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Theora and Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1a2

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gmaxwell at wikimedia

Jul 30, 2008, 3:27 PM

Post #1 of 7 (2691 views)
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Theora and Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1a2

I'm very pleased to point out this announcement from the Mozilla project:

"Mozilla is committing to include native support for OGG video and
audio in its next release that includes support for the video element
tag." [http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=492]

This is an announcement that Mozilla will be supporting the WhatWG
HTML5 multimedia tags as well as including Xiph's unencumbered media
codecs as part of Firefox.

The WHATWG HTML5 <video/> and <audio/> tags allow supporting browsers
to naively display multimedia content just as they display still
images: without the need for plugins or extensions and with full
integration. Mozilla's commitment to including a set of reasonably
performing and unencumbered codecs as a baseline means that web
developers and users have an opportunity to have multimedia that Just
Works without licensing obligations adding friction to the free flow
of knowledge. Together the native multimedia support and the baseline
inclusion of unencumbered multimedia codecs are an essential step
forward in preserving the open and unrestricted qualities of the web
which are so important to our mission.

The Wikimedia projects have long had a strong commitment to free media
formats, and Wikimedia Commons is probably the largest repository of
videos in Ogg Theora on the web. But our commitment has, at times,
been a costly one: As an early adopter of free media technology we've
suffered from more than our share of complications and incompatibilities.
After years of effort driving adoption and our own work improving the
state of the art for free media formats we're now seeing the beginnings
of a true mainstream adoption which will allow these multimedia formats
to be truly costless for producers and consumers of knowledge. I know
from my own involvement that Wikimedia's adherence to free formats has
been essential in moving things this far, and everyone who has worked
on multimedia within the Wikimedia projects should be proud of our
collective contribution here.

This could never make it into the mainstream without the groups
developing and promoting these free codecs -- particularly Xiph.org,
spreadopenmedia.org, and the FSF's PlayOGG campaign. The W3C's policy
of only accepting royalty-free technology has played an essential
role by not allowing encumbered codecs as part of the standard, but
there has been a stalemate in the adoption of a useful, royalty free
baseline codec set. Because of this, I'd like to personally extend
thanks to the Mozilla Foundation for joining our leadership in this
important area of web standards. Without their help Web Video would
have no hope of escaping the environment of incompatible, proprietary,
"de facto standards" with their related costs.

The Wikimedia projects have had integrated video playback support
for some time now via the OggHandler extension. OggHandler supports a
multitude of playback methods (such as a Java player using Cortado, and
the VLC browser extension) in an effort to get unencumbered multimedia
format support working for as many people as possible. OggHandler has
been a great success, already working for a vast majority of readers, but
the native support in a popular browser will make OggHandler even better
(smoother performance, zero install or an easy upgrade to FireFox, etc).

The new <video/> tag in Firefox has been supported as a playback method
in OggHandler since day zero so the new Firefox builds will automatically
use their native playback ability on the Wikimedia sites.

The code for native support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis
was checked into the Mozilla mainline last night and is
already available in nightly builds marked 3.1a2pre or later
[http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/].
The support is new and pretty raw: There are obvious outstanding issues
with things like timing and audio access on some platforms (such as many
GNU/Linux distros). Once the known bugs are fixed I'll be soliciting
Wikimedians to check for bugs in both our own player code as well as
the Firefox test releases.

Now would be a good time to start building up some material on commons
to showcase this support for Firefox's official release. Although
we've had video on our projects for a long time it's still largely a
new and unexplored territory for us. There are many opportunities to
make important contributions and to have a lot of fun.

--Greg Maxwell

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dgerard at gmail

Jul 30, 2008, 3:54 PM

Post #2 of 7 (2547 views)
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Re: Theora and Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1a2 [In reply to]

2008/7/30 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell[at]wikimedia.org>:

> I'm very pleased to point out this announcement from the Mozilla project:

Could you please put this on the Wikimedia blog? (cc-by-sa)

- d.

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geniice at gmail

Jul 30, 2008, 3:57 PM

Post #3 of 7 (2546 views)
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Re: Theora and Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1a2 [In reply to]

2008/7/30 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell[at]wikimedia.org>:
> Now would be a good time to start building up some material on commons
> to showcase this support for Firefox's official release. Although
> we've had video on our projects for a long time it's still largely a
> new and unexplored territory for us. There are many opportunities to
> make important contributions and to have a lot of fun.
>
> --Greg Maxwell

That is good news although don't the Xiph.org standards now call for .ogv?

Figuring out what to do with videos encyclopedia wise is going to be
another potential interest

<humor>Of course now Theora isn't elitist any more it's time to switch
to Dirac</humor>

--
geni

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dgerard at gmail

Jul 30, 2008, 4:01 PM

Post #4 of 7 (2555 views)
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Re: Theora and Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1a2 [In reply to]

2008/7/30 geni <geniice[at]gmail.com>:

> <humor>Of course now Theora isn't elitist any more it's time to switch
> to Dirac</humor>

H.120 is THE. CLEARLY UNENCUMBERED. VIDEO FORMAT.

(I wrote the Wikipedia article. I shudder at the prospect anyone
actually trying to use H.120 for anything, ever. But! It's
unencumbered!)

- d.

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gmaxwell at gmail

Jul 30, 2008, 4:41 PM

Post #5 of 7 (2538 views)
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Re: Theora and Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1a2 [In reply to]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 7:01 PM, David Gerard <dgerard[at]gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/7/30 geni <geniice[at]gmail.com>:
>
>> <humor>Of course now Theora isn't elitist any more it's time to switch
>> to Dirac</humor>
>
>
> H.120 is THE. CLEARLY UNENCUMBERED. VIDEO FORMAT.
>
> (I wrote the Wikipedia article. I shudder at the prospect anyone
> actually trying to use H.120 for anything, ever. But! It's
> unencumbered!)

Heh. Indeed. So is ANIMATED GIF and UNCOMPRESSED YUV FRAMES (sure,
it's 1.1GBytes per minute (640*480*30fps) but it's unencumbered!)! :)
... There is a reason why I said "reasonably performing [...] codecs"

Dirac is a cool format, and I expect in the long term we'll get accept
submissions of content in very high bitrate I-frame only DIRAC and
transcode it down for web playback to browser-compatible
broadband-compatible low bitrate Theora. (Dirac currently underforms
theora at 'web bitrates' by a healthy margin, and it's only somewhat
recently achieved real time operation on fairly beefy machines... so
Dirac really plays in a different space than Theora right now... but
it is good stuff too)

Speaking of performance, the Theora encoder has been undergoing a
rewrite: It's not done yet, but the preliminary results appear to be
getting roughly half the bitrate for the same quality (or,
alternatively, twice the quality for the same bitrate).
[http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo5.html] I'll
obviously be posting to the commons list telling folks to upgrade
their encoders once the new stuff is out of development and officially
released.

> That is good news although don't the Xiph.org standards now call for .ogv?

.ogg is the catch all, .oga for audio, .ogv for video. Of course all
should work. At some point we should switch. "It's just a name" in
any case.. the clients won't care.

> Figuring out what to do with videos encyclopedia wise is going to be
> another potential interest

Yea.. Well there are lots of cases for use of video in a 'source'
material capacity. We're already doing a lot of that. But certainly we
write about TONS of things that move where a short video could improve
understanding.

I think the bigger challenge is that the text and imagery created by
Wikimedians is already at such high standards that making videos that
don't look out of place will be hard. Wikimedians routinely produce
still photography and diagrams which could hold their own in any
professional publication. Creating a video which is both informative
and polished looking is simply a lot harder than creating a good still
photograph.

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wiki at konsoletek

Jul 30, 2008, 4:46 PM

Post #6 of 7 (2537 views)
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Re: Theora and Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1a2 [In reply to]

<AOL>WOOT!</AOL>

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell[at]wikimedia.org>wrote:

> I'm very pleased to point out this announcement from the Mozilla project:
>
> "Mozilla is committing to include native support for OGG video and
> audio in its next release that includes support for the video element
> tag." [http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=492]
>
> This is an announcement that Mozilla will be supporting the WhatWG
> HTML5 multimedia tags as well as including Xiph's unencumbered media
> codecs as part of Firefox.
>
> The WHATWG HTML5 <video/> and <audio/> tags allow supporting browsers
> to naively display multimedia content just as they display still
> images: without the need for plugins or extensions and with full
> integration. Mozilla's commitment to including a set of reasonably
> performing and unencumbered codecs as a baseline means that web
> developers and users have an opportunity to have multimedia that Just
> Works without licensing obligations adding friction to the free flow
> of knowledge. Together the native multimedia support and the baseline
> inclusion of unencumbered multimedia codecs are an essential step
> forward in preserving the open and unrestricted qualities of the web
> which are so important to our mission.
>
> The Wikimedia projects have long had a strong commitment to free media
> formats, and Wikimedia Commons is probably the largest repository of
> videos in Ogg Theora on the web. But our commitment has, at times,
> been a costly one: As an early adopter of free media technology we've
> suffered from more than our share of complications and incompatibilities.
> After years of effort driving adoption and our own work improving the
> state of the art for free media formats we're now seeing the beginnings
> of a true mainstream adoption which will allow these multimedia formats
> to be truly costless for producers and consumers of knowledge. I know
> from my own involvement that Wikimedia's adherence to free formats has
> been essential in moving things this far, and everyone who has worked
> on multimedia within the Wikimedia projects should be proud of our
> collective contribution here.
>
> This could never make it into the mainstream without the groups
> developing and promoting these free codecs -- particularly Xiph.org,
> spreadopenmedia.org, and the FSF's PlayOGG campaign. The W3C's policy
> of only accepting royalty-free technology has played an essential
> role by not allowing encumbered codecs as part of the standard, but
> there has been a stalemate in the adoption of a useful, royalty free
> baseline codec set. Because of this, I'd like to personally extend
> thanks to the Mozilla Foundation for joining our leadership in this
> important area of web standards. Without their help Web Video would
> have no hope of escaping the environment of incompatible, proprietary,
> "de facto standards" with their related costs.
>
> The Wikimedia projects have had integrated video playback support
> for some time now via the OggHandler extension. OggHandler supports a
> multitude of playback methods (such as a Java player using Cortado, and
> the VLC browser extension) in an effort to get unencumbered multimedia
> format support working for as many people as possible. OggHandler has
> been a great success, already working for a vast majority of readers, but
> the native support in a popular browser will make OggHandler even better
> (smoother performance, zero install or an easy upgrade to FireFox, etc).
>
> The new <video/> tag in Firefox has been supported as a playback method
> in OggHandler since day zero so the new Firefox builds will automatically
> use their native playback ability on the Wikimedia sites.
>
> The code for native support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis
> was checked into the Mozilla mainline last night and is
> already available in nightly builds marked 3.1a2pre or later
> [http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/].
> The support is new and pretty raw: There are obvious outstanding issues
> with things like timing and audio access on some platforms (such as many
> GNU/Linux distros). Once the known bugs are fixed I'll be soliciting
> Wikimedians to check for bugs in both our own player code as well as
> the Firefox test releases.
>
> Now would be a good time to start building up some material on commons
> to showcase this support for Firefox's official release. Although
> we've had video on our projects for a long time it's still largely a
> new and unexplored territory for us. There are many opportunities to
> make important contributions and to have a lot of fun.
>
> --Greg Maxwell
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l[at]lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
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cimonavaro at gmail

Jul 30, 2008, 8:59 PM

Post #7 of 7 (2538 views)
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Re: Theora and Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1a2 [In reply to]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 7:01 PM, David Gerard <dgerard[at]gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Figuring out what to do with videos encyclopedia wise is going to be
>> another potential interest
>>
>
> Yea.. Well there are lots of cases for use of video in a 'source'
> material capacity. We're already doing a lot of that. But certainly we
> write about TONS of things that move where a short video could improve
> understanding.
>
> I think the bigger challenge is that the text and imagery created by
> Wikimedians is already at such high standards that making videos that
> don't look out of place will be hard. Wikimedians routinely produce
> still photography and diagrams which could hold their own in any
> professional publication. Creating a video which is both informative
> and polished looking is simply a lot harder than creating a good still
> photograph.
>

Don't let's think about this purely in terms of using
video for wikipedia. Think about wikiversity lectures.
Lectures and instructional videos (wikibooks) generally
aren't polished and choreographed to the hilt.

But somehow I wouldn't be too pessimistic about the
quality anyhow, since the track-record overwhelmingly
has been that wikimedians have delivered, when given
the opportunity.

Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

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