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Ogg Theora In Firefox, With Wikimedia Support
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jul 31, 2008 01:19 PM
from the cause-for-optimism dept.
from the cause-for-optimism dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ogg Theora support for the HTML5 <video> tag is in the Firefox 3.1 nightlies. Theora is the only video format allowed on Wikimedia Commons, so Wikimedia people are pushing Wikipedia readers to download a nightly and try it out. Break it, crash it, report bugs, get it into good shape and nullify Apple and Nokia's FUD the best way possible. They may have gotten the words 'Vorbis' and 'Theora' removed from the HTML5 spec, but the market will tell them when their browsers are sucking."
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Submission: Ogg theora in Firefox, Wikimedia supporting by Anonymous Coward
[+]
News: Theora 1.0 Released, Supported By Firefox 310 comments
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."
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YouTube (Score:5, Funny)
It would be nice if YouTube supported in-browser Theora once Firefox 3.1 is released. It would also be nice if Theora were a good enough codec for that to be practical for them.
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:YouTube (Score:4, Insightful)
oh jeebus, that is ALREADY EASY.
If joe sixpack cant type "youtube downloader" into google and find a product to buy or get for free than he is a drooling moron.
youtube has no protections for their videos, just like vimeo and the others, it's trivial to nab what you want off those services.
Granted nobody wants the horribly pixelated and low quality files on youtube, and that is their protection.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You checked the contents of your browser's cache folder recently?
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Informative)
Youtube's business model (such as it is) revolves around keeping you coming back to their site to watch the videos
And Firefox relies on the power of customization to offer add ons such as Video Download Helper [mozilla.org] which allows you to download media on a page with two clicks. I find excellent for saving hard to find music videos on YouTube, reminds me what DVDs to look for when I visit my local independently owned record shop [buymusichere.net].
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Same way average "Jow Sixpack" (sic) wouldn't be able to figure out how to download a Theora file and play it.
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you are missing the thread of this conversation. The question is whether or not Youtube would consider offering Theora files. Someone above claimed that offering Theora files would allow people to download the videos (ie, watch them while not pointing their browser to Youtube). Someone else responded that tools exist to download Flash videos. The AC I responded to claimed that "Jow Sixpack" couldn't use those tools. I would argue that someone who can't use those tools would be equally incapable of downloading a Theora file.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because the average Jow Sixpack doesn't know about those tools.
We better keep quiet about it then.. and not let these tools get out on the internet where anybody can get to them...Oops. People are not as stupid as you seem to think. I've seen indifferent users express a desire to do something, and not stop trying until they figure it out. If someone has an incentive to do something, they will. Or they will find someone who can tell them how to do it.
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Informative)
Ogg Vorbis is an awesome music codec, producing smaller files than MP3 for the same level of quality. Ogg Theora is a rather mediocre-to-poor video codec, producing larger files than most alternatives (MPEG4, for instance) for the same level of quality. To top it off, it also taxes the CPU more than alternatives, which is still important for really high bitrate videos. Given the current level of quality of the Theora codec, it wouldn't make any sense for YouTube to switch to it for its videos, even if YouTube had the desire to do so.
Parent
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Interesting)
To top it off, it also taxes the CPU more than alternatives, which is still important for really high bitrate videos.
Which most likely is lack of support for hardware acceleration in the video card drivers. Easily remedied if AMD or Nvidia can be bothered to step away from their Watt eating contests.
Parent
Re:YouTube (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you are misinformed. Older Theora was pretty bad, but the current builds are great. If you use ffmpeg2theora well you can actually get better quality with smaller file size than the equivalent h.264 if the content is animated (as in cartoons, CG, etc.). Theora does still suffer with sharpness issues, and in a case where I would need to preserve sharpness I would choose h.264 over Theora. But for web video, h.264 has some definite drawbacks. As for which CODEC is more "web suitable", I'd have to question what type of video you intend to embed. I think in many cases people will want small, easy to handle video (easy to make, easy to distribute, small file size) in which case Theora is in my opinion the superior CODEC. If you want to play DVD quality video in your web browser then h.264 is probably a "good" choice.
If we can use BOTH Theora AND h.264/MPEG4 with the video tag then I think everyone wins. Is that not the issue here?
Parent
amount of content (Score:3, Informative)
Re:amount of content (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:5, Informative)
I've put more Theora videos on Wikipedia commons than almost anyone else. The problem is, ffmpeg2theroa [v2v.cc] (which is the most direct way of generating theora videos, by transcoding them from other video formats) is not all that great. I've tried to get three features included in ffmpeg2theora with no success at all. The developers don't have bugzilla and don't respond to email. (For anyone interested, those three features are: [1] a command line option to use whatever resolution the target video uses rather than manually specifying it [2] the ability to rotate by 90 degrees, and [3] because many cameras (including mine) tend to set a couple of bits wrong when creating quicktime movies, ffmpeg2theora need to be less picky about following certain file specifications. Right now, it errors out without producing any output)
So yes, this is good news. But until there's more content to actually view using this - and that necessitates better production-side software - it's not all that big of a deal.
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the purpose of ffmpeg is to convert to/from many video formats, why isn't the conversion to Theora simply added as another codec to ffmpeg? I guess I don't understand why ffmpeg2theora needs to exist at all. (I've just used ffmpeg a few times, so I don't know too much about it, just curious.)
Parent
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:5, Informative)
ffmpeg does support conversion to ogg theora. The problem is that (a) ffmpeg is Linux only, which means that it won't serve any more than a niche audience for the purposes of putting content on Wikimedia commons, and (b) ffmpeg is an 800 pound gorilla. Trying to read through its man page to figure out the correct options to output to theora is *painful* (on the occasions I've used it, I had much more success simply googling for the right command)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, it isn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffmpeg [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's "available for Windows" in the same sense that all open source software is -- they provide the source, and (assuming you have a compiler on your windows systems) you do the job of compiling it yourself. That's so far from usable for the vast majority of windows users that I do not count it.
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:4, Insightful)
It's "available for Windows" in the same sense that all open source software is they provide the source, and [...]
then other people compile the binaries for you. Not hard at all to find or use, and it works very well. When compiled with MinGW you don't even need to bother with Cygwin's libraries.
http://www.google.com/search?q=ffmpeg+windows [google.com]
Parent
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:5, Interesting)
The instructions you cite were originally copied from the English Wikipedia guide [wikipedia.org] (and its associated talk page), which I wrote :)
My current solution is a bit more elegant than the ones on that page. I wrote a python script (which wraps around ffmpeg) to convert directories full of quicktime movies (which is what my camera creates) to ogg theora.
Parent
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:5, Informative)
The script is here [udel.edu]
Parent
Re:MEncoder can do all that (Score:4, Informative)
After some time spent googling and figuring out how to use Mencoder and Ffmpeg to do the rotation and theora transcoding, I wrote a Python script [udel.edu] to do the heavy lifting. So that takes care of my problem, but that won't work for 99.9% of people who have this problem.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If Wikipedia is the only (major) site using Ogg Theora - and as far as I am aware, it is - then this announcement affects only people who visit Wikipedia and and play its media content. But, Wikipedia already has support for embedded Theora and Vorbis. About a year ago, Mediawiki introduced a java player so that ogg Theora and Vorbis videos could be embedded and played within pages.
The built-in Firefox player will effectively replace Mediawiki's java player (for people using Firefox, at least) but functiona
Theora quality; An exciting battle (Score:5, Interesting)
With the way things are going this sounds like it's going to be quite a fight between the proprietary and open worlds. I can't think of anyone better than Noikia [slashdot.org] and Apple [slashdot.org] to play the side of proprietary. ... Not even Microsoft seems to be able to pull off, well, evil as completely as those two these days. And with Mozilla and Wikipedia on the other side it's not like either side of this fight is hopelessly out-gunned.
Of course, this is interesting to more than just Wikipedia [cydeweys.com], but few other players are both as important and have such a clear long-term vision.
Round TWO! FIGHT!
what are the technical probs with Theora? (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep hearing that Theora has problems. Does it really? Or are these rumors FUD?
Some of the "problems" seem to be misunderstandings. Like, someone encoding at a too low bitrate, and then complaining that the quality is poor. Perhaps encoding isn't very fast either. I know Theora isn't the best codec ever, but it's decent.
I've heard it's difficult to program for the Theora libraries.
But what I've heard the most of is unethical and unwarranted efforts to stop the use of Theora and Vorbis as well. In light of that, I regard reports of "problems" with a lot of skepticism.
Re:what are the technical probs with Theora? (Score:4, Informative)
You are aware that article is from over 2 1/2 years ago and theora's development did not stop dead at that point, right?
More recent developments [mit.edu] seem quite promising.
Parent
ogg is already used in games... (Score:4, Informative)
... because it's patent-free. Quite a few games I see have vorbis.dll and therora.dll's about.
Opera, too -- but where is Google? (Score:4, Insightful)
The truth is ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The truth is, Theora takes much more processing power to decode than h264. It can't match the quality of h264 when compressed to the same size. Beyond that, there are HARDWARE h264 decoder chips that require little power for use in mobile devices, not so with Theora.
Free and open formats are awesome. But sometimes, just sometimes, being free and open isn't as important as being efficient and portable. Its about priorities and usefulness in the broader market. Theora has no traction in the mobile space. there is no indication it will surpass h264 in quality at similar file sizes.
what good is a free and open video codec if it requires more disk space, more processing power, and has no ability to be offloaded to a specialized chip in a mobile device?
If you want companies to adopt Theora, fix those issues. That's the benefit of open and free software. You are free and open to make it better until it meets the demands of the marketplace.
The truth is the parent post is full of lies. (Score:5, Informative)
When I was evaluating codecs for an embedded platform H.264 consumed three times the MIPS of the Theora decoder, on our target CPU architecture.
H.264 did win out on quality, but the licensing was very expensive... almost as costly as our whole CPU. The cpu load would have required us to add an expensive decoding chip. Because of those negatives H.264 was simply a non-starter.
Fortunately our application didn't require interworking with the outside world so Theora was a good fit. At the low bitrates we needed Theora's quality was far above our other options (MPEG1, for example) and reasonable enough.
As Theora adoption increases we can expect the pace of increase to increase. For many people the objective balance is already in favour of Theora but for most applications compatibility dwarfs all other factors. Few care about 10% differences in bitrate, and free has a huge advantage over the long term in terms of archiving ubiquity.
Parent
What about BBC Dirac Video Format? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about BBC Dirac Video Format? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not yet, not until it's way further developed. But both Wikimedia and WHATWG are watching it closely.
Parent
Firefox developers lost in Canada :-) (Score:5, Funny)
Opera had it first (as always) (Score:4, Informative)
I really don't want to sound fanboyish, but, Opera implemented the attribute (though only for Windows at the time) at 8th November 2007 [opera.com] and it added the Mac and Linux builds at 18th July 2008 [opera.com].
But, as always, it didn't got the respectable place in /.'s front page.
I am also dissapointed in the fact that Wikipedia didn't even say a single word about Opera supporting the same spec. as Firefox even earlier than Firefox.
Yes, I do know they support free (as in free speech) software so they recommended Firefox, but not saying a single word about Opera makes me (and Opera's devs) cry.
Re:Opera had it first (as always) (Score:4, Informative)
Those are labs builds. Opera has no release build or planned release build (like this Firefox release) with the feature in.
Parent
Re:Opera had it first (as always) (Score:4, Insightful)
But, as always, it didn't got[sic] the respectable place in /.'s front page.
Did you submit it?
I am also dissapointed in the fact that Wikipedia didn't even say a single word about Opera supporting the same spec.
You know what works better than being disappointed? Adding it to the wikipedia article. It's Wikipedia... you can edit it.
Parent
Re:That is nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:That is nice (Score:5, Insightful)
How would Mozilla developers fix a crash in closed-source Adobe code?
They may not be able to fix the problem, but at the very least they should be able to prevent Flash from crashing Firefox.
Parent
Re:That is nice (Score:4, Informative)
Those of us on x86-64 already have this, because Adobe doesn't feel a 64-bit flash is important and we have to run 32-bit Flash via nspluginwrapper. When flash crashes for me all that happens is that any flash objects on open web pages disappear and turn into empty white squares. I just hit reload and it starts up flash again.
Parent
Re:The tag is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's not like anybody used the IMG tag either, all media on the web is in OBJECT tags.
Parent
Ahh.. the fairness of slashdot. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Ahh.. the fairness of slashdot. (Score:4, Interesting)
All these magic improvements are in the encoder; the decoder remains unchanged, so none of this affects FF.
Parent
Re:Ahh.. the fairness of slashdot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the decoders don't often admit much quality optimization. Modern lossy codec formats for both audio and video typically allow for considerable implementation leeway (and computational expense) in the encoder, while the decoder's work is fairly cut-and-dried (and designed to be efficient). Consider that the encoder's job is to pick the reduced set of bits that best represents the original signal (within the format spec), but the decoder just has to handle reconstituting exactly one narrowly defined format.
This front-loading of the work has two benefits: one as seen here, where better encoders can come along and provide benefit to all decoders. The other is an efficiency concern: the media will be encoded just once, but decoded many times.
For those that are new here(tm), it wasn't that long ago that just decoding audio on a desktop computer or workstation was a fairly taxing operation. This set off this deliberate encoder/decoder work imbalance, but we continue to benefit wherever power draw is a concern.
Parent
Re:Wikimedia is out of touch (Score:5, Insightful)
The level of free-content zealotry that has infected the Wikimedia Foundation has done nothing but drive contributors away and remove useful content from their projects. They're a bunch of idiots shooting themselves in the foot.
How is "free-content zealotry" in an organization which exists solely for the purpose of developing free libraries of free content [wikimediafoundation.org] a bad thing?
Parent
Re:Words (Score:4, Informative)
.
Blipverts, anyone?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ogg and Vorbis names of characters in Terry Pratchett novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld [wikipedia.org] I'm not sure where Theora originated.
Ogg did not originate from Discworld, according to Wikipedia:
"It is sometimes assumed that the name Ogg comes from the character of Nanny Ogg in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. However, it derives from ogging, jargon from the computer game Netrek which came to mean doing something forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. At its inception, the Ogg project was thought to be somewhat ambitious given the power of the PC hardware of the time."
No FUD. (Score:5, Informative)
The HTML5 spec originally specified that, as a baseline, conforming implementations should include a minimum of Vorbis and Theora.
This would mean that web developers would have a reasonable baseline they could target that would work for all users, but still offer up 'higher quality' versions in more efficient alternative formats if the user had the right software.
Sadly, some of the MPEG video patent holders have big voices in the W3C and demanded that there be no baseline. (What a shock: they don't want to have have a more level compatibility playing field because they don't want to have to compete on quality and price).
W3C pulled the baseline due to those demands... but at least they didn't mandate useless or proprietary codecs.
No one proprietary format can gain universal adoption because some companies are always going to push their own, which is why we have this morass of incompatibility... FLV, WMV, Real, ugh. Apple pay Microsoft for a video format? Not if they can help it!
Companies like Apple are perfectly happy having their own walled gardens of incompatible formats since they've made quite a business out of it. The lack of a good standard suits them just fine.
So... providing good working web video becomes a numbers game and it's all up to us users to set things straight by making good choices, which is why this is such big news. Internet standards... protocols, formats, etc. should belong to the public. Anything less will make us perpetual victims to fighting between big companies and leave us subject to constant taxes on our internet use.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Theora has always been overrated. Now with the C implementation of Dirac and the hardware implementations that existed before there is no reason to still use Theora. Next to this anyone having directshow filters have