Ogg Theora In Firefox, With Wikimedia Support

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."

YouTube

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

No way Youtube is going to let Joe Sixpack easily download whatever video he wants to his computer.

Re:YouTube

Youtube's business model (such as it is) revolves around keeping you coming back to their site to watch the videos, and view the associated ads while letting them track what you're watching. They are most certainly not eager to help you make them less money y letting you easily download. You may as well ask why your local cinema doesn't give you a copy of the DVD with your movie ticket.

Re:YouTube

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].

Re:YouTube

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:YouTube

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.

Re:YouTube

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.

Theora still lacks good creation software

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

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.)

Re:Theora still lacks good creation software

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)

Re:Theora still lacks good creation software

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.

Re:Theora still lacks good creation software

The script is here [udel.edu]

Theora quality; An exciting battle

I might claim that this event is unimportant due to Theora's quality compared to the leading-edge codecs, but it looks like that has been fixed [mit.edu], or soon will be. Obviously no one sane will knock Vorbis' quality.

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?

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.

ogg is already used in games...

... because it's patent-free. Quite a few games I see have vorbis.dll and therora.dll's about.

What about BBC Dirac Video Format?

There is another free codex that I heard was pretty good. BBC has the Dirac video format [free-codecs.com]. Could this be an alternative?

Firefox developers lost in Canada :-)

I am not sure whether Firefox 3.1 will ever be finished as most Firefox developers seem to be trapped without power in Canada... :-) See: http://planet.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org]

Re:That is nice

How would Mozilla developers fix a crash in closed-source Adobe code?

Re:That is nice

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:The tag is stupid

Yeah, it's not like anybody used the IMG tag either, all media on the web is in OBJECT tags.

Ahh.. the fairness of slashdot.

Ah, nothing like Slashdot to bring out the best in humanity. The doom9 comparison is four years old... that would be like comparing something to the MPEG reference code. The latest work [mit.edu] on Theora shows a pretty clear doubling of quality per bitrate vs theora from a few months ago... but since this is Slashdot, I'm sure that little details like that won't slow anyone down. Good job, Nokia.

Re:amount of content

Wikipedia needs your penis movies [wikimedia.org]. You would think that with anonymity and with the rare opportunity to flaunt their packages in front of the world, people would be tripping all over themselves to upload their junk, but sadly it just isn't so. </sarcasm>

Re:Wikimedia is out of touch

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?

The truth is the parent post is full of lies.

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.

No FUD.

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.