[theora] Fwd: [videoblogging] Re: Fwd: Opera proposed Theora for native video playback in browsers

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Theora needs a nice GUI encoder.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steve Watkins <steve at dvmachine.com>
Date: Mar 7, 2007 12:22 PM
Subject: [videoblogging] Re: Fwd: Opera proposed Theora for native
video playback in browsers



That is interesting news. I always go on about mpeg4 and h264 as if
 they are the ideal, wheras in an ideal world something like ogg theora
 would be the most worthwhile format to support - being open and
 unburdened by much intellectual property horror.

 In practice I rarely respond when you mention this sort of stuff, only
 because such things hav not gained widespread popular support from the
 majority of users who are on windows or os x. Having dabbled with
 Linux I presume that most Linux users are used to having to put in
 some extra effort to think about these things, and choose open
 formats. If only the same enthusiasm could be transferred over to
 people on other paltforms.

 There desnt seem to be much of a problem with playing back theora
 files on OSX or Windows, as VLC and some other apps can play it, and
 quicktime & directshow stuff are available to enable playback within
 those systems. There does seem to be a lack of nice easy well-known
 encoder applications with proper GUI. The masses arent going to use
 command line tools, so where are the developers to bridge the gap? I
 tried to use VLC on the mac to encode, using its ability to transcode,
 but I only got the audio in the resulting ogg file, the video went
 missing somewhere. I will try again sometime.

 Anyway I support strongly the idea of video being built into a future
 HTML spec, and being supported as standard in browsers. I There could
 be problems if peoplew ont use the format till all browsers support
 it, if microsoft or apple dont want to play ball, they will only be
 forced to if sites use and expect such features and it helps drive
 more people to firefox or opera. But will sites use such a format if
 others like flash are well established already? Anyway I hope this
 initiative leads to something.

 I suppose the other issue I could have is how rich the control of the
 video is within the page. Need to be able to do things like report
 back to javascript what position in the timeline the video is at, if
 clever stuff (that can currently be done in flash) such as video
 conversations linked off timeline, are to be achieved using the
 built-in video feature.

 Returning to Theora as a whole, my other issue is with hardware
 playback & recording support, and the chances of it being used on
 mobile phones etc. Its still too early to tell quite how big an issue
 these things are, has to catch on with the masses, but mpeg4 and
 friends are looking fairly entrenched on these platforms so far.

 Cheers

 Steve Elbows

 --- In videoblogging at yahoogroups.com, "Charles Iliya Krempeaux"
 <supercanadian at ...> wrote:
 >
 > Awesome news!
 >
 > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
 > From: Luis Gonzalez <ghempresa at ...>
 > Date: Mar 5, 2007 2:23 PM
 > Subject: [theora] Opera proposed Theora for native video playback in
 > browsers
 > To: theora at ...
 >
 > Hi ,
 >
 > I see this news in Opera website :
 > http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2007/03/05/1
 >
 > I think this is a good news for Theora Team and also a greater news
 if video
 > tag becomes true.
 >
 > This extract of the website is incredible :
 > 'One thing to keep in mind that adding native support for Theora in
 Opera
 > would only add about 300K to Opera's overall size! And I am sure
 that could
 > even be optimized to reduce it even further.'



-- 
    Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.

    charles @ reptile.ca
    supercanadian @ gmail.com

    developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/