Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 24th Feb 2008 21:55 UTC, submitted by Punktyras
Multimedia, AV "The immense popularity of sites like YouTube has unexpectedly turned Flash Video into one of the de facto standards for Internet video. The proliferation of sites using FLV has been a boon for remix culture, as creators made their own versions of posted videos. And thus far there has been no widespread DRM standard for Flash or Flash Video formats; indeed, most sites that use these formats simply serve standalone, unencrypted files via ordinary web servers. Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software."
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tristan
Member since:
2006-02-01

write to your favourite video portal and request full support for Theora videos


No, don't do that.

Don't get me wrong, I like the sentiment, but the trouble is that Theora is rubbish. It's rubbish compared even to XVid/DivX, let alone H.264 or WMV9.

Admittedly, work is (finally) being done to improve the quality of the reference encoder, and that's great, but it doesn't solve the problem that Theora is a codec that is (at least) two generations old.

Where the free software/free culture people should be focusing their attention now is Dirac; a state-of-the-art wavelet-based codec developed by the BBC. It is, according to the BBC's lawyers, patent unencumbered, and is on its way to being standardised as VC-2 (Microsoft's WMV9 is VC-1). An MIT-licenced implementation, Schroedinger, has been developed by Fluendo, and has just hit 1.0.

Exciting times!

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 5

jemmjemm Member since:
2007-08-06

"write to your favourite video portal and request full support for Theora videos


Where the free software/free culture people should be focusing their attention now is Dirac; a state-of-the-art wavelet-based codec developed by the BBC. It is, according to the BBC's lawyers, patent unencumbered, and is on its way to being standardised as VC-2 (Microsoft's WMV9 is VC-1). An MIT-licenced implementation, Schroedinger, has been developed by Fluendo, and has just hit 1.0.
"

OMG! I've always known that Dirac is being developed, but it seemed to be in dormant state. Now it looks like that things have moved very fast. And that's only good.

This blog sums up the state of things http://sonofid.blogspot.com/

Did some checking and pretty new Schrödinger is already available in Debian Unstable and Testing. Even first GUI-app is available: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/oggconvert . And GStreamer-aware apps are already able to play Dirac video.

In true open-source manner OGG-container seems to be able to play Dirac+Vorbis http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggDirac .

The same time FFmpeg-team is looking for a competing codec with the same feateure set (Snow). These indeed are interesting times.

Looks like I have to stick to my original statement. Just Theora may be needed to swap to Dirac some time pretty soon ;)

Edited 2008-02-25 17:56 UTC

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