[theora] This is a sad day for interoperability in the Web

[Hannes Hauswedell]

Thanks for the info!
I have problems of understanding tough. The Flash Player is proprietry and 
non-open, how would it have made it difference if the internal video-encoding 
was in a free format?
You would still have been forced to use Adobe Flash Player Binary to look at 
it, or not? So we haven't really lost anything, because Free-Software-Users 
where not able to look at the stuff before anyways.

What we really need to do is offer viable alternatives!! Xiph.org is doing a 
great job programming but from a marketing Point-of-View things are lagging 
behind.
Theora is continously released in 1.0alpha steps. Everyone from outside the 
Free-Software world will take it as a sign of non-progress or 
so-little-progress and alpha clearly denotes it as not-usable:

Quote from WP: "Alpha level software can be considered approximately 35% 
complete, and typically includes temporary material and multiple 
product-breaking issues."
- Is this really the case with Theora?

I am member of FSFE-Germany, we want to launch a compaign to make Public TV- 
and Radio-Stations use free Codecs on their web-pages (at least in addition 
to proprietry ones), since they are obliged by law to offer their content to 
the "general public" (e.g. they are prohibited from encrypting their Digital 
Signals).
It would be great if we had a stable version of theora and a simple 
convert-from-anything-to-OGG program for windows that we could offer, so as 
to give less reasons of being turned down (maybe something like that could be 
hacked from vlc).
Also something like http://www.mux.am that can convert uploaded media and/or 
media-files on the internet to ogg and offer them for download, would be 
great to have embedded on xiph.org . mux.am can actually do this and they 
offer "API-access for developers", maybe they would help...

Thanks!
Greetings
Hannes Hauswedell

Am Dienstag 21 August 2007 14:48:17 schrieb Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves:
> Today, Adobe Systems Incorporated announced[1] that they will extend
> their Flash platform to support the proprietary H.264 and HE-AAC
> formats.
>
> The Xiph.Org Foundation has previously contacted Adobe to consider
> extending Flash to support the Open Media formats Vorbis, Theora, and
> Speex.  Adobe developers replied by stating it would be unwise as it
> would increase the file size of the Flash Player, and yet, that is
> what will happen now, with the unfair procedure by Adobe to ignore the
> backing of our formats by the W3C through SVG and SMIL, by the WHATWG
> through HTML 5, and by the XMPP Standards Foundation through Jabber's
> Jingle.
>
> There is clearly a need for a non-patented, royalty-free standard for
> video and audio on the web.  The Xiph.Org Foundation provided such
> standards.  Adobe Systems Incorporated decided to ignore this and back
> the use of formats with submarine patents and no clear advantage over
> Open Media formats.  Interoperability on the Web?  Nah, screw that.
>
> The Xiph.Org Foundation will continue to provide support for the
> corporations who seek to create interoperability on the Web.  We will
> not stop the improving process of our formats.
>
> The Xiph.Org Foundation will announce soon the Web Video/Audio
> Interoperability Campaign through our Spread Open Media project[2].
> This campaign will bring together the community and the browser
> developers to speed up support of the <video> and <audio> elements of
> HTML 5, as well as the use of SVG and SMIL in order to create an Open
> Web.  Be part of such vision.
>
> Adobe Systems Incorporated describes itself as "Adobe revolutionizes
> how the world engages with ideas and information -- anytime, anywhere
> and through any medium".  We would like to work together with Adobe
> Systems Incorporated to reach such goal.  However, we do not agree on
> their approach in this issue, and we would like to ask them to
> consider their stance.
>
>
> [1] http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070821/20070820006124.html?.v=1
> [2] http://spreadopenmedia.org/
>
> ----
> The Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides a
> collection of open source, multimedia-related projects.  It is the
> most aggressive effort to put the foundation standards of Internet
> audio and video into the public domain, where all Internet standards
> belong.
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