Submitted by “In summary, it’s possible to play full-screen Ogg Theora videos on the N900 at full frame rates with low CPU use by off-loading video decoding to the DSP and colour-space conversion and painting to the GPU. There are opportunities for optimization left, tuning for battery life needs to be investigated, and the integration into Firefox still needs to be done.”
So will other companies adopt Theora ?
Such results are encouraging to have a Nokia phone (N900 or something related to Meego)
Well, the Droid and Pre use the same CPU, so they can take advantage of this work, too – it just has to be able to run within Android and webOS.
this was obvious, at least for me….we have gpgpu, craploads of stream processors/dsp and there were people around saying: “no h264 can be accelerated, theora cannot”
ok now we have theora hardware acceleration, it is time to trash h264
but I think vp8 will be integrated into theora, so for now we will not see theora (vp3) everywhere
Hold your horses. No one said it could not be accelerated at all. People said Theroa could not be accelerated using the chipsets that support h.264 *without* extra hardware. The DSP is “extra hardware”.
Depends on your definition of “no one” and “extra hardware”. The implication was certainly clear: existing embedded devices could not run accelerated theora.
It is the same “extra hardware” that h.264 uses on this platform. Except that the h.264 implementation uses more of the hardware due to the people writing the code having greater access to hardware specs.
The original blog post made it sound more like they knew about and could use the extra hardware capabilities but if they did they would not be able to release the resulting code as open source.
This is an example of people voting with their fingers (aka coding) rather than sitting around like armchair pundits saying H264 is and Theora is not.
I have an N900 (since January) and it just keeps getting better and better with each day.
So the question is, if I start encoding things in Theora, will most other Android users be able to use it? We don’t care about them iPhone users
“other Android users”?? You think you are an Android user? Either you don’t own a N900 or you don’t know that the N900’s OS is Maemo 5.
I think he knows he owns a N900 which runs on Maemo 5. What he wants to know is does Android supports Theora. Because if Android also supports Theora, it will be more reasons for him to encode in Theora.
Oops, see what happens when you type things when you’re tired?
Yes, I know that Maemo 5 is what the N900 runs, I also know that it can indeed run Android (though I am currently not running that) but yes, what I meant is “will Android users be able to view Theora videos as well”
Good luck with that. Nokia are probably the worst company in the world at supporting a platform without breaking binary compatibility through changing API or ABI and dropping models after 18 months with little or no future support. I was an N800 user and got extremely burned when they dropped support like a hot potato. Never buying Nokia again.
Plus, their is a new batch of meego handsets coming out in the next year. the n900 might still be kept alive, but if the platform really takes off, most people on the platform won’t have n900’s
The article should IMO be less focussed on the N900, more on the TI OMAP 3 platform, since the work will benefit any phone on the OMAP 3 platform (and maybe future platforms too if they share the same DSP).
However many Android smartphones use the competing Qualcomm platform, and that does not contain this DSP, so there is an issue.
As for Nokia, until recently they were not using qualcomm at all – due to well, they got sued bigtime by qualcomm but recently that has changed where Nokia has announced a phone based on their platform.
So while this is great news for Theora it shows that it’s not a standard replicable solution for all platforms, yet. Just like H.264 hardware acceleration requires specific hardware, so does this concept. It’s great that people are thinking outside the box to come up with these concepts and hopefully it goes some way to making Theora ready for widespread adoption, but until it’s a canned solution that any vendor can pick up and easily integrate with the level of certainty they can with H.264 it’s not a serious competitor in the commercial world.
Its not perfected, but it soon will be. Hardware vendors should ignore theora at their own peril.
It was clear from the beginning that the previous Maemo devices were technology previews. The N900 is the first somewhat mainstream device from that range, but even this one is considered a stepping stone.
A Nokia representative said publicly months ago (before the N900 was even released I might add) that the N900 is step 4 of Nokia’s 5 step Linux plan — referring to Qt-based Maemo 6 (now MeeGo) as final step.
That said, several companies (including Nokia) are currently sponsoring KDE’s handset porting plans to provide a special Plasma shell, reduced memory footprint, and new GUIs for some KDE applications. The N900 is officially targeted.
Older N8x0 devices aren’t dead. There’s a Maemo distribution called Mer for them. The goal is to support older hardware as well.
There are also (community) plans to get MeeGo on N8x0:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=606646
MeeGo is also considered to be better angle of updating the N8x0 legacy hardware than Mer, by Mer developers themselves.
Granted I’ve only been checking out the Maemo community since I bought my phone in January, but it seems it’s made up of about 80% people who whine about every little thing (well I guess it is a phone made for the masses) and 20% people who are absolutely awesome!
Within just a few months all sorts of emulators and apps and Debian goodness has come piling in.
I even just installed Google Chromium on mine.
So even if Nokia screws us in the long run, there will be open source support for a long time to come, as there is for the n8xx.
Keep telling that history:
Read the novel, Rescue at Pine Ridge, “RaPR”, where Buffalo Bill Cody meets a Buffalo Soldier. A great story of black military history…the first generation of Buffalo Soldiers.
How do you keep a people down? ‘Never’ let them ‘know’ their history.
The 7th Cavalry got their butts in a sling again after the Little Big Horn Massacre, fourteen years later, the day after the Wounded Knee Massacre. If it wasn’t for the 9th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, there would of been a second massacre of the 7th Cavalry.
Read the novel, “Rescue at Pine Ridgeâ€, 5 stars Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the youtube trailer commercial…and visit the website http://www.rescueatpineridge.com
I hope you’ll enjoy the novel. I wrote it from my mini-series movie of the same title, “RaPR†to keep my story alive. Hollywood has had a lot of strikes and doesn’t like telling our stories…its been “his-story†of history all along…until now. The movie so far has attached, Bill Duke directing, Hill Harper, Glynn Turman and a host of other major actors in which we are in talks with…see imdb.com at; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0925633/
When you get a chance, also please visit our Alpha Wolf Production website at; http://www.alphawolfprods.com and see our other productions, like Stagecoach Mary, the first Black Woman to deliver mail for Wells Fargo in Montana, in the 1890’s, “spread the wordâ€.
Peace.
Keep telling that history:
Read the novel, Rescue at Pine Ridge, “RaPR”, where Buffalo Bill Cody meets a Buffalo Soldier. A great story of black military history…the first generation of Buffalo Soldiers.
How do you keep a people down? ‘Never’ let them ‘know’ their history.
The 7th Cavalry got their butts in a sling again after the Little Big Horn Massacre, fourteen years later, the day after the Wounded Knee Massacre. If it wasn’t for the 9th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, there would of been a second massacre of the 7th Cavalry.
Read the novel, “Rescue at Pine Ridgeâ€, 5 stars Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the youtube trailer commercial…and visit the website http://www.rescueatpineridge.com
I hope you’ll enjoy the novel. I wrote it from my mini-series movie of the same title, “RaPR†to keep my story alive. Hollywood has had a lot of strikes and doesn’t like telling our stories…its been “his-story†of history all along…until now. The movie so far has attached, Bill Duke directing, Hill Harper, Glynn Turman and a host of other major actors in which we are in talks with…see imdb.com at; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0925633/
When you get a chance, also please visit our Alpha Wolf Production website at; http://www.alphawolfprods.com and see our other productions, like Stagecoach Mary, the first Black Woman to deliver mail for Wells Fargo in Montana, in the 1890’s, “spread the wordâ€.
Peace.