Comments on: Open Source Video Codecs

By: Ivan

Ivan — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:29:00 +0000

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By: uraeus

uraeus — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:57:57 +0000

@Fabian: mp3 became an ISO standard in 1991, which means that with the maximum lifespan on a patent being 20 years they will have to expire sometime before 2011.

I might have jumped the gun a bit on MPEG2 though as it was standardized in 1995. So worst case those patents are valid to sometime in 2015.

That said for both technologies I would assume the patents where filed and granted some time before the ISO standardization process was completed and thus likely to expire quite a bit sooner than the worst case dates.

By: Fabian

Fabian — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 08:02:18 +0000

MP3 and MPEG2 patents are expiring the next 2-3 years?!
Are you sure?
I can’t believe this.
Where can I read / have you read this is true…?!

By: arne

arne — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 07:48:47 +0000

@Alexandre: Yes, something like this! Thank you very much for the link!!

By: Alexandre Franke

Alexandre Franke — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:44:28 +0000

@arne, do you mean something like iTheora?

By: dave

dave — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:01:10 +0000

A couple of related links of interest to anyone who thinks web video is important:

Safari nightlies have video/audio support for any Quicktime codec:

http://webkit.org/blog/140/html5-media-support/

XiphQT, quicktime components for Ogg Vorbis/Theora

http://xiph.org/quicktime/

The above work together for me on (most of) the Opera and Mozilla HTML5 video demos.

Flash beta with support for H.264 and AAC (and fixing mp3 support for all sample rates)

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2007/08/h_dot_two_sixty_four.html

http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html

Which combined with the Safari support for the Apple bundled H.264 codec seems to set the stage for H.264 and Theora as the next big codecs for web video. (interesting that Google/Youtube commited to converting all their video to H.264 ostensibly just for the iPhone).

Note that H.264 is only a contender because Flash makes it easy to deliver to IE. Thus I believe the key to wider support of Vorbis/Theora is the mv_embed plugin and supporting technologies:

http://metavid.ucsc.edu/blog/2007/06/07/html5-video-the-future-is-now/

By: Greg K Nicholson

Greg K Nicholson — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:01:23 +0000

Firefox 3 (i.e. Gecko 1.9) will have native support for Ogg, Vorbis and Theora, when using the video and audio elements from HTML 5.

Current development versions (and perhaps even release versions—I’m not sure) of Opera and Safari (i.e. WebKit) claim to support the video element so, per the spec, they SHOULD™ have support for Ogg, Vorbis and Theora too.

I think this (particularly the Firefox and Safari bits) will be important.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:10:29 +0000

As soon as the Software Patent Mess is fixed, and algorithms are no longer subject to stupid “ownership” claims, MPEG-4 will be instantly as free as Theora, due to the fine free and opensource codecs that are already available.
Oh, and btw. in countries that do not have Software Patents, this is already the case.

By: uraeus

uraeus — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:52:57 +0000

Ronald: I think both have validity for the time being. With Monty’s work Theora will become much better quality and thus become much more viable for a lot of people. On the other side I do think Dirac is a better codec in terms of potential image quality/compression ratio, but Dirac’s weakness is that its a quite CPU intensive codec even just to decode.

Hopefully we can create a bundle at some point for Windows and Mac, so that when Windows and Mac users install one of the codecs they get both. That should create a win win situation.

By: rbultje

rbultje — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:28:51 +0000

There appears some fragmentation given that there’s effort into both Theora and Schrodinger. Which one would you put your money on? Why not drop one and go for the other? Do they have different audiences?