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Media Movies Software

Theora I Bistream Format Frozen 329

Posted by timothy from the but-it's-a-dynamic-freeze dept.
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."
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Theora I Bistream Format Frozen More

Theora I Bistream Format Frozen

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  • Oh, this will be modded as flamebait... (Score:5, Funny)

    by markv242 ( 622209 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:04PM (#9436212)
    "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?

  • Fighting a losing battle (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The_reformant ( 777653 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:04PM (#9436218)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by forkazoo ( 138186 ) <<wrosecrans> <at> <gmail.com>> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:19PM (#9436356) Homepage
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by node 3 ( 115640 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:30PM (#9436484)
      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 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Killswitch1968 ( 735908 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:32PM (#9436497)
      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.
      • Firstly, I store my music in MP3 format, mostly because my car player doesn't do Vorbis. Second, I think you're right that all things being equal, without a significantly better format, MP3 will remain top dog. However, I fully understand that the MP3 format is patent encumbered and as such it's not free, as in mine to do with as I please. What that means is that Thompson is free to change the rules of the game at any time. They could turn around tomorrow and say that there's now a fee for *playing* an MP3
      • Well there's no point if you already have the music encoded anyway. But if you didn't have it encoded already, you had a choice between Ogg and MP3, and you weren't one of those iPod fanboys, you'd surely choose Ogg over MP3, right? I mean all decent media players play both formats with the same degree of ease.

      • Re:Classic betamax tale (Score:3, Informative)

        by Teach ( 29386 ) *

        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.

        It's all about your situation. I run Linux at home, so mp3 vs. vorbis is a toss-up in terms of "support". (Actually, since mp3 support isn't shipped with RedHat/Fedora by default, Ogg Vorbis is actually *more* supported....) At work, I wrote my own music player software for my computer lab, and I found

      • Re:Classic betamax tale (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Malc ( 1751 )
        But OGGs *are* that much smaller. I found that -q5 (~160kbs) were as good as 192kbs VBR MP3s. I ripped 80 CDs and found that the OGGs took 4.52GB vs 5.76GB for the MP3s. I have 20GB on my iHP-120, so to fill it with 20GB of MP3s will be only 15.7GB of OGGs... or alternatively, I can fit 70-80 more CDs encoded as OGG. Unfortunately it's not that simple as OGGs at this bitrate run the battery down in 11-12 hours, whereas MP3s last 16 or more.

    • I do (Score:2)

      by Adam9 ( 93947 )
      I pick up my 128mb solid state ogg player that I bought from Neuros Audio [neurosaudio.com]. It plays Ogg along with several other formats just fine. Once you tell people you can fit twice the number of songs on your "mp3" player without losing much quality by using Ogg Vorbis, they start listening.

      The Neuros, Rio Karma, and iRiver all support Ogg Vorbis.

    • Re:Fighting a losing battle (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Talez ( 468021 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:42PM (#9436583)
      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 (Score:4, Funny)

        by The_reformant ( 777653 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:50PM (#9436655)
        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

      • Very good point (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bogie ( 31020 )
        The Vorbis people are pretty aweful in that department. Why are they hiding the freaking acm version of the codec? When 1.0 or whatever came out I thought for sure they would change their crappy policy of hiding the directshow codec. But alas no. They for some reason don't want to reach 90% of the computing public.

        From the readme for the acm version which your likely to find several places with the exception of vorbis.com

        "Vorbis Sucks, but I found the stupid goddamned folder on some site in Mexico.
        Right-

    • Re:Fighting a losing battle (Score:5, Informative)

      by zurab ( 188064 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:52PM (#9436679)
      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.

  • YANFF (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bsDaemon ( 87307 )
    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).

    • Re:YANFF (Score:3, Insightful)

      by n0d3 ( 708403 )
      having all these codecs around might be annoying yes, however howmany open codecs do you have besides the ogg suite?

      Some people prefer their pc's with all open software. Open standars, and even open src.

      this is where ogg comes in. now we have video and audio for free. For some of us, including myself, this is great, as mp3 is isn't an open format, nor is divx (and it's brethern) or mpeg for that matter.
      • mp3 is isn't an open format, nor is divx (and it's brethern) or mpeg for that matter.

        divx isn't but xvid is. xvid is also used more often partly for that reason.

    • Re:YANFF (Score:2, Insightful)

      by grumbel ( 592662 )
      Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't Theora the first OpenSource and non-'Patent-poisned' Codec that we have that is also (at least more or less) up to todays standard? Xvid and so are all fine and nice, but rather useless if I am not allowed to use them due to patents.

      • You say that there are problems with using XVID due to patents?

        Is this true?

        From the FAQ they say:
        "XviD is Free Software (licensed under the GNU GPL), open to third-party contributions and aims for standard's compliance, portability and interoperability, high processing speed and superior quality."
        and
        " We believe that XviD is the best currently available MPEG-4 video codec solution and additionally XviD is free software!"

        So, are there actual problems with using XVID or not?

        I personally love XVID as

  • Have questions about this codec? (Score:5, Informative)

    by saskboy ( 600063 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:04PM (#9436223) Homepage Journal
    Here's where to look for the FAQ [theora.org].
  • Great... They've chosen to give the theora video files the same .ogg extension as their audio format?

    • Re:.ogg? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Short Circuit ( 52384 )
      Sure... "Ogg" is the actual format of the file, which is simply a container for the content encoded within.

      I'd like to see ".ogv" start popping up to signify Ogg video.

      • I'd like to see ".ogv" start popping up to signify Ogg video

        That would still be really confusing, ".ogv" could just as easily stand for ogg vorbis as ogg video.

    • Since nobody seems to have had a problem when this was done in .asf, I don't suppose there will be a problem now. It's not like the 'file' command can't tell what is inside the file.

    • Re:.ogg? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iabervon ( 1971 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:45PM (#9437070) Homepage Journal
      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".

  • My God! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:10PM (#9436279) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:11PM (#9436284)
    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... (Score:3, Funny)

    by OS24Ever ( 245667 ) * <trekkie@nomorestars.com> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:14PM (#9436323) Homepage Journal
    ...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'
    • I was thinking about that issue - isn't it more the case that a Theora codec will be developed for the central system (say a Quicktime plugin or a Windows Media Equivilent) and other players will make use of the built in codec? I know there are a few players like mPlayer that just build in all the codecs but a lot of players just make use of the system codec, I think.

      Sorry to sound so unsure I just have never written a media player by hand and unsure what the standard way to go about it is nowadays, or ho

  • Mod points to burn. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Talinom ( 243100 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:16PM (#9436337) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • Someone's gonna mod me down for trolling because I don't echo the Slashdot groupspeak on this. Oh well.

      Ah, but that is the slashdot groupspeak - you're just one of the crowd, saying "so what, i got my windoze media player, who cares?"

      On the other hand, folks like me love the idea of having more choices...

      • you're just one of the crowd, saying "so what, i got my windoze media player, who cares?"

        No, I do care about choice. I wonder about saturation in the market preventing adoption. If a free codec came out a few years ago it might have more acceptance. Time will tell with Vorbis and Theora. With the currently used codecs firmly entrenched switching people over may be difficult. I have no use right now for ogg. People who use Linux (I used to be one) will love it. This means that probably 98% of the userbase

        • Re:Mod points to burn. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by imroy ( 755 ) <imroykun@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:14PM (#9437318) Homepage Journal

          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.

    • I would think that the main users for Ogg Theora would be computer game makers, just like they are the main ones who support Ogg Vorbis. IIRC, UT2004 uses Ogg Vorbis due to it being royalty free and smaller than straight PCM. I have most of my music in Ogg Vorbis but am thinking that I will switch to MP3 because I want to eventually buy a portable jukebox. So who else will use Ogg Theora? Beats me! I guess we'll see.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:39PM (#9436555)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Why I used ogg for audio. (Score:4, Informative)

      by twitter ( 104583 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:40PM (#9436560) Homepage Journal
      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.

    • "Who honestly cares about or uses Ogg?"

      For fitting more music on a 128 megabyte card, it's fairly cool. Otherwise, I agree, it seems to be just another hot topic here to gain karma. For some reason, preferring OGG/Vorbis has been a status symbol of sorts.
    • Who honestly cares about or uses Ogg?

      Video game designers. They can release their audio in vorbis and their video in theora and not have to pay anyone for that aspect of their game. Which means if you're a game player, you've probably already used vorbis.
    • Someone's gonna mod me down for trolling because I don't echo the Slashdot groupspeak on this. Oh well.

      Why do people insist on this idiotic preface - it's the only part of your post that makes me want to mod it down.

      To answer your question: I rip my CDs exclusively to vorbis. Even I can notice the difference in quality with MP3 (and I am certainly not paying for MP3 Pro). I am quite a fan of the whole software libre thing as well. I can't think of a single advantage to encoding my own stuff in MP3, so i

  • A reason to delay ... ? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:19PM (#9436365)
    ... 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? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zarxrax ( 652423 )
    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).
    • XviD is based upon MPEG-4 though, which uses various patents and has license fees [com.com] associated with it. They might not have cracked down on XviD or any of the others yet, but there's always that doubt...

    • Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pldms ( 136522 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:42PM (#9436580)
      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).

    • XviD isn't free (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It may be open source, but MPEG-4 is patented up to the hilt. You could, in fact, be prosecuted for using it. Not likely, but possible.

      We're not talking OGM. OGG is a container itself. OGM was a hack to add extra functionality. Functionality which OggFile2 will supercede. Currently though, the OGG container is plenty powerful enough for the short-term.

      VP3 is a base to work from. MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are MPEG-1 with tweaks and improvements. VP6 and VP3's code are probably a lot closer than you think. Don't be

  • Uses for Theora (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SeanTobin ( 138474 ) * <byrdhuntr AT hotmail DOT com> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:25PM (#9436439)
    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.

    • Like Unreal Tourney (Score:3, Informative)

      by gotr00t ( 563828 )
      Unreal Tournament 2003 used Ogg Vorbis for its audio, for example. Somewhere in its directory structure of its installation, you will find the audio saved in none other than vorbis format.

      I predict that many other games will follow suit becuase vorbis is smaller in size while being comparable in quality to mp3, and with modern computers being extremely fast already, the additional overhead that decoding ogg vorbis creates would not be significant.

    • I noticed the other day that Chrome [chromethegame.com], an otherwise dull and unremarkable FPS, uses Ogg Vorbis for its music. I'm sure there are others.

  • 2 weeks ago (Score:3, Insightful)

    by millette ( 56354 ) <robin@@@millette...info> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:28PM (#9436465) Homepage Journal
    Actually, this was announced two weeks ago [xiph.org].

  • Finally... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Fooby ( 10436 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:30PM (#9436485)
    A format that can be used by the free-as-in-speech porn community.

  • I think they mean BITSTREAM (Score:5, Informative)

    by BigAl_nz ( 39616 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:35PM (#9436518)
    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 ?
    • Man, you put wayyy too much work into decyphering a typo. ;-) Slow day at work?
      • Man, you put wayyy too much work into decyphering a typo. ;-) Slow day at work?

        Not too bad, thanks for asking. :)

        I wasn't sure if it was, hence asking. It could have been referring to a dual channel stream of some kind, which would be interesting to me, if that was the case. Since no one's said that's the case, I'm going with typo.

  • Why another format? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by node 3 ( 115640 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:37PM (#9436538)
    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).
  • 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 (Score:2)

    by Querty ( 1128 )
    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!

  • "WTF does 'Theora' mean?!?" (Score:4, Informative)

    by sirReal.83. ( 671912 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:38PM (#9437487) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by ArcRiley ( 737114 ) <arcriley@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:46PM (#9437546)
    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 (Score:4, Funny)

    by flacco ( 324089 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @10:56PM (#9438074)
    you want to spread Theora? encode a bunch of pr0n in it and spread it out on the net.

  • Tips on Theora usage... (Score:4, Informative)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @06:16AM (#9440089) Journal
    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).

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