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Topic: Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development (Read 6673 times) previous topic - next topic
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Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

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Mozilla has given the Wikimedia Foundation a $100,000 grant intended to fund development of the Ogg container format and the Theora and Vorbis media codecs. These open media codecs are thought to be unencumbered by software patents, which means that they can be freely implemented and used without having to pay royalties or licensing fees to patent holders.


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We believe that Theora is the best path available today for truly open, truly free video on the internet. We also believe that it can be improved in video quality, in performance, and in quality of implementation, and Mozilla is proud to be supporting the development of Theora software with a $100,000 (USD) grant. Administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, this grant will be used to support development of improved Theora encoders and more powerful playback libraries. These improvements will benefit future versions of Firefox, and anyone else who supports open video on the web.


http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/...er-security.ars
http://shaver.off.net/diary/2009/01/26/advancing-open-video/
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=977

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #1 –
Excellent news!!!!

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #2 –
Monty is probably quaking in his pants. Let's just hope the check is made out to Xiph.org! The only problem is the money is there, but who is going to actually put the developement efforts in? does this mean we will be seeing more "forks"? Does anyone know if Theora can scale to HD yet? They were still working on that last time I checked. Monty has a new working model called "Thusnelda" branch, which is suppose to take care of of the motion compensation problems inherient to transform coders. The output looks pretty good and by the looks of it they still have a ways to go if they want to get it on par with H.264. I am sure $100,000 will get things moving a little faster.  . In terms of Vorbis we maybe seeing a lot of work being done on the side project "Ghost" which is just a prototype right now. The future looks bright indeed.
budding I.T professional

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #3 –
Future does look brighter, but only a bit. I don't know anything of the Foundation but is there actually a hard core team working on video and audio codec? Can just 100.000$ get the development wheel spin at a higher speed? Does the gift impact on their budget?

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #4 –
I hope Xiph will give something to Dirac too...

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #5 –
This has to be seen in the context of HTML5 development.

Mozilla wanted to make Ogg Theora/Vorbis a part of the standard as the "default" audio video format.

Apple rejected it because "it would open them to liability". Mozilla rejected Apple's suggestion of patented Quicktime+MPEG4.

I guess the main idea of this grant is to make the codecs more easily usable and widespread, so they become the de facto standard anyway.

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Garf on
Mozilla wanted to make Ogg Theora/Vorbis a part of the standard as the "default" audio video format.

Apple rejected it because "it would open them to liability". Mozilla rejected Apple's suggestion of patented Quicktime+MPEG4.

I'm pretty confused about this issue now. I just did a bit of reading about this dispute, and came across the following quote:
Quote from: http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/12/when_will_html_5_support_soone.html link=msg=0 date=
...the industry's coalition to unitedly back H.264 from mobile devices to HD. There's far more FOSS support for MPEG-4 and H.264 than for Ogg/Theora

This supports what I believed, about the prominence of MP4 codecs in the FOSS market. Certainly, I've used FFMPEG based software plenty; haven't we all? But later on that same page, someone posted this comment:
Quote from: http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/12/when_will_html_5_support_soone.html#c093733 link=msg=0 date=
FOSS support for H264 is illegal, because the patent holders prohibit distributing software which implements the algorithms under terms compatible with FLOSS licensing.

This was news to me, though I'm not all that surprised. Nokie and Apple have put forward a very good point though: part of HTML 5's aim is to unite standards across all mediums, including PCs, STBs, mobile phones and PDAs, but there are no hardware implementations of Theora or OGG (unless I'm misinformed?). Meanwhile, H.264 is well supported across all platforms. This is ignoring, for the moment, the patents issue.

Seems to me like this debate won't be resolved any time soon. The donation to Wikipedia/Xiph is very generous, and I hope it sees Theora (and Vorbis) through to much brighter days. However, without hardware support, it seems Xiph's codecs won't be winning over the HTML 5 working group. Perhaps Mozilla should donate some money to hardware decoder developers to see Theora/Vorbis support there?

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #7 –
Quote
Future does look brighter, but only a bit. I don't know anything of the Foundation but is there actually a hard core team working on video and audio codec? Can just 100.000$ get the development wheel spin at a higher speed? Does the gift impact on their budget?


That's my only question?. I am guessing that since there is $100,000 there that a team will be created or they will assist Monty in the development of Theora (I think there is already a small team of people working on it). Vorbis on the other hand I am unsure of. Nobody was really putting any development efforts into it outside of Aoyumi. Maybe they will be able to create a working group for that also. 


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This has to be seen in the context of HTML5 development.

Mozilla wanted to make Ogg Theora/Vorbis a part of the standard as the "default" audio video format.


Are you saying that the HTML 5.0 standard would have W3C tags that would consist of audio/video standalone? that's pretty interesting. 


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This was news to me, though I'm not all that surprised. Nokie and Apple have put forward a very good point though: part of HTML 5's aim is to unite standards across all mediums, including PCs, STBs, mobile phones and PDAs, but there are no hardware implementations of Theora or OGG (unless I'm misinformed?). Meanwhile, H.264 is well supported across all platforms. This is ignoring, for the moment, the patents issue.

Seems to me like this debate won't be resolved any time soon. The donation to Wikipedia/Xiph is very generous, and I hope it sees Theora (and Vorbis) through to much brighter days. However, without hardware support, it seems Xiph's codecs won't be winning over the HTML 5 working group. Perhaps Mozilla should donate some money to hardware decoder developers to see Theora/Vorbis support there?


There are a few hardware implementations of Theora in terms of hardware. The only reason you don't see more manufacturers using it, because it's still in the beta stages. It's quality is somewhere between XVid and H.264, henceforth what the "Thusnelda" project is for.  What are you talking about? Vorbis has plenty of hardware support on DAP that include Cowon and Sandisk for that matter. I am tired of hearing this argument that it's not well supported on hardware. When you say "well supported" do you mean on most players out there or are you really just referring to the IPod? Apple refuses to support Vorbis for example (this doesn't come as a surprise), because it's an open source (not a standard) and it's in direct competition with it. The same thing goes for FLAC. 
budding I.T professional

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #8 –
Quote from: HotshotGG on
Quote
This has to be seen in the context of HTML5 development.

Mozilla wanted to make Ogg Theora/Vorbis a part of the standard as the "default" audio video format.
Are you saying that the HTML 5.0 standard would have W3C tags that would consist of audio/video standalone? that's pretty interesting. 
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#video
I'm on a horse.

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #9 –
What he means is that if you buy a modern SoC like for example a TI OMAP3 (which powers gazillions of mobile phone models), this chip has built-in hardware decoders for MPEG4.

You can still run the Theora and Ogg decoders in the software, but that'll eat more battery. The number of real chip solutions for Theora and Ogg remains low.

But the hardware manufacturers follow the software popularity as well. Get your codec widely distributed in a popular place (ahem, Wikipedia) and hardware follows.

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #10 –
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http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#video


Very cool. It appears as though the future of the web is going to be more multimedia driven? There is some cool stuff in this working draft here. It definitely would make things much easier if they had multimedia tags. I sympathize with them. Getting a majority of the web browsers to support the new spec. That's another task in and of itself. 

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What he means is that if you buy a modern SoC like for example a TI OMAP3 (which powers gazillions of mobile phone models), this chip has built-in hardware decoders for MPEG4.

You can still run the Theora and Ogg decoders in the software, but that'll eat more battery. The number of real chip solutions for Theora and Ogg remains low.


I see what you are saying now. 

budding I.T professional

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #11 –
Great news.
I think the development should be focused on video codec. Vorbis is very mature nowdays and is comparable to all modern audio codecs. While last version of Theora (thusnelda) isn't good even if to compare with MPEG-4 ASP http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=977
http://vorbis.org.ru/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=589

And video's bitrates are 10x higher than audio's.

Mozilla Contributes $100,000 To Fund Ogg Development

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Garf on
What he means is that if you buy a modern SoC like for example a TI OMAP3 (which powers gazillions of mobile phone models), this chip has built-in hardware decoders for MPEG4.


I think they have built in TMS cores, which are software programmable DSPs (which is why they "accelerate" everything from MPEG to MS codecs and more depending on what codecs you put in them).  Looking at the TI website for the OMAP3, they even have software updates for the "hardware" decoders. 

Quote from: Garf on
The number of real chip solutions for Theora and Ogg remains low.


Out of curiosity, is it much higher for MPEG?  Most "hardware" decoders I've seen are just DSP cores running ordinary software.