Mozilla’s 100k Theora Development Grant

January 27th, 2009

As announced on wikimedia late yesterday, Mozilla will be investing 100k into Theora development over the next 6 months. This development effort includes 3 projects aiming to rapidly mature core open video technologies for wider use.

Coverage: See a great detailed post by Christopher Blizzard, Silvia’s Blog post (Silvia was also heavily involved in making this grant happen), and articles on tech crunch and wired For complete coverage see Mozilla press wrap up.

The three project include the following developers:

• Viktor Gal - the maintainer of liboggplay
• Conrad Parker - the key developer of multiple Ogg support libraries, in particular liboggz
• Tim Terriberry - the key developer of Ogg Theora

Viktor will work towards stabilizing the current Ogg Theora support via the liboggplay library in Firefox and (time willing) add Schrödinger dirac support. Conrad will work on improving Ogg network seeking, language selection and improved core library support. Tim will work on encoder enhancements to enable the new Thusnelda Theora encoder. These projects combined will make free license video very competitive with contemporary codecs & containers and will enable free video to greatly surpass contemporary solutions in terms of scalable web delivery.

In my LCA talk I outlined how open media is becoming very competitive as well as the latest development updates for collaborative video on wikipedia in partnership with kaltura. I will try and post a summary of that talk shortly.

Entry Filed under: development, future, theora