac format. That is, none.
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Yes, but vorbis is somewhat inferior to AAC (Advanced audio codec, hint, it goes with Advanced video codec, aka h264), which was also highlighted by the parent.
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A few clarifications:
> outdated video codec
An arbitrary definition which, could very well apply equally well to H.264 in comparison to almost any other codec.
> loses to H.264 in pretty much every codec shootout
But not usually by very much; and in any case, countless codecs beat H.264 in pretty much every respect in turn - but since the issue is not some theoretical perfect codec but a cost/bandwidth/quality/encode-cpu-time/decode-cpu-time/features/etc tradeoff, this might still result in a net benefit
Re:Q. What is Theora? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? Do you work for the MPAA or some other group like that? People who pirate stuff aren't comic book villains who break laws just for the sake of breaking laws. They don't think "oh hey while I'm violating copyright I'll violate patents too, just because I can!" H.264 is more popular because it is better, not because the people who encode stuff get hard at the thought of breaking laws in a way nobody particularly cares about and they're never ever going to get in trouble for.
The AC above me covers the rest of your points quite nicely, so I'm not going to write something that would be much the same as his. Your post is utter nonsense, and you and the people who actually looked at your post and not only managed to not laugh, but modded you up need to pull your heads out of the GNU/sand and admit that Theora is simply inferior. If you think not having any patent problems is a big enough issue to prefer a technologically inferior codec, that's fine. But don't twist the facts and outright lie just so you can try to pretend Theora is otherwise a match for modern codecs, because it is not.
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They don't think "oh hey while I'm violating copyright I'll violate patents too, just because I can!"
No, but if they don't particularly care about violating copyright, they won't care much about violating patents, either.
H.264 is more popular because it is better
Because it's better, or because it's perceived as better -- in terms of quality per bit. But again, anywhere other than the pirate community, patents are likely to be an issue, and an open-but-worse format may be preferred over a closed-but-better format, especially if it's not that much worse.
admit that Theora is simply inferior.
I'm pretty sure that's what was meant by this part:
But not usually by very much; and in any case, countless codecs beat H.264 in pretty much every respect in turn
In other words, yes, Theora is inferior, but p
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Phrasing it as them using "a misappropriated unpaid-for format" is not saying they merely don't care. You really have to read that line very loosely and optimistically to interpret it in a way
that doesn't make it seem like the author was thinking "damn filthy fucking pirates" when he wrote it.
I don't se
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Phrasing it as them using "a misappropriated unpaid-for format" is not saying they merely don't care.
Oh? I don't think so, but I'm not the one who phrased it that way.
You really have to read that line very loosely and optimistically to interpret it in a way
that doesn't make it seem like the author was thinking "damn filthy fucking pirates" when he wrote it.
You have to read it with quite a lot of prejudice to come up with "damn filthy fucking pirates".
I don't see how "in terms of quality per bit" changes anything, as that's the regular definition of "better" when it comes to lossy compression.
Really? You wouldn't at least consider performance?
And I do think patents are a valid consideration here -- that is, price.
anywhere other than commercial uses nobody cares about patents.
I'm surprised you don't consider "commercial uses" to be significant, especially when "ripping for personal use" often involves some sort of commercial software which had to pay that fee.
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However, "misappropriated unpaid-for format" is about a hair's width away from "stolen"
Which, like it or not, is still not a terribly inaccurate way of describing what's going on here. You could say "illegal unlicensed format", if you like, but I don't think it changes the tone significantly.
Unless you can provide evidence of widespread usage of "misappropriated" in anything but a negative way
Are you going to argue that patent infringement is a positive thing?
I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but let's be clear, because it sounds like that's what you're advocating.
a better codec is better even if it's impractical or even impossible to use it given current hardware.
It's come down to a semantic argument, but this seems pretty blatantly wrong to me. It's "better" even if it's impossible? In
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Violating IP laws is not the same as theft. Not even close. Were it merely claimed to be illegal, I never would've had a problem with its wording. Let us look up the definition of "misappropriate [merriam-webster.com]", shall we? "to appropriate wrongly (as by theft or embezzlement)" Saying merely that it's "illegal" is a neut
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You're dismissing the opinion of pirates on their choice of video codec because they're pirating content, implying they're somehow baised towards h264 because it's a patented codec.
No, I'm not. I'm saying they lack a bias against that codec that would be present in legitimate use, and in evaluating what is the best tool for the job.
they will choose the tool they believe best for the job.
Which has often been divx, even when h.264 existed and had decent support. It was only once they started embracing HD video that h.264 saw any adoption, and you still occasionally see a 720p divx.
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When you cut out the wishful thinking you pretty much agree with me that it isn't being used by those that do care about software patents or those that don't care about software patents. The former licenses H.264 or jumps at shadows, the latter uses H.264 without a license. Your futile attempts at counter attack against H.264 failed the save vs reality. Oh by the way, I also forgot one other big thing - modern digicams/video cameras record in AVCHD which is H.264, so unless they edit and transcode it that'l
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> which now also seems to be a mix probably dominated by H.264. The jury's still out on that one - I think most people expect the W3 to wash their hands of baseline video recommendations entirely (at least until a possible appropriate future format meets the requirements)
the trouble is, theora does meet the requirements, and it's the only halfway modern codec which does. however the requirements for accepting a video tag for html from apple seem to be that it cannot be a royalty-free codec because that would allow firefox to continue to exist, which would slow market share growth for safari. instead, a patent-encumbered codec will make it impossible for free-software to implement html5 and manufacturers of proprietary software will have another string in their monopoly.
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The link on xiph.org (http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html I'm guessing you mean) doesn't show that it's better than h264, it shows that it's better than h263, at a low bit rate. In the conclusions it freely admits that the h264 video is better quality.
Here's [saintdevelopment.com] another comparison that clearly shows that both 1.1 and 1.0 are worse than h264 â" the x264 encoder used here is actually pretty old, and missing a couple of major improvements too.
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Did you even watch the videos at your second link? It's pretty clear to me that Theora is the better codec in that clip. Play them side by side and notice how much better the butterfly and the sky looks with Theora.
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Your second link, as has been pointed out so often in this thread, is using an svn snapshot from a year ago. Try again with an actual 1.1 release.
Re:Q. What is Theora? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hahaha, no. Just no.
Also hilariously wrong. Hell, one of the advantages (what few there are) of Theora its proponents like to bring up is that it takes less resources to decode than H.264. I have no fucking clue where you got this idea from.
Wrong again. There have been several comparisons between H.264 and Theora by the Xiph folks and they've all come out in favor of H.264. They've only tried to argue that Theora isn't really that bad. The problem is it is, and the only reason Theora didn't get utterly murdered in their comparisons is they've compared default Theora to default x264 and YouTube's H.264.
Default Theora is pretty much as good as it gets unless you want to set custom quantization/Huffman tables. Default x264 falls far short of x264 with its settings set for maximum quality, mainly because when you set them like that it's slow as fuck and most people will take worse quality over sub-1 FPS encoding. I don't know what YouTube uses or how they set it, but I seriously doubt a site that huge goes for the maximum possible quality.
Furthermore, Theora is simply inferior technology-wise to H.264. Theora-the-specification is far behind H.264 and it makes it pretty much impossible for Theora-the-software to ever be better than a decent H.264 encoder, as any improvements could simply be copied by the H.264 encoder (though it's more likely it'd be the other way around).
It is noticeably better than Theora 1.0, but remains noticeably worse than H.264 and will continue to be so.
Re:Q. What is Theora? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would rather that community based projects with low budgets distribute video using an absolutely free codec if the alternative is that they don't distribute at all because they can't afford the fees. If the quality is a little bit worse, but it's still fit for the purpose, and it's free, then it has more value than superior technology that is not affordable.
People shouldn't be using YouTube as their distribution mechanism in the first place. They should be using their own devices.
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Where in my post did I say that you can't choose inferior codecs for other reasons? All I did was respond to the absurd assertion that Theora is better than H.264. If you think using outdated technology is an acceptable price to pay to avoid patent issues, go right ahead.
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MPEG-1 is completely free, in most areas of the world, due to patent expiration.
It'll also put Theora to shame in just about every respect. Encoding and decoding complexity is so low your digital watch could handle it, and h.264 offers practically no quality improvement at high bitrates, and only a small improvement at VERY LOW bitrates (what it was
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MPEG-1 is completely free, in most areas of the world, due to patent expiration.
Possibly - so long as you don't want any audio with your video.
It'll also put Theora to shame in just about every respect.
Unlikely - even the original VP3 can beat MPEG-1, despite its major flaws.
Encoding and decoding complexity is so low your digital watch could handle it, and h.264 offers practically no quality improvement at high bitrates, and only a small improvement at VERY LOW bitrates (what it was designed for).
Encoding and decoding complexity for MPEG-1 is... actually going to be quite close to MPEG-2. h.264 also offers quality improvements at *every* bitrate - due to CABAC (which provides better compression of the encoded data), better motion compensation that allows the available bitrate to be used more efficiently, and possibly even in-loop deblocking.
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I once claimed that xvid was better than h.264. Boy was I wrong! Slashdotters set me right almost immediately, and then I started researching it.
The h.264 4.0 profile isn't that good. I believe Youtube uses that, with optimizations like CABAC and B/Ref frames turned off, and motion estimation quite low. During my research, and after days of tweaking, I put together some ludicrously good x264 settings(very tweaked 5.1 profile) which yielded incredible results for FRAPS'd test vids. I was getting Youtube HD's
Someone's gotta say it... (Score:4, Funny)
I hope that this version becomes widely used so that we can eventually read of the triumphs of Thusnelda.
(Oy vey, oy vey...)
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It's dangerous to go alone. Take this.
Samples of current Theora, H.264, VC-1 (Score:3, Interesting)
I made a few samples using the latest versions of x264, VC-1, and Theora, testing both offline VBR and real-time CBR encoding.
http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/Theora%5E_1.1 [live.com]
Theora is defintely improved, but I see a lot of basis pattern throughout these samples. Theora would be well-served by a postprocessing filter. Theora's 1-pass CBR encoding definitely needs a LOT of tuning before it'd be viable for real-world content; I don't think we'll see it used effectively for live encoding this version.
Re:What every player is missing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why? If the video and audio are compressed already, are you really gaining much by trying to compress them again?
Perhaps he's using the zip/rar as a simple container file.
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Yep. They are actually zero-compressed files, but still inside multi-archived files. But the subtitle files are as separate. I can load a video file just fine on vlc, but I cant load subtitles in it unless I decompress and they have the same filename.
smplayer allows arbitrary name subtitles (Score:4, Informative)
Just wanted to let you know that SMplayer [sourceforge.net] lets you load any file as the subtitle file. Of course, Mplayer itself does, too, but some people get intimidated by the command-line. With SMplayer, you go to the Subtitles menu, click on Load, and then pick whichever file you want.
In case anyone doesn't know yet, SMplayer is a user-friendly front-end for the powerful Mplayer program. Mplayer is probably the next best thing to an omnipotent video (and audio) player, but it's a command-line program with a bewildering array of options guaranteed to intimidate the weak of heart. SMplayer is a very well done user interface, just as easy to use as VLC but allows use of most of the features of Mplayer. SMplayer is to Mplayer what Ubuntu is to Debian.
Now, it still doesn't work on zip files. I wish someone had written SMplayer with the KDE toolkit instead of GTK+; then you could use the zip Kpart and just dive right into the Zip file (or even specify the subtitle filename as "fish://mylogin@myhomemachine/mypath/mysubtitlefile" and just pull it off another machine on the SOHO net).
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SMplayer is the best MPlayer frontend I've tried. I still prefer MPC-HC + KLite for the GPU shaders, but I can't deny that SMplayer and MPlayer are quality software! Based on CPU usage when playing stuff, I'd bet that the GPU acceleration/decoding is fully enabled and working.
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Now, it still doesn't work on zip files. I wish someone had written SMplayer with the KDE toolkit instead of GTK+
i was going to mod you up until i got to this. smplayer is written in qt (qt3 for older versions, qt4 for some time now).
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SMPlayer makes sure that you never ever need to see command line.
On Linux and Mac OS X (where MPC [sourceforge.net] + CoreAVC isn't available), Mplayer front-ends are your surest bet for HD video playback with soft subtitles.
As much as I wish for VLC to work, it is probably worst of all HD capable players, having all possible problems: subs sync, a/v sync, video jitter.
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Yep. They are actually zero-compressed files, but still inside multi-archived files. But the subtitle files are as separate.
This is wrong on so many levels it's not even funny. Why the hell would you want to keep an already compressed file format in a zero-compressed multi-archive?
I can understand if you want to seed your torrent, but in that case that's not the video player you're having trouble with. Why don't you ask for a torrent client that automatically decompresses them when the download is complete?
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VLC does. And it doesn't suck anymore.
Re:What every player is missing (Score:5, Informative)
But does it have hardware acceleration for .mkv out of the box?
You don't understand what MKV [wikipedia.org] is... it's not a codec, it's a container format for holding the video & audio stream along with assorted other information. This could mean multiple video and audio streams as is common for many movies dubbed in different languages or alternate video scenes. The hardware acceleration applies to whatever codec is used to create the streams held within the MKV file.. and that could be many different things from MPEG2, h.264, VC1, etc. etc.
Re:What every player is missing (Score:5, Informative)
You don't understand how acceleration works.
It's up to the media player to ensure the streams are accelerated by picking a proper codec. It's also up to the media player to understand the container format. These things aren't very difficult, because of the codec frameworks that exist. On Windows, the most common one is DirectShow. (or whatever they've renamed it in Vista/Win7)
The media player has to pipe the stream data through to wherever it has to go - the Codec handles this, so once the media player picks a hardware accelerated codec, you're set!
VLC usually just sends it to its own CPU-based codecs, but other media players (like MPC, loaded up with directshow codecs for different formats) will send parts of it to the GPU to be decoded/accelerated. MPC-HC also has GPU shaders that can enhance the quality, regardless of the codec.
H.264 will be accelerated in .MKV, .MOV, and .MP4 unless your media player doesn't know what to do, which is unlikely because of the codec frameworks. The biggest issue is either going to be a missing codec(solved by using a pack like the klite mega codec pack) or your media player of choice(VLC) favouring compatibility over performance. VLC likes to choose CPU-decode codecs rather than GPU-decode ones. As far as I know, it also lacks GPU shaders.
Side-note: Recently I was uploading H.264/AAC to Youtube. There was a glitch on Youtube's end that it thought VBR-AAC was longer than it really was, so it rejected the video. After switching to .mp4(h.264/mp3), I had problems with audio desyncing. Then I switched to .mkv(h.264/mp3), and it worked fine. Seems like youtube has solid mkv support, just like most desktop software I've tested.
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Hardware accelerators don't know what a mkv "wrapper" is. They don't care about the container format at all, and don't know anything about an AVI file, a MPEG transport or program stream, RTSP, etc. The software just reads the H.264 bitstream from the container and feeds only the H.264 stream to the decoder.
This is why various set-
Re:What every player is missing (Score:4, Informative)
But does it have hardware acceleration for .mkv out of the box?
No, because mkv is a container format. Hardware acceleration for a container format makes no sense. Other than to demonstrate that you don't know the difference between containers and CODECs (or between Gb and GB) was there a point to your rant?
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The really screwed up thing is that it is very rare for people to differentiate between coders, decoders, codecs, and encoding schemes.
DivX is a codec. A codec is a specific piece of software for converting between video and a specific encoding scheme. It is actually a terrible term. There is no such thing as a codec. There are encoders and decoders. They are often distributed in pairs. When doing so, the decoder will always support the output of the encoder, but might also support video using encoding sche
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Your question is just as stupid the second time around... MKV is a container, just like AVI, MOV/MP4, etc. You can put any codec in it that you want, including H.264.
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You keep getting modded down because you keep on ranting and not listening what you're being told.
The answer to your sexually mless frustrated than you question is would be obvious if you knew what a container file is. That's why people keep on trying to explain it to you. However, to keep you from
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CCCP [cccp-project.net]
Anime went MKV way (x264+Vorbis) for HD release quite some time ago.
Also I hear recent DivX supports MKV files too.
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Anybody who uses Vorbis and h.264 together deserves to be smacked.
Re:What every player is missing (Score:4, Informative)
No. On Mac OS X best shot is the the MPlayer OSX Extended [mplayerosx.sttz.ch]. At H.264 playback it's better than vanilla CCCP, but not as good as commercial CoreAVC.
VLC sadly is as hopeless as it was before. When I heard that they finally supported ASS subtitles I was excited to try it out - only to find that it still sucks at any contemporary media job.
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Just use http://www.perian.org/ [perian.org] instead.
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LG BD 370 Network Blu-ray Disc Player
http://www.lge.com/products/model/detail/bd370.jhtml [lge.com]
Also supports Netcast, Cinema, Netflix ,Youtube
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I can't see much reason for that. I can only guess that he's downloading TV programs or something off free file hosting companies. With a limit of 100MB for example, people break larger media into rar archives so that they can be downloaded piecemeal.
Re:What every player is missing (Score:4, Informative)
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And it's also a pain to transfer a "folder" of files to someone over the net. Torrents are the only remotely usable solution and that requires making a torrent, uploading it to a site, and then finding a user you want to give it to who also understands bittorrent...
Totally. Someone should get on this immediately. It would be totally cool to have a program which is able to string a number of files and their associated directories together, and just dump them into one file for ease of distribution! And then,
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And I mean good support, not just something that works like a stream, but where you can seek and do everything like you can do with actual files.
Afaict the only way to read a portion of a file in a zip is to read and decompress the whole file up to the portion wanted so seeking is going to be pretty damn slow.
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Re:What every player is missing (Score:5, Informative)
I'll just have to ask... why? Except for some holdouts from Usenet I think pretty much everyone uses torrents without any rar/zip compression. And even those are automatically decompressed if you set up something like hellanzb. It certainly doesn't save you any space, it's just for grouping files together and intgrity checking. Except torrents already do that, same with PAR on the Usenet side. It's completely redundant these days.
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Indeed, both torrents and Usenet are secondary distribution systems. The original scene releases work through a completely different system of topsites and PREs, etc.
Of course, I've definately downloaded a torrent before consisting of many rar files, inside which was a zip file, inside which were the original scene rars, insider which was the content, plus some supplementary material in a zip file.
That means that some files have had 4 layers of compression. That drives me nuts personally. I far prefer that
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Funny how these days noone knows how the real Scene works. But it's surely better this way.
The old scene follows obscure rules to be l33t like ftping around rars, but they're a fraction of a fraction of the people downloading. There's also a new scene that's not so lame, I can tell you there's original releases that go on private torrents first but are packed up to make the old scene happy. Or they stay as internals, which is just fine with me.
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The old scene follows obscure rules to be l33t like ftping around rars, but they're a fraction of a fraction of the people downloading.
Sure. But they are supplying 95% of what other people are downloading.
The topsite network was never meant to supply a large number of people, but was and is a *fast* and *secure* distributed exchange system for those who are in, *and* are contributing.
There's also a new scene that's not so lame, I can tell you there's original releases that go on private torrents first but are packed up to make the old scene happy.
Sure, I know and I respect them. They often fill the many holes left by the old scene these days. But still, these new scenes are *mostly* supplying mp3/cam/ts/scr/rips. No technical knowledge in there, just a matter of having fresh meat working for you. Yes,
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The point was that there's relatively few people that get rars from the topsite system. Once you get past the fan-up and fan-out and start sharing in any form of peer group it's more effective to put up a torrent. I've never felt the need to view anything inside rars, and I'd say my hookup is stellar. But then I probably know one of the two exceptions you speak of.
Re:What every player is missing (Score:4, Informative)
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Umm video/audio files are compressed, so technically we have this already. What you are proposing is compression inside of compression, which is quite useless. If you actually are getting good compression ratios from the RAR or ZIP then the video wasn't encoded with a good compression algorithm to begin with.
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The one thing I'd like to have with players is good support for playing files off from compressed (rar/zip etc) files. And I mean good support, not just something that works like a stream, but where you can seek and do everything like you can do with actual files.
There's really only one graceful way to implement this, which is to decompress it to disk well ahead of time to avoid getting I/O bound. Maybe you can do it in blocks. The best option is to only support uncompressed files in archives; compressed files get decompressed wholesale. And really, anything compressed in there is probably small enough to just decompress too.
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I know that's no excuse for lazy Slashdot editors, I just thought you might need to be reminded.
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Please explain this "Linux" thing to me, everyone talks about it, but they assume that everyone "just knows" what it is.
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to actually say what the hell the thing is in the summary without assuming everyone "just knows"?
Everyone would have been perfectly happy if they just came out and said, "yes, it will support streaming porn."
That's all we need to hear, right?
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Say what? You've been living under a rock for five years? Why would anyone do that? ... Oh. Ok. Whatever. Still seems stupid to me.
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can I get a what what [justfuckinggoogleit.com]
Re:You know.. (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the point? It's free, in both senses of the word.
Unlike H.264, you do not have to pay to use Theora.
Unlike H.264, you can use Theora in open-source software without worrying about being sued or shut down overnight.
Sure, if you don't care about freedom and don't mind paying for the privilege, go ahead and use H.264. But why would you want to, when you can use Theora however you want to, and without paying a cent?
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Mod parent up
Re:You know.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because everyone else in the industry is using H.264. If you want your materials to play nice with others hardware, software, etc. you'd better damn well be using H.264.
Generally, the cost of the H.264 license is covered by the software/hardware purchased by the consumer, whether it's a business or personal use. It's licensed by Adobe/Apple/Google/whomever when you buy or use their encoder. I don't have to pay a licensing fee for every video I create in H.264.
I've tested Theora on a few occasions. Everytime, H.264 has beat it in terms of quality for file size plus I can send an H.264 file to anyone else in the industry and I guarantee it will play for them. And today, I can put it out on the web and be pretty much guaranteed that just about everyone can view it.
Not so much with Theora.
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> And today, I can put it out on the web
Something that may cost you money starting 2011. MPEG-LA has indicated that it's likely to require royalties for streaming (not encoding; simply making available in a streamable fashion) H.264 starting then, with the final decisions on pricing and such to be made in December 2009, last I checked.
Of course for the next year or so you're ok.
The fact is, the video codec landscape on the web just doesn't look very good.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unless it becomes popular, in which case the so-called "submarine" (actually they may not even be submarine) patents will come to the fore, and you'll have to pay... I'd go for the predictability of a licensable codec ahead of one that almost certainly would be a target for patent lawsuits if it ever achieves critical mass,
Ludicrous FUD. Did concerns like this make anyone even pause, for a heartbeat, before considering H.264?
Nothing about Theora's "open-ness" makes it more likely to be hit by a submarine patent than any proprietary project.
And remember, it was originally proprietary, and is covered by a few patents, which have been released to the public domain -- so if your argument is that having something patented once means it's less likely to be infringing on someone else's patents, even if that was ever a valid argument
What does being an astroturfer pay? (Score:4, Informative)
The first claim of 5,214,742 states (in part): "the improvement comprising selecting the length of the respective window functions as a function of signal amplitude changes", all the other clauses are dependent on this one.
Libvorbis lib/envelope.c, line 87:
The code goes on to NOT select the window length based on a function of the signal amplitude.
Never mind the fact that block switching transform codecs pre-dated that patent significantly and that switching based on amplitude changes is the most obvious criteria since the primary purpose of block switching is to reduce movement of signal energy from high amplitude parts into previous low amplitude parts.
So, how much do they pay you to spread bullshit? Are there openings available? My soul is also for sale, at the right price...
Re:You know.. (Score:4, Informative)
The MPEG-LA license only protects you against the MPEG-LA members. In no way does it provide any sort of guarantee that someone who isn't in MPEG-LA won't start suing at any point in time. The argument against Theora in this regard can really be made against any codec.
As for your "safe" codecs, MPEG-1 may not be patentable my MPEG-LA's standards anymore, but that doesn't mean someone hasn't patented some part of the format at a later time than the standard came out, thus making the patent still valid today. Would such a patent pass the test of prior art? It depends on what they patented, but even if it didn't all it takes is for a patent grant by the USPTO to allow a lawsuit, and the patent must be invalidated afterwards. You still can get sued, even if the claim can be found baseless.
The BBC may have done research about Dirac and came up with nothing, but are they more open about what exactly they did than Xiph? If they are, please give a link showing what you considered acceptable for Dirac but not for Theora.
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The MPEG-LA license only protects you against the MPEG-LA members. In no way does it provide any sort of guarantee that someone who isn't in MPEG-LA won't start suing at any point in time. The argument against Theora in this regard can really be made against any codec.
Well, the members of the MPEG-LA patent pools hold pretty much all the known-critical patents for video compression, so that's actually a pretty good real-world protection.
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Yes, it does. You have 1 year after publication to file a patent. After that, any patent is invalid.
It would be trivially easy to demonstrate the patent is invalid in the specific case of a MPEG-1 video encoder/decoder, since people were doing that before the (later) patent was filed.
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If there were going to be submarine patents, they would have showed up when Xiph was selling the codecs... or their successors... or when AOL licensed them and used them in Winamp and AIM... or when Adobe licensed VP6 for Flash8 video... or...
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That should be "On2", not Xiph.
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Encoders such as Theora, DVD rippers, and GUIs for these are pretty much separate things. Normally an end user doesn't even end up in any kind of direct interaction with a Theora encoder, or an H.264 encoder implementation such as x264. The article is about encoders, not GUI applications that use them.
While I don't know much about MediaCoder, judging from screenshots on the site it's clearly a front-end that binds together these features -- ripping, decoding, processing (scaling etc.), and re-encoding, and