[theora] Ready for real use?

[Douglas Gore]

Thanks, I've had a lot of response back on and off the list saying that Theora is ready for real use and as I said previously it was quite close in my own experience. In my own view the biggest issues are sorting out all the little issues on the Windows platform that might prevent me from using Theora.

To give some background we are a Windows only company and we produce mass market retail software so whatever we use has to pretty reliable otherwise we will get hundreds of support calls. Currently we use DirectShow for all our video playback needs and have no plans to move away from that as our entire video infrastructure is built around it. Our software currently runs on Windows XP / 2000 / ME, it also runs a wide variety of computers some with quite a low spec (I think we now ask for 600Mhz as our minimum) and for this reason we rejected Windows Media as it's very slow unless you have a modern graphics card which many users don't.

Evaluating the current DirectShow filters I did find that they work for encoding and decoding but under Windows 98 and ME fail to work because the Theora decoder cannot be attached to the video renderer. I think this is something to do with the output formats of the filter not matching up to the video renderer of DirectShow. If I continue evaluating this and other parts of the Windows implementation where is the best place to report issues found in Theora and the DirectShow filters?

For encoding purposes is there a dedicated Video for Windows (VfW) codec in the works? I think I read you can encode Theora using the ffmpeg VfW implementation but I'm not sure if there are any issues with that.

Thanks,

Doug

-----Original Message-----
From: Luis Gonzalez [mailto:ghempresa at hotmail.com] 
Sent: 31 August 2006 11:41
To: theora at xiph.org; Douglas Gore
Subject: RE: [theora] Ready for real use?


>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.
>
>Keep up the good work guys,
>
>Doug

Maybe the "alpha" word for you means unfinished software , but it's only 
beacuse in the roadmap there are some features that are not implement yet.

Theora is so stable now and Theora bitstream format has been frozen , so all 
your Theora files can be showed and worked perfectly now to when Theora 1.0 
will be released.

And also Theora files can be showed in a lot of Operating Systems Linux , 
MacOs , Windows , ...

Take a look at wikipedia for other details : 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora

If you finally use Theora for commercial software , tell us about it.

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