[theora] Ready for real use?

[Michael Smith]

On 8/30/06, Douglas Gore <douglas at imagitech.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been following Theora's progress for a while as the company I work
> for is looking at replacing the use of the MPEG1 codec with a royalty
> free alternative. I have evaluated Theora and I think in its current
> state it is quite close to doing to job as oppose to Dirac which still
> has a very long way to go.
>
> What I would like to ask is how far from 1.0 is Theora? I see periodic
> updates here and there and in my own tests using the last illuminable
> DirectShow filters release from February (which is quite dated now) it
> seemed close to usable with the only critical bug being that it didn't
> work under Windows 9x. As we are a commercial software producer we're a
> bit nervous about using alpha software but if there is a chance it could
> be finalised in the next year we'd be very interesting in using Theora.

We've not really done a very good job with our version numbering.

Really, using theora is fine - despite the alpha name, it's very
stable and reliable. It's only called 'alpha' because there are some
additional features we'd like to implement.

You'd certainly be far from the only commercial user of theora, should
you choose it - so we hope you do.

That said, we'd expect to see a final 1.0 release before another year passes.

Mike