Through Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla has awarded a grant of $100,000 for the continuing development of Theora and associated tools. This is a clear sign that things are finally changing. Sure, we are not the top tier, but we are no longer the underdog either.
If you are one of the volunteers that is converting as much content as possible to Theora and Vorbis, do carry on. Your efforts will not be wasted.
In a time when free formats are finally gaining some terrain over their counterparts, there was a niche in Ogg that had not been properly tapped yet: captioning.
Well, sure, those who have been paying attention to the last few years may have heard of attempts like CMML or the vaporware Writ. You might even have heard of the SRT mapping. But I would say that none of them cover today’s needs when it comes to a simple format that does subtitles, lyrics and even Karaoke with all the neat stuff subbers — or caption authors, if you will — expect; from basic text to complex animations; from simples notes in English to entire books in Sanskrit or Chinese. To paraphrase the cliché, it’s only limited by your imagination, and even that I’m unsure of as the format is extendable.
But in an article where we introduce Kate it wouldn’t make sense to just stop there, would it? Sure, Unicode is good. Sure, extensibility with backward- and forward-compatibility is good, but what about the REALLY neat features? Mayhap streamability? MPEG-4 Part 17 has that and nobody uses it for that feature alone. A simple syntax, then? Certainly. Not having one was what killed USF.
Hm, you want more? Why, such a demanding audience we have today. Well, imagine this: you downloaded a large film in a foreign language — say, Korean — and Kate subtitles are available in your language, but turns out those aren’t complete yet. Fast-forward some days and, what you know, there’s been an update! Finally you can watch the whole thing — it just sucks that you’ll have to download the entire file again. Right? Nah. Just get the Kate script and use an application to merge it with the film you already have. You can go as far as leave the two versions in to compare them while playing. And in an age of wiki collaboration, what stops you and your friends from botching improving the script?
But let’s leave the snarkiness aside for a bit. If you want a free format for captioning you’ll find Kate good enough for all your needs, and with Ogg’s multiplexing you can in one file add a simple transcript of a Speex track, which you had there in the first place for the blind, then add a translation caption of the original dialog (for the people who don’t speak French or Japanese or whatever) and finally add a copy of that one but with pretty colors and animations for those who would rather have that.
“Ah”, but you say, “there’s a catch somewhere, innit? I’m pretty sure no applications work with Kate.”
I’d say it’s a fair point, but considering Kate just started this year, we already have playback support in VLC and Cortado, with output available from vorbis-tools and ffmpeg2theora, plus a bunch of patches to more software than you can count with your two hands just waiting for the developers to commit them, I think we have a solid base here.
The future looks bright. Help us make it so.
Oh, and happy new year!
The final release of everyone’s favorite video format is finally here, and though Xiph tried to postpone it as long as possible in solidarity with Duke Nukem Forever (which is taking forever, by the way), the desperate cries of our many fans plus long hours at night ironing out bugs have converged into the most stable and rock-solid version of any video format out there. I kid you not.
Now, if you are wondering why words like “stable” and “mature” keep popping up around this release that’s because it was the order of the day. The priority in 1.0 was making sure Theora was not an interesting experiment but a powerful tool in daily life, ready for any situation were reliability takes precedence. As many have come to learn, Theora is incredibly portable, vastly documented and fast even in slow processors.
But Ivo, you say, what about those awesome quality improvements? Well, that will have to wait for Theora 1.1 as the new encoder is currently not as mature as the one in 1.0, but the good news is that you can already start using it. Download this enconder binary and have fun with it.
Thanks to zazengate, we now unleash upon the world the German counterpart of SOM. You too can help make SOM available in your language. Contact us if you’d like to help out.
That’s all.
What, were you perhaps expecting me to speak some German? Rosenthalerstrasse. Brustwartzen. Liebling! Go spread some files, you lazy bum.
Finally, time for new campaigns. We present you Operation Transcode and Share the Funnies!
These two campaigns do not focus on the SOM project itself, but on the actual pratice of spreading Open Media. Getting more files out there is a top priority, and if you want to join the effort (why wouldn’t you) these are the campaigns for you.
If you are a loyal reader, you may have noticed that we never use the word “open” near “formats”. Yeah, what’s the story behind that, you ask. Well, we’ll dive into the subject in just a moment, but since I’m known for doing (strange) comparisons while presenting an argument, let’s go ahead and think of a door.
It is open; you can go in and out any time you want, right? Right. Until someone steps in, claims the door as his and tells you you have to pay to get in. Oh, and he (and everyone else) still considers the door open, because you can see what’s on the other side. See, open door, open formats! How could you think of it any other way?
Yeah. So, you probably know some open formats already: MP3, OOXML, Xvid, H.264 and the rest of the MPEG-4 mess. Why are they considered open? Because their specification is, in fact, open, which means you can implement it anywhere you want… if you pay to cross the door. Well, I guess you can’t implement it afer all.
If freedom is catchy, as some people claim, then free formats would have taken over by now, wouldn’t they? I too wish it was that simple. Until recently, there wasn’t an exact distinction between open and free formats, but such distinction is becoming more and more clear. It’s got to the point where the big corps are attacking free formats to protect their investments in the open ones.
As soon as word got out that Theora would be the baseline video codec of HTML 5, a Nokia representative came out of nowhere and vaguely suggested that a submarine patent may be there somewhere. Neither he or Nokia have expanded on this, nor will they. The damage was already done, and Nokia’s investments in 3GPP technology were not wasted. They hadn’t paid all that money in licenses, hardware optimizations and research to make MPEG-4 work on cellphones just to let an upstart that everyone else could implement win the race. No way, ese!
And you likely already know about the whole OOXML debacle. How Microsoft got so afraid of OpenDocument (ODF) that they invested millions and millions on a 6000 page pile of — let’s face it — crap. Pure, pointless crap. To beat another office format. And they bribed every ISO jurisdiction they could. To beat another office format. Because it would mean everyone would use a single format and make Microsoft’s office suite obsolete. No way, ese!
This isn’t anymore about closed vs. open formats, and you don’t need me to rub it in your face. It’s time to leave those non-free formats behind and look forward for a world of interoperability, a world of doors free to trespass in whatever way you want, and where no one will be able to take that freedom away from anyone else.
tl;dr version: Just because something calls itself an open standard, it doesn’t mean it should be trusted. Good standards are free standards, too.
Are you a student? Have you always wanted to make a difference in the world? Know C or PHP? Want to build a powerful resume? Then look no further! The Xiph.Org Foundation is participating in Google Summer of Code 2008, and you can join one of our projects.
For the SOM enthusiasts, don’t forget to check out the SHARE proposal. It will be a playlist sharing web application for our community, a simple but efficient way to have everyone share Open Media.
Less talk, more action!
SOM is about Open Media: being confident you will always have access to the information that matters to you. Whether that’s your favourite song, your holiday pictures, your diary or that embarrassing karaoke video, we think you should be able to use it wherever you take it. However, technology changes and is not subject to someone else’s whim. The good news is that the technology is already here and it’s available to everyone!
But this isn’t enough: for Open Media to work it needs to be there before you are and, no matter how good the technology is, we can’t do that without your help. How can you help? By choosing products that support free formats (many do, for instance the ever increasing number of music players supporting Vorbis), and by asking for products that support them. This is what the MailOgging project is for: pick a product which you wish supported free formats and ask for it, politely.
My current hobby is asking for Vorbis and FLAC from online music stores. Some independent sources, such as Pandora records and Creative Commons, have been supplying Vorbis for a long time, but big name stores are only beginning to realise that their customers hate DRM. This is the perfect time to ask them to provide free formats; see this letter to Play.com for ideas. Vorbis on the iTunes store? Maybe, if you keep on Ogging.
So, here we are. Free formats, Open Media. Fine words, fine words, but what do they mean to you?
Perhaps not much yet, but hear me out.
Those words mean HD-quality video. They mean high quality music at small file sizes. They mean office files that work everywhere, no matter the system. They mean playlists that you can actually share. And more importantly: they mean freedom from corporation locks.
Yes… corporations. They want to lock your files, your media. Try to backup a DVD film of yours. Oh, that’s right, it doesn’t work. That’s how many of them maintain their software monopoly and their hold on the gadget market. At the cost of the freedom of their customers. Your freedom.
Wouldn’t you rather support companies that won’t take that freedom away? That can only happen if you use free formats, so the companies are forced by demand to sell open media and players that work with free formats. Don’t you wish to be free to use your media anywhere you want? Maybe you heard of DRM already, but that is only the tip of the iceberg of non-free formats.
A much bigger concern is that non-free formats either belong to a company who will not allow them to be used anywhere but in their own products, or said company demands that everyone pays a license to use those formats. For instance, when you buy a DVD film you are paying not only for the already over-priced content, but also for the license to use it. Here’s another anedocte: perhaps you remember the original Xbox. Although it had a DVD drive like a certain other competitor, unlike it, the Xbox could not play DVD films. Microsoft avoided paying such license by forcing its consumers to buy an expensive remote control to cover the license fees. That’s certainly not how you serve your consumers. And let me not even get started on MP3. Ask Microsoft how they feel about paying billions in damages to Alcatel-Lucent so that people may continue to use a format that sounds like VHS audio.
Non-free formats are of the interest of no one but the people who own patents on them. The freedom to spare the money to pay for unnecessary licenses should not be taken lightly.
Still not convinced? Audio CDs have arguably become out of fashion with the turn of the century, so a few have moved to the next distribution method: online stores for digital music. Now, imagine. There’s this guy, he’s just a bloke struggling to make a good service out of representing musicians and gain a commission while at it. He’s the middle man. But since he has not yet become filthy rich, it turns out he can’t pay all the licenses required to sell music in non-free formats, and he knows he can’t just sell them in free formats, because people don’t know they should use free formats or just don’t care. So he either gives up or goes illegal and prays nobody notices.
You — yes you — can avoid this. All you gotta do is use free formats like Vorbis (.ogg) and FLAC for music, instead of MP3 and whatever they try to promote as its successor. Or use Theora (.ogv) for video.
Still not convinced? Okay, back to the subject of freedom and liberty. The concept of Open Media is one that means two things: freedom in the use of the chosen format for any and whatever reason (only possible when you deal with free formats) and freedom to use the content for any and whatever reason (only possible when the content is made available under a free license). To achieve Open Media, a special kind of nirvana to some, a useful tool to others, these two battles to free content must be fought. Free formats and free licenses. And Open Media is only one step for the betterment of humanity.
Does it sound like some hippy bullshit? It’s not. It’s about leaving a better world for the next generations.
Well, but is it about quality as well as it is about the freedom? Hell yeah.
Public tests show that Vorbis is far superior to MP3 and other more modern lossy formats like Musepack and AAC. Classic, Pop, Rock, any kind of music! And it has multi-channel support! DJs know the power of Vorbis and, thanks to Ogg’s streaming capabilities, so do online radio owners.
On the speech front nothing beats Speex. It’s powerful, scalable and people use it in such different areas as podcasts, VoIP, audio books, and talking robots. Record a sample of your voice and compare the quality and the file size between a Speex and an MP3 file. The result is staggering. Not only is the Speex file way smaller, it sounds better!
And in the lossless audio front, FLAC is unbeatable. Good compression, low CPU overhead and — blasphemy! — it works on portable players. It’s everyone’s favorite choice for archiving music digitally. Metallica uses FLAC and so should you.
That covers audio, but what about video? The future will likely hold Dirac, but right now you have Theora. In its early years, Theora has suffered from bad support in tools, which made it look as if it had bad quality. Nothing could be farther from truth. Theora rivals most MPEG-4 formats, it beats Xvid, and it’s ready to provide the world with video for everyone for the next five or more years until something better comes along. And that at a fraction of CPU power used by its rivals. Theora’s performance makes it the ideal choice for video in low-powered devices like the XO laptop from the OLPC project or mobile phones. It is that good.
What if you wanted to share audio or video with your friends? Why, you would have XSPF for that. It is the one playlist format that gets it right. No, seriously. Try compare it with any other. It is no wonder multimedia applications like VLC are using it internally. It’s simple, it’s pratical, and it does everything one may want from a playlist and more.
We talked about the stuff you and I use, but what about the niche markets? The stuff only a few use? Are you wondering about your graphic designer friend? Then fret not. Until recently, graphic designers were forced to use proprietary formats to work with vector graphics. Now? Now they have SVG, a browser-compatible, scriptable and cool format. Your friend can use it for both simple drawings and complex applications. How complex, you ask? Well, let’s mix SVG, Theora and bit of scripting and you get this. Pretty cool, uh?
The formats are here, but they can’t make the decision for you. It’s you who must decide if you want Open Media or not. Make the world a better place. Support freedom, support quality. Use Open Media, use free formats.
Hello everyone. Are you enjoying the new design and main page of SOM? The Spanish version of SOM will be available soon.
I would like to take this opportunity to talk about one of the greatest things to ever happen to Theora: the Theora Sea website. Really! And I just found out about it now, today, a hour ago. Think of it as a mix of YouTube and Digg for Ogg video only. Most amazing thing. I have always felt the need to build an application like that and finally someone took that burden away from me, while doing it pretty well. When I say Theora Sea is one of the greatest things to hit the Web for the Ogg cause I kid you not. It uses a mix of Cortado and ITheora to achieve the embeding and does it very well. It’s not the <video> element, but hey it does the trick.
For the love of all that is sacred to you! Take this chance and promote Theora Sea (along with SOM)! The more people sharing video there, the more people that will know Theora, the more people that will use it, the more software there will be to work with it.