Theora I Bistream Format Frozen

p80 writes "The Xiph foundation announced today that the 'Theora I bistream format is now frozen,' even though Beta 1 is not out yet and encourage people to try it as 'there's no reason to delay adopting a free alternative any more!' Mplayer and Xine both support Theora. For Windows users, Directshow filters for Ogg Vorbis, Speex, Theora and FLAC are available here. You can get test cases here and transcode Quicktime movies to theora on that page." This freeze, as an anonymous reader puts it, "means that all future versions will support the format as it is now. It will be interesting to see if there is as much uptake for this as there was for the Vorbis sound format."

Ogg isn't a format

the format for audio is Vorbis. Ogg is just the name of everything, like Ogg Theora

Re:Ogg isn't a format

Ogg is a format. Vorbis is the name of the audio codec, and Theora is the name of the video codec. Ogg is the container, just like avi.

Oh, this will be modded as flamebait...

"It will be interesting to see if there is as much uptake for this as there was for the Ogg sound format"

You mean, almost no uptake at all outside of the Linux community?

Re:Oh, this will be modded as flamebait...

Well, the reason Microsoft includes codecs for download on their site is that the codec producer paid them to do so. They're not giving away bandwidth just because it's cool.

If you want to get DivX, Theora, Ogg or WHATEVER in WMP, you'd have to pay the same price Intel does. It's not impossible, and if it's important to the community to do so, have a project manager get in touch with Microsoft and we'll start a collection.

Fighting a losing battle

I realise that free (as in speech) sound and video formats are a good thing but it seems that certain formats, particularly mp3 are now more or less ubiqoutous (sp??). I mean how many people pick up their 128meg solid state ogg player in the morning??

Re:Fighting a losing battle

you're connected to one of the largest repositories of human knowledge ever created

This is Slashdot. You must be new here.

Oh, you mean the internet! Yeah, there is knowledge there...

Re:Fighting a losing battle

The fact that you don't start the battle as a winner is no reason not to fight it.

Many people create their own content. I consider it much more entertaining than just being a consumer of content, even if my content isn't as flashy as the Matrix or Britney Spears. Because of this, the ability to have free tools to work with is a big deal. I don't care if we never see a movieflix.com movie download site from the MPAA with exclusively Theora content. That isn't the point.

As long as I have access to tools that aren't encumbered by patents, and I can do whatever the fuck I want with them. As long as Fraunhoffer or MS controls things, it means I can't be certain about what happens to my content tomarrow.

Oh, and the guys who are interested in video compression have an interesting toy to hack. That's one step geekier than I currently am, but guys decided to make something cool, and they have done it. Isn't that enough? Why does it have to be a battle. Minix wasn't a battle. Fighting wasn't why it was written. But, because it was more open, and assorted Fins could gain access to the source code to see how things worked, they were able to make some sort of Leenoooks clone with help from the tooth fairy. It doesn't matter than minix didn't win!

Re:Fighting a losing battle

OGG isn't as good as AAC.

Actually, they are close enough that this is arguable. In any event, Ogg passes the "Good Enough" test. So does AAC, of course.

I don't know about this new thing, but I find it hard to believe that it's as good as MPEG-4 at high bit rates or Sorenson at low bit rates.

It's my understanding that Theora isn't as good as MPEG4 at equivalent bit rates. Not sure about Sorenson. Theora should actually be better than MPEG2, and for many applications MPEG2 passes the "Good Enough" test.

Of course, over time, as people come up with clever tricks, the encoders get better. It happened with MPEG and MPEG2, and Theora still has plenty of room to improve.

But if Theora isn't suitable for your application, you can always license MPEG4 or Sorenson or something. I'm certainly not saying that Theora is the all-purpose answer to everything.

It's a pain in the ass to use a nonstandard codec, so why bother?

Actually, because I am a Debian user, it's more of a pain for me to use IP-encumbered tools. So why should I bother?

And I'm not asking you to use Theora. I'm just telling you that you shouldn't say abusive rude things about the folks who are interested in it.

Fraunhofer's own business plan keeps them from "getting too greedy."

Can you count on that? How do you know that pointy-haired idiots won't make dumb decisions? It would be dumb to pick several of your customers and sue them, and drive away all possible future customers, but SCO did that.

Besides, the very fact that you'd consider a company's pursuit of profit through licensing of patented technology to be "getting too greedy" makes me laugh at you derisively. Ha-ha.

Go back and read what I wrote. I haven't argued that patent holders shouldn't be allowed to charge royalties; I pointed out that if you don't use IP-encumbered formats, no one can force you to pay royalties.

There's absolutely no interpretation of patent law that would result in that interpretation.

Um... how about the ability of patent owners to decide under what terms, and for what fees, they license the patent? If you are using patented technology, you have to comply with the terms of your patent license, don't you?

They can't tell you "AND by the way you also owe us big royalties for last year." They can't change the deal retroactively. But as long as they own the patent, they could set a license fee and license terms that you would need to honor in the future, unless you have some sort of signed agreement with them that took precedence.

Frauhofer let everyone use MP3 for free for a few years, then changed the deal and started charging. Are you saying that could never happen again?

[free software distributions like Debian...] are irrelevant to any serious discussion. We're talking about the real world here, not the lunatic fringe.

You really are a rude troll. No doubt you are laughing at me for taking the time to talk to you. Well, I won't make that mistake anymore.

steveha

Re:Fighting a losing battle

I mean how many people pick up their 128meg solid state ogg player in the morning??

More than there would have been had the ogg/vorbis/theora folks decided the task was just too daunting and given up.

Changing the world for the better happens a little at a time.

Classic betamax tale

Producing a better product isn't good enough. You need a SIGNIFICANTLY better product. For me, ripping even a small ~50 CD collection to ogg isn't worth the marginal benefit, even if it is free. Perhaps if oggs were particularly small, say 10-20% the size of the standard mp3, you would probably see more people flocking to it.
But in the age of $1/gig hard drives, space isn't such a huge issue.

Re:Fighting a losing battle

Especially when the Vorbis download page for Windows [vorbis.com] doesn't have a link to the damn (unofficial) Directshow codec on it.

Hint to the Vorbis guys: People are more likely to adopt a format when they don't have to change their media player. Start giving people easy links to useful binaries god dammit.

Hell. If I was a webmaster for Vorbis there would be a big "DOWNLOAD FOR WINDOWS" button on the front page which is linked to a Directshow codec.

Re:Fighting a losing battle

No you fool!!! they can succeed just on free operating systems. And only people clever enough to compile from the source are allowed to use it anyway. Oh yeah and windows media player sucks so anyone which uses that isnt allowed to have it either.

In fact me and my friend keith are just going to keep it for ourselves. Keith had a girlfriend once

Re:Fighting a losing battle

I realise that free (as in speech) sound and video formats are a good thing but it seems that certain formats, particularly mp3 are now more or less ubiqoutous (sp??).

I'm not sure that's the case with video. As far as products (not technologies), there's Quicktime/Sorenson and WMV which definitely are not ubiquitous; both are proprietary and somewhat expensive to license. Then there's MPEG-4 which is even more absurd at licensing. Real's format does not really fall into the same category. If anything was "ubiquitous" I would say MPEG-2, but that does not count in the same category either as it does not serve the same purpose as MPEG-4 (MPEG-2 is nearly useless at low bitrates).

Yes, there are free divx/xvid implementations but those are useless in commercial offerings as they are not properly licensed. So as late as Theora would be getting to the market, IMO, the field is still wide open. Not only has the consumer market not been saturated with any single low bitrate high quality video compression technology, but video "sharing" itself has not reached a maturity level of audio streams when Vorbis first beta was released and standard frozen.

On-Duty Editor must be asleep.

It will be interesting to see if there is as much uptake for this as there was for the Ogg sound format.

That should read:

It will be interesting to see if there is as much uptake for this as there was for the Vorbis sound format.

Vorbis and Theora are both part of the Ogg project.

YANFF

Do we really need yet another format? i know the mantra of "choice is good," but then having to track down all the little things i need to decode every random video or audio file i come across is sort of the opposite of good. it's bloody obnoxiouse, honestly. i still don't know what an asf is (mostly because i am too lazy to look it up).

Have questions about this codec?

Here's where to look for the FAQ [theora.org].

.ogg?

Great... They've chosen to give the theora video files the same .ogg extension as their audio format?

Re:.ogg?

Actually, all of the file extensions people use are dumb. The file extension only really matters in any deep way to the user; the computer can determine trivially what's in it. The user never cares what container the file uses, and rarely cares what codec it uses. The user cares how the file behaves when played: Does it make noise? Does it look like anything? Does it have text? Does it change over time?

In order to be sensible, .png, .gif, and .jpg should be .img; .mng and some .mpg and .wmv should be .vid; .wav, .ogg, and .mp3 should be .aud; and most .mpg and .wmv and now some .ogg should be .av; given that the situation is already hopeless, it doesn't really matter that they're using .ogg for both.

If the people who chose file extensions ran a supermarket, it would sell "cardboard boxes", "jars", "cans", and "plastic bags".

Can Someone Explain What this is?

Hi Slashdot... I know what Vorbis is... But what in god's name is all that other stuff???

Re:Can Someone Explain What this is?

Vorbis is an audio codec...but you knew that.

Theora is a video codec.

Ogg is the transport layer that both are stored in, so a video file will be Theora-encoded data inside an Ogg file, while audio is normally Vorbis-encoded data inside an ogg file.

Ogg can/is used for other audio codecs, too, like FLAC.

Kewl...

...I use Vorbis whenever I rip my audio CDs. If I did video, I'd certainly try Theora.

My God!

I always thought Theora was kind of cool... But frozen? My God! They must really kick arse!

Think this is likely to have better uptake

I think the OGG video stuff will have an easier go of it than OGG the music format.

OGG audio had a few problems - at the start, not as many people knew about it so it was slow to adopt to different players and rippers that people liked to use. The worse problem was that even now it's in almost no hardware, so it made little sense to encode to OGG if you might have wanted to use a portable.

But with video the whole field is still wide open. Getting a Quicktime or Windows media file to my TV is equally hard, so I might as well store my video in OGG as anything - and I am more likley to be able to build a box I am happy hooking to my TV for video than I would have been trying to construct an audio device I would like. And I have a lot more motivation with every consumer video device being generally locked down in very annoying ways.

The other thing that will help is that consumer device makers will have little reason not to adopt this video format since it can be another item on a checkbox and is free to implement. Also the processing power is going to be there in whatever device is created - with OGG audio, for a while there was no good example code for playing OGG files on devices without floating point support (as I remember it).

So, good luck Ogg Theora! I plan to start using it as soon as I can and see how it fares.

Great...

...so now we'll have 'xxx releases new xxx player' with a hundred responses of 'Does it do ogg' followed by another few hundred responses of 'Ogg is not the format, theora is the encoder'

Mod points to burn.

Someone's gonna mod me down for trolling because I don't echo the Slashdot groupspeak on this. Oh well.

Who honestly cares about or uses Ogg? Really. I have yet to even contemplate it. Sure I have the codec on my machine, but I haven't used it. Nothing is out there in the format that I am interested in or have even ran across accidently. I like portability of my music so I use MP3. (I can't very well install the codec on my machine at work.) I have no intention of recording anything into the format, so it would be a poor choice for me to use it. How many people is it a good choice for? Why?

What about Theora? Probably the same thing, at least for me. Most people already are happy with using DivX, XviD, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, or whatever. Adding another into the mix, while giveing people more choices, probably won't sway one person over. Ogg just didn't do it for me. Theora may not, either.

The only place that I can envision Theora being used is by developers needing royalty free in-game movies.

Or am I completely off base here and it will take the world by storm by sheer ease of use, compatability, support, file size, file quality, consumer knowledge, and/or consumer acceptance?

Clue me up.

Re:Mod points to burn.

You seem to think that Ogg Vorbis and/or Theora must have massive mainstream success (like MP3) or it is worthless. They're not commercial products. As long as people are maintaining the code base and using the software, then it has "worth". I don't think we'll see mainstream success, at least not for a while. And we shouldn't depend on success in that one market, or the lack of it, to measure the general success of Ogg Vorbis or Theora.

As others have pointed out, Ogg Vorbis is being used by a number of games for the packaged music. I think we'll see the Ogg codecs (Vorbis, Flac, Speex, and Theora) showing up in more embedded packages/devices. Really anywhere there is the need to handle audio and/or video in an application. The application is responsible for playing (and encoding too perhaps) the material. All the user does is install the application and uses it like any other app. It could be VOIP, a training/teaching program, a demo, cutscenes for a game, a TiVO/MythTV/Freevo-like set-top box, etc. You get the idea.

Re:Mod points to burn.

Audio is often used in a portable sense and the market was saturated by MP3 files way before Vorbis came along - it didn't just have to be good, it had to be so much better that it could kill the competitor and motivate hardware purchases of compatible players, and to be fair it is good but not _that_ good. It is comforting to know that there is a high quality, open and unencumbered format there - trusting a market where there is no incentive to keep your patented codecs free (as in beer) is dangerous but a free (as in speech) codec deters patent issues since people can make the switch if using MP3 is made too inconvenient. In that capacity the existance of vorbis comforts me, but I won't use it until it runs on my iPod. Having said that, most games seem to use vorbis audio for their in-game sounds so it's got more marketshare than many people think.

In terms of video there is not a real portable market (meaning no hardware replacement needed) nor is there a codec to which there is 'no competition' in terms of uptake like MP3 for audio. This gives theora a much better chance of taking off - all it needs is a little download, no selling on your iPod for an ogg compatible hardware player. The video market is a much more level playing field giving theora a chance to stand up on its merits rather than desparately clawing at the heels of an established standard, and even if it does not gain dominance what I said about providing an incentive to stay free and a possibility to switch is comforting - if DRM becomes too bad or divx goes paid there will always be something I can switch to.

Why I used ogg for audio.

I like portability of my music so I use MP3. (I can't very well install the codec on my machine at work.) ... How many people is it a good choice for? Why?

I used ogg audio to encode my music collection because I didn't have an mp3 encoder and I consider it a lucky break. It was easier to use krecord, audacity and abcde in Debian Woody than it was to get any kind of mp3 encoder. The files turned out to be smaller but of comparable quality to downloaded mp3's. I did it mostly so I would not have to worry about my dying phonograph player and saved out wav files before encoding. abcde worked great for my CDs and the collection, as you know, is much more convenient on a hard drive.

As for devices, having ogg forced me to get a Zaurus as a portable player. My handspring visor, though still useful, needed upgrading. Zaurus plays both ogg and mp3 from CF or MMC and does so without the annoying DRM problems most players have. So, my $250 investment in Zaurus served more than one function, though it might not be as nice and surely is not as rugged as dedicated players that now cater to ogg. Sharp promisses you can sync Zaurus to outlook as well as read Word Docs.

I'm not qualified to talk about video formats yet, but I have a feeling that I'm going to like theora.

A reason to delay ... ?

... there's no reason to delay adopting a free alternative any more!

Hmm. Thinking.... Thinking.... There must be SOME reason... This is tough. Oh, wait! I know! I've got one!!!

Beta 1 is not out yet ...

Yeah! There we go. See, I knew I could come up with something.

What's the point?

There's already an excellant open-source codec out there in xvid. Honestly, no one is even going to consider using this Theora codec. And Theora is based on VP3?? HELLO?! There is already a VP6!! And as far as containers go, theres Matroska, which is a far better open-source container than OGM (If you can really count OGM as a container, its really just a hack).

Re:What's the point?

There's already an excellant open-source codec out there in xvid.

For which you may, alas, have to pay a licence fee to MPEG-LA (depending on you usage). I agree that xvid is excellent, but it comes with strings. Theora does not -- probably (nobody can be sure given the current state of the patent system in certain locales).

Uses for Theora

Reading the posts, it seems that people are missing a major use for Theora and even Vorbis.

You know all those games you have that use MP3 for music? They had to pay a fee to do so. You know all those games you have that use bink video for cutscenes? They had to pay a fee to do so.

Now they don't. If there is a free alternative of comperable quality, the developers will use it instead of paying a $25k technology licensing fee. And the companies that don't will end up priced out of the market.

2 weeks ago

Actually, this was announced two weeks ago [xiph.org].

Finally...

A format that can be used by the free-as-in-speech porn community.

I think they mean BITSTREAM

They've refered to it as "bistream" in the title of the post on theora.org, and in the body of that post. But elsewhere they call it "bitstream", and that makes more sense to me at least. The term "bistream" is also not in their FAQ.

Google returns Results 1 - 8 of about 17 for bistream theora [google.com] for me, which is few enough for me to consider it a typo. Is it a typo, or does it mean a dual stream of some kind ?

Why another format?

Because it's better, it's free, and it's open.

It's not ubiquitous, so what? Do you have to commit to using just one format, and no other?

If you prefer better, free, and open, when you see an ogg in the list of downloads, choose it over the WMP/QuickTime/Real file. If you don't, then pick the one you prefer.

If you're worried about the web becoming more complex, don't. MS, Apple and Real will just have to work to make things easier than ogg--they have to in order to keep the money flowing in.

If you're bothered that there's some people out there whose idealism you find disconcerting, just remember, you made a pragmatic choice (you gave up a little money and control in exchange for ease-of-use), these ogg (vorbis, theora, flac, etc) people are working to make it so that you won't have to make that pragmatic choice. They're trying to make the world how you'd really like it to be if you had the choice (unless you are all about acquiring money by controlling access to technology, in which case they are your worst enemy, and you are right to fear them--they will ultimately win).

Matroska

I would like to see Theora (or for that matter Dirac) used inside a matroska container, which to my untrained eye lookes more powerful. It should be possible, but has anyone done it?

wow

I hadn't a clue the Theora project was as far along as this. The example payed without fault on totem (xine engine) on my Fedora Core 2 installation and looks (ans sounds) really good!

Keep up the great work!

Floating point math?

Anyone know if Theora's reference decoder uses floating point math, or is it all fixed integer? I.e., can it run on Familiar Linux on PDAs?

Dirac?

Just a though/question. Why don't the Xiph.org guys help out with the development of BBC's Dirac codec instead of trying to re-invent the wheel? It will have much greater acceptance with the BBC behind it as opposed to trying to sell Theora. We really need a free video codec for the future and competing ones doesn't help. Michael

"WTF does 'Theora' mean?!?"

Read the FAQ [theora.org]:

Q: Why the name 'Theora?' A: Like other Xiph.org Foundation codec projects such as Vorbis or Tarkin, Theora is named after a fictional character. Theora Jones was the name of Edison Carter's 'controller' on the television series Max Headroom. She was played by Amanda Pays.

Now I don't wanna hear another fewl asking about it ;P

Sample Videos

We put up some sample video torrents [theora.org] including the three winning Creative Commons videos and a full length independent film called "Honey". All of them are made available under Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] licenses. Free videos in a free format, fancy that? Share and enjoy!

be pro-active

you want to spread Theora? encode a bunch of pr0n in it and spread it out on the net.

Support in LiVES

I am still experimenting with this, but I hope LiVES [sourceforge.net] will soon feature support for encoding to both the ogg theora and the dirac formats.

If you know Perl and want to assist with this, please contact me via the website.

Salsaman.

My Mplayer does not support it?!

I downloaded the sample CC videos from the site and tried to play them on my Gentoo Linux machine. Here're the results (useless info omitted):

pwhite@wkst $ mplayer Mixtape.large.ogg
MPlayer 1.0pre4-3.3.3 (C) 2000-2004 MPlayer Team

Reading /usr/share/mplayer/codecs.conf: 66 audio & 176 video codecs

Playing Mixtape.large.ogg.
Cache fill: 13.57% (1138688 bytes) OGG stream 0 is of an unknown type
OGG file format detected.

Opening audio decoder: [libvorbis] Ogg/Vorbis audio decoder
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, 16 bit (0x10), ratio: 13940->192000 (111.5 kbit)
Selected audio codec: [vorbis] afm:libvorbis (OggVorbis Audio Decoder)

AO: [alsa1x] 48000Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) (2 bps)
Building audio filter chain for 48000Hz/2ch/16bit -> 48000Hz/2ch/16bit...
Video: no video

So how does one explain that? As you can see, I am running the very latest version of mplayer. Do I need some special USE flag?

Re:My Mplayer does not support it?!

Yes. Add "oggvorbis speex flac theora" to your USE variables.

You can also emerge libtheora first, just to make sure. mplayer/xine will only build with Theora support if you have libtheora on the system, and that may or may not happen automatically if you have the "theora" use variable in place first.

Not the same case as Ogg Vorbis

People seem quite pessimistic about this codec (they might say realistic). The situation is however not the same as with Ogg Vorbis. Let's face it, the main use of video codecs like DivX etc are in pirated movies. While thousands of people might rip a CD or two into the most handy format (read: MP3 or in some cases AAC) movies are ripped by only a few people. Here it is not ease of use or availability that matters, it is simply technical performance. If Theora has a higher quality/size ratio than for example XviD then these people will use it, clear and simple. If you don't have the codec then too bad, you better get it.

Ripping movies is an endless quest for higher quality and smaller files sizes. A great example is the increasing number of videos encoded with OGG for sound instead of MP3 since that squeezes out a few megs from the final file size.

PS: I of course have never downloaded any of the aforementioned files :)

First Live Theora Stream

Woohoo, Xiph ! Anyways, we have a Theora live webcam stream for you guys to test out. AFAIK we're the first doing this. http://mirror.fluendo.com:8801/ With MPlayer, for example, you'd do mplayer -cache 40 http://mirror.fluendo.com:8801 to watch it. If you're lucky you can catch Rupert coding. Not a lot goes on in this stream, we're fairly boring (Read: our boss is watching too) We'll be adding Vorbis sound sometime this week too. The server will be Coming Soon to a Repository Near You.

Tips on Theora usage...

Okay, with any luck, everyone will go out, get their video players working with Theora, and start encoding content. So, I think I should throw-out some quick tips before people start complaining and/or getting frustrated...

First, to get Theora playback for any players on Linux, you need to compile and install the alpha3 snapshot first, and to do that you need the CVS version of all the "vorbis-tools" as they are called. Once you've done that, you just have to re-compile your video playing programs (like MPlayer) with something like "--enable-theora" passed to configure...

As for encoding, you're probably going to have sync problems... I don't want to waste my time getting in-to details, but suffice it to say you need a version of MPlayer newer than 1.0pre4 (CVS right now), and you need to use the "-vf softdup" option when you are dumping the video to the fifo (from which the Theora encoder is fetching the source video).

Also, trying to have mplayer dump to video and audio fifos at the same time is guaranteed not to work... You need to either dump the audio to a real file (wastes space), or launch two instances of MPlayer, one dumping audio from the source file, one dumping video from the source file.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't started encoding video with Theora, so just keep these tips at the back of your mind, because you'll need them when you do start.

The only other tip I've got, is to wait until a better encoding program is written. The libraries are fine, but the wimpy example programs leaves a lot to be desired. When other media programs (mplayer, or transcode) start doing encoding via the Theora/Vorbis libs, we'll be a lot better off.

Just hope that Theora/Vorbis encoding support finds it's way into MPlayer (or transcode I suppose), then you won't need to worry about all of these issues ('softdup' will likely still be needed though).

Re:sigh.

While this is true, it's always possible that we'll come up with something a bit better in the file size/quality ratio. I mean, look at XviD vs DivX. But, that doesn't mean we all have to jump every time a new codec hits, but considering the success of the Vorbis codec for audio, it's a bit sad to see another ogg bite it.

Re:Many questions...

IIRC, Theora is an AVI replacement codec, it's just a file wrapper, much like AVI files can have DivX/XVid/whatever video and MP3, AAC, OGG, WAV sound tracks.

The DirectShow filters means it'll be able to be opened by VirtualDub, and possibly rendered by it.

Re:Naming system

Especially when compared to AVI, MP3, DivX, and other obviously-named popular data formats.