Ogg Theora In Firefox, With Wikimedia Support 339
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."
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
The tag is stupid (Score:1, Insightful)
It is as useless as the EMBED tag from HTML3 tag, which was deprecated by OBJECT tag. Why bother with introducing a specialized version of OBJECT tag, when similar tags are made obsolete in HTML4? These HTML5 developer are wasting their time on features that only serves to create confusion and inefficient code.
Re:That is nice (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:YouTube (Score:3, Insightful)
You checked the contents of your browser's cache folder recently?
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?
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.
MPEG2 == Costly; nothing else free is sutable (Score:2, Insightful)
And MPEG3? We should use a dead, patent encumbered, standard for HDTV that is designed for 25+mbit/sec for web use? Give me a break!
Many of the codecs people think are "free" are really quite expensive with per unit encoder, decoder, and encoded media costs. It's easy to ignore these when they are packed up as part of the "Microsoft tax" but their burden on content creators and society in general is pretty substantial.
When you're a Wikipedia, serving hundreds of millions of users per month on donations, this matters. Especially since a key part of their mission is making sure that everyone has the freedom to modify their works without paying tribute to middlemen like Apple and Nokia.
Embrace and extend... (Score:1, Insightful)
It is just like Microsoft... embrace and extend. Stick to the standards! Oh wait... it is Mozilla that is extending this time. I'm confused. So it is OK for open source to embrace and extend the standards then?
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (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]
Re:YouTube (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:Opera had it first (as always) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No FUD. (Score:2, Insightful)
You mean "incompatible formats" like standard MPEG-4, H.264 and AAC? Those aren't proprietary to Apple at all and any decent/modern player should be able to play these files properly (as long as there's no DRM involved).
Browser support. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do you need JPEG / PNG support in the browser? ... So it actually *works* for most users.
The whole "sit back and let a plugin handle it" approach has resulted in a pretty good chunk of the web locked up behind proprietary players and authoring tools. Since it's an explicit goal of the W3C to not propritarize the web by adopting non-royality-free technology some folks argue that they ought not to propritarize the web through inaction either! ... and a browser that can't support the basic functionality that people expect while browsing without a bunch of extra plugins isn't doing its job very well.
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.
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.
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.
Why not Xvid? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why make such a point about Theora support? Why not Xvid? Xvid is free software, released under the GPL, and, in contrast to Theora, yields excellent video quality. Xvid is already pretty much the standard codec for fansubbers because of this, so why is Wikimedia being so difficult?
Re:Full of lies? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Of course the problem IS VLC and not Theora"
Fixed it for you. A video file does not leak memory nor does a codec specification. The implementation (VLC in that case) is the problem. But I did not read the Theora specification, maybe it says "After the frame is rendered allocate some memory and never free it", who know?
Re:No FUD. (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't find any evidence of Microsoft opposing it on those grounds. Can you point it out in the list archives? It would be rather silly of them to do so since they already ship the Xiph codecs in quite a few products.
As far as Nokia and Apple go ... Both are patent holders participating in the MPEG LA pool, both receive fees when non-patent holders use MPEG codecs. Both can avoid paying the same fees themselves by entering into confidential cross-licensing and covenants not to sue with other pool members rather than paying into the pool. (Or alternatively, since we can't actually tell if they are doing that: Both are so large that they would exceed the annual licensing fee caps by a healthy margin. ... supporting Theora/Vorbis would allow their smaller competition to save money but not them).
Regardless of the claimed justification this is exactly the sort of result you'd expect when you include parties with clear conflicts of interest in decision making processes.
Considering that Vorbis and Theora have been publicly available for over a decade, distributed in the millions or tens of millions by large and small groups alike, and never resulted in litigation or even public disclosure of claimed infringed patents. ... The obvious explanation here is that Apple and Nokia's position is driven not by a desire to avoid infringement but instead by a desire to preserve their vendor lock-in and multimedia-tax income.
(I have no doubt that Nokia has some obscure patent whos 23rd independent claim purports to patent the notion of compressing audio or the like... but such clams would be quickly struck by the USPTO if they were made available for review, thus the cloak-and-daggers game)