Hi, FYI :) Pretty exciting and cool indeed, IMO :)
regards,
Holger
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Native Ogg Theora support in Firefox
Date: Thursday 31 July 2008 12:52
From: "Planet Xiph: silvia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
What a day for great news!
[Chris Blizzard][1] and [Chris Double][2] of Mozilla have just announced that
native [Ogg Theora and Vorbis][3] support is now available in the trunk of
Firefox's codebase. Compiles of that codebase have the support enabled by
default, which means that very soon now any Firefox that gets installed on
any platform will come with built-in Ogg Theora/Vorbis support out of the
box.
This is exciting in more than one way.
First of all: it is a browser implementation of the new HTML5 video tag
currently in the process of standardisation. Opera is the only other browser
that has support for the video tag also using Ogg Theora as the baseline
codec, but [Opera's support is in an experimental branch][4], while Firefox
will be the first to have native support.
The choice to include Ogg Theora natively is a huge step forward on Mozilla's
behalf considering the [submarine][5] [patent][6] [debate][7] that has been
raging around this codec ever since it was removed from the HTML5
specification as baseline codec. So, maybe the Mozilla lawyers believe the
risk of this threat is negligible and if they have, other browser vendors
may follow.
This is a big day for open media technology and a big day for the future of
video on the Web.
It is important because the availability of free and unencumbered video and
audio codecs that are natively supported on the Web will make a huge
difference in progressing the capabilities of video on the Web. As an
example, look at the efforts of [Annodex][8], where we are creating video
webs through a video format with embedded hyperlinks and annotations. To
make this feasible, you need a standard and open format for the time-aligned
hyperlinks and annotations, which will only work with a flexible open video
format. This is just an example: open captioning and karaoke formats, open
overlay formats and many other extensions to video formats will now be
feasible. The golden age of online video is starting.
[
Michael Dale][9]'s [metavid][10] project is giving us a taste of this future.
Video can be searched on time-aligned annotations and only the relevant
video segment will be retrieved. Video segments can be addressed by
[temporal hyperlinks][11] and recombined easily into new mash-ups simply
through the creation of a list of temporal hyperlinks. How powerful this
will be when we do it across sites! This takes video into a completely new
dimension.
Now, let's step back again from the future to the current exciting news. I am
particularly proud of the input that Annodex people have made to this
development - code from people like Conrad Parker, Andre Pang, Zen Kavanagh,
Shane Stephens, and many others.
Chris Double from Mozilla has been implementing the Firefox Ogg Theora
support for more than a year and is using Shane Stephens' [liboggplay][12]
library, which was originally developed by [CSIRO][13] and is in the [code
repository][14] of the [Annodex Association][15]. liboggplay requires
libraries from [Xiph.org][16] (libogg, libvorbis, libtheora) and from
[Annodex][8] ([liboggz][17] and [libfishsound][18]) to work. All of this has
to work across operating system platforms.
It is an enormous achievement and I congratulate the open media technology
community on this big success.
[1]: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=492
[2]:
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/07/theora-video-backend-for-firefox-landed
.html [3]:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/index.cgi/rev/20a2f518b07d5896d9392311
b712540b101b53ec [4]: http://ajaxian.com/archives/opera-element-proposal
[5]:
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/12/video-element-and-ogg-theora.html [6]:
http://metavid.ucsc.edu/blog/2007/12/11/the-attack-against-ogg-theora-or-how
-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-proprietary-web/ [7]:
http://blog.gingertech.net/2007/12/13/about-baseline-video-codecs-and-html5/
[8]: http://annodex.net/
[9]: http://metavid.ucsc.edu/blog/2008/07/30/native-theora-for-firefox-31/
[10]: http://metavid.ucsc.edu/
[11]: http://annodex.net/node/69
[12]: http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggPlay
[13]: http://ict.csiro.au/
[14]: http://svn.annodex.net/liboggplay/
[15]: http://annodex.org/
[16]: http://www.xiph.org/
[17]: http://annodex.net/software/liboggz/index.html
[18]: http://annodex.net/software/libfishsound/index.html
URL:
http://blog.gingertech.net/2008/07/31/native-ogg-theora-support-in-firefox/
-------------------------------------------------------
pgphKtItLE5Pr.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ Debconf-video mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-video
