Working With Ogg Theora and the Video Tag

An anonymous reader writes "The Free Software Foundation's Holmes Wilson is just back from Berlin, where he participated in the Ogg Theora book sprint put on by FLOSS Manuals. Here is a broad look at Ogg Theora and how it fits into the push for free formats: where we're winning, what works, and what could be improved."

Re:Theora

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. And the OP linked article has a joke-of-a-comparison. I encoded the same video, same dimensions, same frame rate, and was able to widdle h264+AAC bandwidth down to 260 kbps and it still looked better than Ogg/Theora+Vorbis especially where the scene zooms towards the dark cave with sleeping bunny.

Theora 1.1

[Torrance]

Monty from Xiph has provided an update [mit.edu] on the state of the upcoming 1.1 release. It makes for interesting reading.

Re:The bigger picture

[SanityInAnarchy]

I don't think there's any evidence that the video tag is catching on in any meaningful way. Can anyone point me to evidence of the contrary?

Here you go [youtube.com].

Is the video tag DRM friendly?

Hell no, but neither is Flash, realistically.

Re:The bigger picture

[MartinSchou]

Well, that was anti climactic.

Opera 10 beta 3: Shows the player, but doesn't work "You must have an HTML5 capable browser."
Firefox 3.5.2: Shows the player, but doesn't work. Doesn't give the error message though
Google Chrome 2.0.172: Same as Opera "You must have an HTML5 capable browser."
Google Chrome 3.0.195.6 (latest beta): All player controls work except full screen and the thingie on the right hand side, but none of the "more from" or "related videos" links work at all.
Internet Explorer 8: Only shows the controls for the player, "Done, but with errors on page"
Apple Safari 4.0.3: Can play the video (yay), but nothing else works. Doesn't show the time played or remaining, doesn't move the time indicator, none of the "more from" or "related videos" links work at all.

I've no idea if the issue is with YouTube or with the browsers, but ... it's really not impressive. I installed the latest Chrome beta just to see if that made everything work like it should on that page, and it still doesn't.

I've no doubt that it will work eventually, but for now, I wouldn't use that site as an of course it works, just look at this example.

Google behind HTML5... Not behind Theora

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Chris DiBona [dibona.com] of Slashdot fame [slashdot.org] now of Google fame [google.com] had some choice words [whatwg.org] regarding Theora.

Re:hmmm

[thatskinnyguy]

Thanks for the clarification. Why I asked in the first place was because I actually tried the video tag out. It's dead simple in theory, but in practice, it's another story. I needed at least 3 video files and two additional scripts for browsers to fall-back on in case the browser didn't support Ogg Theora - one for Safari and one for a Flash player. There was no perceivable difference in quality in any browser.

If things are going to be this way by the time HTML spec becomes a standard, I think I'll just stick with Flash.

Re:Google behind HTML5... Not behind Theora

[David Gerard]

Yes, and when he was called out on his BS and FUD [xiph.org] ... he promptly disappeared.

Re:hmmm

[FrostedWheat]

Apple refused to support ogg because it's technically inferior and they didn't want to put dev effort into something worse than they already have

I don't believe this is true. They've mentioned the potential for submarine patents as a reason for not using it. If this could be made clearer for them, there's no technical reason why they couldn't support the format. Heck, Webkit already supports the <video> tag and adding a Theora decoder would be trivial for an apple developer. A few hours work.

Regarding quality -- yes it's not just as good, but they don't have to promote the format. They just have to decode it. If a website is using Theora (mine does!) then it'll look the same regardless if they're using Safari or Mozilla, it's not like Apple will be worse off for it. And the difference isn't that great -- it's not like JPEG vs. JPEG2000, and we're still not using JPEG2000.

Re:Theora

[Lennie]

Even more likely they'll implement VP6 from On2, the company they recently bought. On2 is the company that released the source and codec-information of VP3 as Theora. Theora has been seperately improved over the years.

Maybe they'll release VP6 as open source, we'll know when we see it.

Re:Theora

[FrostedWheat]

Not to mention the lack of hardware acceleration makes it pretty much a non starter

You say this, but nowhere do you say why it needs hardware acceleration. Have you even tried it? My fairly old machine plays a 1080p Theora video just fine. A completely unscientific test with top shows about 33% CPU usage, peeking at about 40%. The same machine cannot decode 1080p H.264 video in real time.

Theora just isn't as CPU greedy as H.264 -- it doesn't need hardware acceleration. Although it wouldn't hurt ;-)

Re:Theora

[mugginz]

With any luck, the findings pointed to by http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo8.html [mit.edu] may lead to better quality/bit-rate ratios in the future.

Re:Theora

[BikeHelmet]

Also... pushing an inferior standard down the throats of a web viewing public, isn't going to win the open source model any friends.

Inferior codec? Yes, IMO.

Inferior standard? Debateable.

Theora has...
-Superior (lower) CPU usage.
-Superior (smaller) patent minefield and licensing costs.
-Superior (lower) encoding time. You might not think much of this, but I'm sure Youtube does, which probably encodes dozens of videos per second.

Theora lacks...
-Hardware acceleration. (At the moment, although I'm sure DSP/GPU codecs could be designed. Someone just has to do it.)
-Good quality at low bitrates. (Although to be honest, with all the settings Youtube has turned off for H.264, Theora and H.264 might actually be comparable)

I've found that FRAPS'd video between 640kbit and 1500kbit can have identical or better quality than Youtube's 2mbit, if you tweak the settings a bit.