[Vorbis] XiphQT / Theora Questions

[Ralph Giles]

On 3 November 2011 08:15, Michael A. Peters <mpeters at domblogger.net> wrote:

> Hello, I hope this is not an inappropriate list for this.
> This is the list suggested by http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/

The theora list might have been better, since you're talking about
video, but this will do.

>
> I use Linux exclusively at the moment and do not plan on buying a Mac,
> but I am working on a CMS including html5 media support.
>
> Patent licensing costs forbid decoding proprietary video formats on the
> server for transcode into Ogg Theora so I am looking for a way that non
> technically inclined (IE afraid of the CLI) users can produce Ogg Theora
> files on their own to upload (along with h.264).
>
> I'm hoping that with XiphQT installed, for Mac users anyway it is as
> simple selecting Ogg Theora on some kind of export menu from QuickTime
> Pro or iMovie. Is that the case?

Sort of. Unfortunately I can't really recommend XiphQT for this. While
it was possible to use XiphQT to export directly to theora from FCP on
older MacOS, the export interface was never that polished, and Apple
has now abandoned Quicktime Components and external format support, so
without an awful lot of work (which no one has volunteered in the past
few years) this isn't going to be a good option for non-technical
folks.

Probably the best workflow is to have them export at high quality and
then transcode using a separate application.

Kyle mentioned FireFogg, which is a wrapper around ffmpeg2theora. This
is a great option for an upload service, since your cms can signal the
encoder profile it would like, but the actual encoding happens on the
client side.

However, it's still using ffmpeg so it's still without a patent
license, and it requires Firefox.

The best thing would be a 'qt2theora' programme which used the system
decoders to make a free format version, but someone would have to
write that.

 -r

-- 
Ralph Giles
Xiph.org Foundation for open multimedia