Posts filed under 'theora'
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.
dale
January 20th, 2009
FOMS 2009
Here is a summary of FOMS 2009 discussions and developments that I see are applicable to collaborative media on Wikimedia’s sites.
FOMS 2009 included a lot good discussion and hacking. As with previous years the meeting included the establishment of Community Goals
Several Projects are of interest to the future of collaborative media on Wikimeida.
Software Patents
As you may remember last December Nokia raised some “patten issues” to get the free format ogg theora tossed out of the html5 spec. While this failed to stop firefox from shipping ogg it has slowed down Opera and given Apple a reason not to ship Theora support. OpenMediaNow.org is project attempting to take on patent issues around enabling media in free software in a legally conforming way. They aim to encourage developers and companies to publish research around open codecs and group together legal resources to confront this issue.
Client Encoding
As mentioned on wikitech-l, firefogg is a really great solution for uploading theora media to websites from within the web browser. You simply point it at your high quality HD or DV footage and it transcodes to theora from settings supplied by the web service and uploads (in this case commons). Some new features for firefogg where discussed including resumable uploads.
Server Side Flattening of Sequences & Video editor
The current state of PiTiVi the open source gstreamer based video editor was presented. PiTiVi has been a 5 year effort Edward Hervey that has some very nice distinguishing qualities over the other open source video editor efforts. Most importantly its a extremely modular gNonLib / gstreamer core. (allowing it to easily tie into the massive collection of gstreamer plugins). PiTiVi’s is written in python and its interface is optional. We discussed how it could serve as a server side flattener for video collaboratively created on Wikipedia. This way you could save a sequence to a DVD or play back the flattened sequence with the java applet or a video plugin (just like video files are currently supported on Wikipedia).
Oggz_Chop
The current state of oggz_chop was reviewed and a model for highly scalable, accurate media seeking and playing via integrated open protocol for client side (liboggplay, firefox) and server side ( oggz_chop) ogg serving. Essentially oggz_chop provides headers for Firefox so it can request two resources one small oggz_chop generated resource ogg header and other being a normal http byte range request for the video payload. This will work well with proxies that already support http ranged requests. If your client does not send headers saying it support this model you will continue to get a single resource so things like wget myvideo.ogg?t=start&end will still work 
Bright Future for Open Media Scaling Up & Support for Dirac
Diracsupport was also discussed. Unlike the many years of efforts to get theora out into the media ecosystem we will likely be able to push Dirac out a _lot_ faster. This is because free code libraries are now powering media for popular web browser. We discussed adding Dirac support to both Firefogg (the in browser transcoder) and liboggplay (in library for supporting media playback in Firefox). Both efforts are relatively far along as ffmpeg2dirac already exists and some patches for liboggplay are on the way
dale
November 3rd, 2008
xiph.org
The xiph foundation has announced the release of Theora 1.0. Theora is the underlining free software video codec used here on metavid.org and elsewhere. This release paves the way for the new encoder work to become the main focus of development.
This 1.0 release marks an important step in the free media formats relentless push for wider adoption against the powerful entrenched proprietary formats. From the xiph press release:
A number of leading multimedia web groups already support Theora. Upcoming releases of Mozilla Firefox, the world’s most popular open source browser, will support Theora natively, as will releases of the multi-platform Opera browser. Top-10 website Wikipedia uses Theora for all of its video. “Open media formats are critical for ensuring a future where everyone can create and share media freely,” says Kat Walsh, Wikimedia Foundation board member, “and so we congratulate Xiph.org on this important achievement.” Theora’s success in these applications paves the way for wider adoption.
dale
July 30th, 2008
Looks like the code to support ogg vorbis/theora playback has made its way into the nightly builds of firefox! This is a really great development! Mozilla’s has announced support for native theora support in ff 3.1. This will have a hugely positive effect on promoting free formats and ensuring current “non-free” formats stay cheep or free-as-in-beer. This is particularly bold of Mozilla in they are pioneering a “more free web” than the standards groups were able to agree on. As previously discussed some industry participation in the htm5 group discouraged a free baseline web video format citing submarine patent concerns. The power of the premier open source projects to ensure support of a free software ecosystem can not be overstated. Mozilla role here is hugely important and its great to see they have taken the right path to ensure the possibility of a bright future for free and open media.
Update: see Ginger’s excellent summary with historical contextualization, Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan’s Why Ogg Matters post, coverage on bush coder blog (the firefox video integration branch developer) and Greg Maxwell’s post (one of the key supporters of ogg media on wikipedia)
dale
June 18th, 2008
Firefox 3 download day was a huge success and it features many improvement over firefox2. But as they say you can’t please everybody, and download issues were not the only blip on this otherwise exciting launch. Perhaps lost in the hoopla over Fierfox 3 impressive new features set is the html5 video support which did not make it into this release. While Chris Double has done an excellent job in building cross platform ogg theora support into Firefox the new implementation strategy raises some questions about the future vitality of open media and open web standards.
Specifically Mozilla current implementation strategy proposes supporting video via hooks into the proprietary media platforms for windows and mac. i.e Firefox on mac will hook into quicktime, Firefox on windows will hook into direct show, while Firefox in Linux will hook into gstreamer… This approach risks abandoning support for a baseline free codec (ie ogg theora) for the video tag. We can only hope the base cross platform theora support code that is already written is not abandoned as they add in these hooks.
Its now clear that html5 is heading in a codec agnostic direction, thanks to “patent concerns” raised by Nokia and apple pushing forward with quicktime based video tag “support” in Safari 3.1. This of course makes it complicated for sites like wikipedia to count on the html5 video tag to support free media since apple is not going to make any attempts to support it on their own. This makes it slightly more complicated for us at metavid as well. (will have to do some more case detection with the mv_embed script).
What is not clear is mozilla’s long term strategy….
Proprietary media formats do best in proprietary media platforms. Free software does poorly when parts of the web are tied to proprietary platforms. Free software can flourish on an open web. From a purely business perspective anything Mozilla can do to promote a web that works well with free software will ultimately increase the vitality of free software platforms and ultimately increase firefox’s market share. Apple and Microsoft are certainly not going to pre-install mozilla as the default browser in their proprietary platforms.
But forces beyond mozilla’s control have made htm5 codec agnostic… What should mozilla do now?
They should take the sonbird approach and ship gstreamer across all platforms with native wrappers to direct show and quicktime to fall back on proprietary encoded content while ensuring baseline free codec and free media platform support. There are many reasons to go with an open community extensible free media platform, as outlined in the songbird blog…but let me mention a few more:
- Going with a GPL based media platform ensures they will not be subordinate to the same proprietary platforms that they are competing with. Ie Mozilla will control the media platform user experience rather than the host operating system media platform which has its own browser to promote.
- It ensures that the widely successful Firefox extension concept can be extended to the media platform in a cross platform friendly way. There is already a huge base of gstreamer plugins to build off of. Imagine a site that installs a simple client extension that enables transcoding from local high quality DV format directly into dirac or theora and uploading to the site… avoiding server side transcodes and associated quality loss. OR an extension that lets you do live brodcasts from your machine integrated with an associated web service or a full featured inbrowser video editor OR an extension that uses gstreamer to enable output to DVD iso from a collaboratively produced video sequence –these sort of killer apps can help propagate firefox.
- Doing gstreamer cross platform will make it easy to support future free codecs such as dirac in one pass, instead writing and maintaining codec extensions for every codec for each propitiatory platform and trying to ensure the experience is identical across both proprietary and free platforms.
- The code is already mostly written.
If Mozilla takes its own manifesto seriously hopefully they will be more forward thinking about the open media platform issue.
dale
September 5th, 2007
Thought I would send out a quick update of some open media happenings:
Super Open Media Platform: Everyone should check out Chris Doubles SVG + firefox3 video element demo. Similar to a silverlight demo for rotating still images, this demo takes the next step and swaps in ogg video inside SVG elements. This is done in an entirely free software and is patent unencumbered (for example notice the “we cant redistribute this edition” quote here in open source silverlight video implementations)
FOMS 2008: Building on the success of FOMS 2007 free & open source software developers will again converge in January to iron out the stumbling blocks to wide scale free-media adoption. Check out FOMS 2008
Miro road to 1.0: Miro previously known as Democracy Player is quickly nearing 1.0. Check out the latest feature set and get ready for the official release
dale
June 7th, 2007
Given the many parallel projects to bring ogg theora into the many browser platforms it can easily get confusing. In this post I will give an update on the embed video projects that I have been following in the development of the latest mv_embed script. This script is a rewrite of the mv embed script with the intentions of bridging support for video tag from the html5 spec to non html5 browsers. Once the mv_embed script is included it goes through the page and rewrites all the html5 video tags with whatever playback method the client supports, letting web developers use the future html5 video tag today! See the sample page.
The script works by creating a html element / javascript object that mapps html 5 video tag javascript calls to the appropriate methods on clients supported playback system. Obviously not all of the html5 features will be supported for every playback method, but the idea is to build robust support for basic video embeding while letting web users immediately take advantage of simplicity of usage for embeding theora video.
Native (html5) browser support for ogg media is developing nicely…Chris Double is working on ogg video support for firefox3, experimental builds of Opera have been shown to support it, and the oggplay plugin is under very active development as a firefox plugin for the win, linux and osx platforms. Even an ActiveX version for IE is planned. The mv_embed script should detect any of these “native” support mechanism and do nothing. As these playback systems should more or less conform to the html5 spec.
But for all the existing browsers: the mv_embed script looks for existing methods to decode ogg video. Initially I am only targeting the vlc plugin for *near* html5 support. Basic video playback with the html5 tag will be supported via the java cortado applet & any plugin that registers the mime type: application/ogg such as mplayer, totem, or xine.
Future versions can extend the base javascript embed video object to implement more complete support of the html5 spec with plugins. Also we will improve the cortado applet so that it exposes the necessary javascript hooks for more complete html5 support. And we will also want to get the cortado applet signed and hosted somewhere so that ogg embedding is further simplified and the mv_embed javascript can be referenced on a different domain than the ogg media.
adoption update:
Just a quick note on the adoption front, wikimedia commons now supports inline playback of ogg audio/video media via a iframe very cool! great work maikmerten and gmaxwell
dale
March 31st, 2007
From the DemocracyTV blog:
There’s a new version of XiphQT, which is the behind-the-scenes code that helps Democracy Player for OSX play Ogg files. We’ll be including this in an upcoming release of ours and it should make Ogg playback much more efficient. If you use the XiphQT plugin yourself, this version supports creation of Oggs, which is very handy.
This theora support means that the RSS feeds generated by MetaVid searches (those funny orange boxes: 
) are exportable as channels for your DTV player. You could use a channel for your own Congressman (here’s mine), an issue you care about (like peanut butter), or some combination of the two (Anna Eshoo saying Peanut Butter). The great thing about RSS and DTV is that as new matches to these searches occur, the clips will download automatically — giving you a new and efficient way to sousveil your representative and cause.
update: hmm, it looks like our feeds are broken in the latest democracyPlayer; we’re looking in to why.
aphid
March 23rd, 2007
Some interesting conversations have been taking place in the whatwg standards group as people set about to design the standards for the future web platform. Out of this discussion the video element has been proposed as a standard way of embedding video content into the page. Implementation details are being discussed such as css styles for video playback controls and annodex like temporal stream reference. But most of the discussion has centered around the video element and its single standard baseline codec that web developers can count on being supported if they use the new video element. As free software intermixes with the process of standardization proprietary solutions fall to wayside and free codecs/containers become the only broadly supportable solution.
Activity on the list grew earlier this month when Opera demoed embed ogg theora video in their browser. As the proposal gained traction the Apple folks chimed in. As to be expected Apple is not too keen on having theora be the baseline standard for web video.
In the old world of un-free software, each proprietary vendor would bundle their proprietary solution with the software they controlled. (IE bundled with windows media, safari with quicktime & now adobe apollo with flash video) Playback of each proprietary solution is “free” for playback and on tap for for anyone thats dirking as each company tries to wedge their proprietary solution into the web platform. If they are successful a prosperous future awaits in taxing all audio/video interactions online.
We may have sudo standards like flash video, but no proprietary component can become a native standard for a free browser. Likewise proprietary browsers eventually end up supporting free formats such as png as there is little to no cost to support these free-licensed formats and they must evolve with the web platform to maintain what little is left of their proprietary platform.
Because Firefox has experienced such phenomenal growth its influence carries over to other pieces of the web platform insuring that no one company can gain a proprietary wedge.
While it looks like an impossible project for ogg theora to go from close to zero adoption on the web to wide scale standardization that is exactly what will happen over the next few years.
dale
