Monty from Xiph.org Foundation, the people behind Theora and Vorbis, have announced their support for Google’s WebM container format. “The Xiph.Org Foundation is pleased to announce its support of the WebM open media project as a project launch partner. As announced earlier today at the Google I/O Developer Conference, the WebM format combines the VP8 video codec, the Matroska container, and the Vorbis audio codec developed by Xiph into a high-quality, open, unencumbered format for video delivery on the Web. Xiph will continue to contribute to WebM as a whole and collaborate in its further development and deployment.” Remember, people, without the hard work from the boys and girls at Xiph, Google would not have been able to do this.
I don’t get what this means. Does it mean that they will focus on VP8 and theora development stops? Because I can’t see any way they could keep developing both. Developing two competing codecs with the same goals really doesn’t make sense to me.
Xiph aren’t developing WebM, they are merely stating that they support what Google are trying to do with WebM.
Xiph’s part in WebM is the audio codec for WebM, which is Vorbis.
It is unclear what Xiph will be doing, but I imagine that they might decide to continue development of Theora. Despite repeated and vocal claims to the contrary, Theora is actually pretty good. Theora 1.2 (still in development) promises to be very competitive indeed.
Wikipedia currently use Theora.
http://videoonwikipedia.org/
I’m not sure if Xiph or Wikipedia will continue with Theora or go with WebM instead. It might depend on Mozilla and Opera and their continued support for Theora as well as their announced support for WebM.
It seems to me that two open video codecs would be harder for patent trolls to attack than just one. If Theora development continues, it could provide open video with a “fallback” position perhaps.
The Open Video Alliance seems to be assuming that Theora will continue:
http://openvideoalliance.org/2010/05/google-frees-vp8-codec-for-htm…
Edited 2010-05-20 12:36 UTC
[quote]Does it mean that they will focus on VP8 and theora development stops?[/quote]
Nope. VP8 is (and has always been) designed and optimised for online video (streaming, efficiency at small resolutions, small processing and memory specs).
Theora is still the open codec of choice for offline videos, and may on the contrary suddenly improve a lot by focusing only on that, instead of trying to fit all cases. Which h264 manages to do, only because it is a very good codec (at the expense of more computational power and memory we just begin to catch up with – many new computers (notebooks) still can’t natively decode h264 without buying specialized software (coreavc) or hardware (nVidia CUDA or Broadcom chipsets)) and because it has been designed from the ground up to have different “profiles” for different uses.
On the other hand, Ogg development may switch to transOgg (search for “VP8” in this webpage: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/lj-pseudocut/o-response-1.html ).
Edited 2010-05-20 12:41 UTC
Hmmmm.
transOgg quote:
I don’t know, but this quote seems to me to be saying that if Google open VP8 (as they have done, just announced), then Xiph would be interested in “back-porting” some of the optimisations in VP8 back into Ogg (Theora).
That, or they bring their expertise on VP3 to VP8 and make Theora-II, becoming what x264 is to h264.
Ogg Vorbis and Theora have been major forces for free software video over the past decade.
Whether Xiph decided to help WebM or not, any victory of WebM would be thanks to the ground breaking work over the last ten years by Xiph.
Glad to hear they’re working together on this now.
I have wanted a clean and not license-complicated way out of this mess. I know that Back in the day we had to deal with all of these crazy plug-ins and extensions and nonsense just to get basic video displayed on the desktop not even to mention the web. A few years ago most OSs did not ship with the ability to play video.
– – Truth being worth Gold I did not know that the quicktime environment ran like garbage on windows. Remember Realplayer? How about anything that came before it? how many of these are still in use. I really understand the market realities and the need to commodify and monetize the web But did we throw of the shackles of the old school just to go running to flash or silverlight.
– – I was at a conference and I remember the speaker explaining that if it wasn’t for the Adult Entertainment industry then the internet would not have grown so swiftly and eCommerce also would have been delayed. This is the reality of the world despite my personal feelings.
– – I would love to live in a world where we all have common sense ideals that some company was not trying to subvert or co-opt or patent it. All I can say is Vote with your Ideals, don’t hate – innovate. If you don’t like Apple don’t use it. If you don’t like Microsoft don’t send out your résumé in .doc if .rtf will do just as well. Why send out a picture in .psd (photoshop) if jpeg will do?
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/video/article.php/3883451
So there you go. Theora continues, despite WebM.