Theora video codec to be coded out from Chrome and Firefox The Theora video compression codec is finally being put out to pasture as Google pulls it from Chrome and Mozilla mulls the same for Firefox. It's been a while coming. Theora first showed up nearly 20 years ago, but more than a decade has passed since any serious development was done. In light of an increasingly challenging …
Theora was a sad chapter. VP3 was made free in 2001 back when it was reasonably competitive with other patented video codecs. But it saw almost no adoption, as the Theora project was in the works that was going to dramatically improve the codec and standardize it. Not until 2008 did Theora get an initial release, long after the world world had moved on to newer formats Theora couldn't hope to compete with. And all the while there were loud-mouthed Theora supporters using cherry-picked demos to insist it was better than everything else, while 99% of the world utterly ignored it as a failed experiment in non-commercial public collaboration and development of video codecs. You can still see echos of this petty advocacy in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora#Performance
I anxiously await a patent-free video format gaining popularity. It's one thing to use it on your computer, but quite another to have something widely implemented in hardware so you can play your videos on all your multimedia devices.
Av1 is on the way. And both svt-av1 and rav1e are good and have there usage profile. The latter works better with anime, the former better with the rest. Just don't use the builtin multi-core support (aka tiles), hurts quality and compression. Instead use one of those those tools which feed several snippets of the original video parallel to several encoders instances.
I programmed my own powershell script for this to make use of as many threads as my CPU can take, monitoring the CPU load/Memory load to run the right number of threads. Others use python.
Unfortunately there's now an av1 patent pool mudding the waters.
The first release of the H.264 standard was 2004, so we're getting closer to the point where that can be the free baseline.
I've never used Theora, although on the audio side I have previously used, vorbis and sometimes I now use Opus.
Unfortunately there's now an av1 patent pool mudding the waters.
MPEG patent-holders have always been spreading FUD about patent-free codecs. This is to be expected. It's an existential threat to their business.
The MPEG-LA got a pittance settlement out of their court case, and were being investigated by the US Department of Justice for their anti-competitive actions. Nokia's patent claim failed in a German court. VPx has not fallen afoul of a single patent yet, and the huge players implementing AV1 like Cisco and Google without being sued is a pretty strong statement that none of the claimed patent holders actually even believe their own claims will hold up in court now, either.
Official tools here, or in many programs. Holla, version 8.2 officially available? Time to update! We will see how much the compression improved. Especially .GIF from Dilbert was hard to beat, GIF always won, but the changelog shows promising entries...
My self-written powershell mass converter tool, which I may have to update now though. Can handle unicode filenames too, unless the workaround is not needed any more and they fixed the cjxl.exe "cannot handle unicode filenames" bug. But I've, literally, already converted millions of pictures to .JXL lossless, and can convert them back to their original .PNG/jpeg with djxl if needed.
Something to do for the next few hours :D.
Should the browser not come with just a W3C standard level of support and then uses just in time delivery to install plugins/extensions/support packages as required and user authorised, as most people have fast enough broadband to do this. Browsers should become faster, more secure and easy to maintain?
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