[theora-dev] A thank you and question about the cortado jar

[Michael A. Peters]

I'm not sure this belongs on a developer list but I did not see a more 
appropriate list.

First question about cortado jar.

I'm developing a php blog application (yes, yet another blog, I have my 
reasons) that will allow embedding ogg files via the html 5 media tags 
with fall back to cortado.

I'd rather not package the jar file with the app, instead preferring to 
point to the jar file on theora.org as I then don't have to worry about 
releasing new versions because of bug fixes in the cortado jar. I will 
have configuration to point to local jar if that's what blog admin prefers.

I want to make sure though that doing it that isn't considered bad 
netizen behavior, ala hot linking, since it is distributing an 
application that points to a resource not bundled with the application.

Is what I'm doing kosher?

-=-

Secondly, since I'm here on the developer list, I really want to thank 
the developers of Ogg Theora. I've personally been using Flac and Ogg 
Vorbis for years, but I never really gave Theora a chance, always using 
DivX for the very few videos I produced.

With FireFox 3.5, I got more exposure to Theora, and it absolutely blows 
me away.

I use Linux exclusively at home (CentOS) - multimedia has always been a 
sore spot. Flash often works but can be quite quirky, even skipping and 
displaying weird artifacts when I let the video completely buffer (which 
does not happen with Windows flash plugin). The totem mozilla plugin 
broke with FireFox 3.x. the gxine plugin does not embed. The mplayer 
plugin sometimes takes the browser down.

The native support for Theora though is extremely good, it even 
performed fairly well on my old low memory Thinkpad T20.

Your high quality video codec and the new media tags that browsers are 
adopting make multimedia extremely smooth when used, and I'm definitely 
going to promoting the use of your codecs with the media tags wherever I 
can, as they are quite good and just plain work everywhere (well, except 
for IE and assuming Safari users install a plugin, but cortado works 
well as a fallback)

So thank you. The capabilities of theora really blow me away. I wish I 
had given it serious consideration before.