MPEG-LA Further Solidifies Theora as the Only Video Tag Choice
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 31st Jan 2010 14:20 UTC, submitted by lemur2
Internet & Networking Despite the recent interest in adopting HTML5's video tag, there is still one major problem: there is no mandated standard video codec for the video tag. The two main contestants are the proprietary and patended h264, and the open and free Theora. In a comment on an LWN.net article about this problematic situation, LWN reader Trelane posted an email exchange he had with MPEG-LA, which should further cement Theora as the obvious choice.
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RE[3]: Theora
by KAMiKAZOW on Sun 31st Jan 2010 17:58 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: Theora"
KAMiKAZOW
Member since:
2005-07-06

Their stance is that Dirac (...) is currently unsuitable for streaming but they'll consider implementing it once the technical hurdles are out of the way.

That's bullsh*t. Mozilla had no problems adopting Ogg Theora, even though it was hardly usable for streaming when Mozilla adopted it. Firefox needs to download the beginning and the end of an Ogg Theora file, because it hasn't even a length info in the file header. How braindead is that?

BTW, it still doesn't change the fact that by adopting GStreamer right from the start, Mozilla would've gotten Dirac support for free.

Reply Parent Score: 1

v RE[4]: Theora
by marcp on Sun 31st Jan 2010 18:09 in reply to "RE[3]: Theora"
RE[4]: Theora
by ba1l on Sun 31st Jan 2010 18:27 in reply to "RE[3]: Theora"
ba1l Member since:
2007-09-08

Ogg was designed for streaming. Specifically, it was designed for streaming radio using Vorbis. It's worked properly for years, including storing the length of a stream without having to read the whole file.

Perhaps you're thinking of AVI, which stores a separate index at the end of the file. That certainly can't be streamed (easily) without reading the beginning and end of the file.

Reply Parent Score: 7

RE[5]: Theora
by KAMiKAZOW on Sun 31st Jan 2010 19:33 in reply to "RE[4]: Theora"
KAMiKAZOW Member since:
2005-07-06

Ogg was designed for streaming. Specifically, it was designed for streaming radio using Vorbis. It's worked properly for years, including storing the length of a stream without having to read the whole file.

Perhaps you're thinking of AVI, which stores a separate index at the end of the file. That certainly can't be streamed (easily) without reading the beginning and end of the file.

1.) Learn to read. I never wrote that Firefox needs to download the whole file, just the beginning and the end.

2.) No, I'm not confusing Ogg with AVI.
To Quote Christopher Blizzard from Mozilla:
(Firefox) seeks to the end of the video to try and determine the duration of the video. (...) Ogg was originally designed as a format for streaming, not static files and as such doesn’t include duration information in the header of the file

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/autobuffering-video-in-firefox/

Reply Parent Score: 3

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RE[4]: Theora
by ssokolow on Sun 31st Jan 2010 18:54 in reply to "RE[3]: Theora"
ssokolow Member since:
2010-01-21

I get the feeling you've never had to write code that uses GStreamer.

By many peoples' standards, it's not mature and not only do the devs have an over-inflated view of its quality, they threw a tantrum when "once burned, twice shy" KDE wrote Phonon with the original intent of it being an API wrapper for GStreamer to ensure API stability for the entire KDE 4.x release cycle.

Here's one of the places where I read about the original reasoning behind Phonon: http://lwn.net/Articles/183462/

Unfortunately, I was only able to find that because I remember it being on LWN. I can't get Google to narrow things down enough to find the other two or three which cemented my view of GStreamer developers as immature and with too much ego. (I think it was a post-reply conversation between KDE and GStreamer dev blogs)

Reply Parent Score: 5

RE[5]: Theora
by KAMiKAZOW on Sun 31st Jan 2010 19:38 in reply to "RE[4]: Theora"
KAMiKAZOW Member since:
2005-07-06

I get the feeling you've never had to write code that uses GStreamer.

By many peoples' standards, it's not mature and not only do the devs have an over-inflated view of its quality

That doesn't change the fact that:
1.) Songbird is using GStreamer and Mozilla could share the workload with the Songbird team.
2.) Mozilla is using GStreamer for Firefox Mobile (aka. Fennec): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540

So why should Mozilla support LibPlayOgg on desktop and then support a separate back-end for Fennec if Mozilla could just as well use the same code for both?

Reply Parent Score: 4

RE[4]: Theora
by iaefai on Sun 31st Jan 2010 19:48 in reply to "RE[3]: Theora"
iaefai Member since:
2009-12-14

Can you send a length as part of the http Content-Length or whatever field it is?

Reply Parent Score: 1