[theora] Theora video support in Firefox and Opera

dos386 dos386 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 29 01:22:48 PST 2010


Firefox: 3.6 is out. What's new? I don't know (see :-( below)

Trying to play videos:

+ Can play (in some cases) Internet videos
+ Can play (in some cases) videos from local storage
+ Seems to pass the testsuite tests ,
http://wiki.xiph.org/TheoraTestsuite , ("offset" looks good, 4:4:4 and
4:2:2 too, not sure about the 322x242 "not divisible by 16" - there is
a black line ...)

- The video controls still don't work with JS off,
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449358 , got 1'000'000'000
duplicates but no fix, if this is not fixed for 3.6, what is fixed
then? WtF ...

- The system requirements ,
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/system-requirements.html , are
hard core nonsense:

> Firefox 3.6 System Requirements
> Operating Systems
>    * Windows 2000
>    * Windows XP
>    * Windows Server 2003
>    * Windows Vista
>    * Windows 7
> Minimum Hardware
>    * Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500 MHz or greater)
>    * 64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
>    * 52 MB hard drive space

Regrettably to play the "duck" test at least 1 GiB RAM and 3 GHz are
required, and it behaves really badly on "insufficient" hardware: very
unresponsive (you can hardly leave the "offending" page), and doesn't
play (too busy with decoding frames but all dropped before landing on
the screen?)

Better not to discuss "usability" of Vista with 233 MHz and 64 MiB RAM :-D

Opera10.5 Alpha:

Doesn't work: Either player appears but playing doesn't start (even
with small movies working in FireFox), controls are there (even with
JS off), but all what one can do is to move the audio volume button,
or asks "Open with what" offering Firefox or Opera (???), or displays
the movie as text ... Also local movies don't play either.


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