Cortado 0.5.1 release

The Cortado java applet is a pure java implementation of a Theora decoder. Originally developed by the folks at Fluendo S.A., and subsequently developed by Wikimedia, upstream stewardship was recently passed to Xiph.org.

Cortado has been used for many years as a way to support free media content on the web, and is still an important component as a fallback for browsers which don't yet support Ogg audio and video streams natively.

The new maintenance team have now made their second update release of Cortado. Since the last official Fluendo release, version 0.5.1 adds

Support for baseline Theora features used by the libtheora 1.1 encoder.



Better and faster display code.

Basic support for Ogg Kate subtitles.

Various other bug and robustness fixes.

Please visit the Cortado homepage for more information, including downloads and examples of how to use the applet.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release. It was a real community effort.

Theora 1.1.1 release

We've made a follow-up point release to new stable release. This fixes some issues with the inline assembly used by the MSVC compiler and various minor build issues. There are no other significant changes.

Thanks to everyone who's tested and given us feedback in the last week!

Theora 1.1 "Thusnelda" release

After over a month of public testing, we're pleased to declare our 1.1 rewrite of libtheora stable. This is the reference implementation for the Theora video codec. Source code for libtheora 1.1.0 is available now, and will be incorporated in major Theora-supporting applications soon.

What's so great about the 1.1 release? The highlights are:

Better-looking videos or

or Smaller files at the same quality.

Much faster decoder.

Two-pass mode for making files just the size you want them.

for making files just the size you want them. Rigid bitrate controls trade off quality for the needs of live streaming applications.

This release incorporates all the work we've been doing over the last year, and the encoder has been completely rewritten, although some of the code had its genesis way back in 2003. It also brings substantial performance and robustness improvments to the 1.0 decoder.

This release is API and ABI compatible with the 1.0 stable release and can be used as a drop in replacement, although some changes are needed to take advantage of new encoder features like two-pass. We recommend upgrading to all our users.

Rate-control has been substantially overhauled from the 1.0 release. The new rate control module hits its target much more accurately and obeys strict buffer constraints, including dropping frames if necessary. The latter is needed to enable live streaming without disconnecting users or pausing to buffer during sudden motion. Obeying these constraints can yield substantially worse quality than the 1.0 encoder, whose rate control did not obey any such constraints, and often landed only in the vague neighborhood of the desired rate target. The new --soft-target option can relax a few of these constraints, but the new two-pass rate control mode gives quality approaching full "constant quality" mode with a predictable output size. This should be the preferred encoding method when not doing live streaming. Two-pass may also be used with finite buffer constraints, for non-live streaming.

Here is a list of some of the technical improvements in the 1.1 encoder. If you have been following Monty's demo pages, many of these will be familiar to you.

Rate-distortion optimization, which leads to Better mode decision Better quantization decisions Most coding decisions only use an approximation of the full RDO process for speed reasons, but casting this in a proper RDO framework eliminates vast swaths of heuristics and fragile thresholds from the 1.0 encoder. Better motion search The new motion search generates better results in less time, and does not suffer from CPU spikes under heavy motion like the 1.0 encoder's did. Better fDCT The 1.0 encoder's forward transform was not well-matched to the inverse DCT used in the decoder, and was as a result responsible for substantial loss of detail and texture at high rates. It has been replaced with a forward DCT that gives much smaller round-trip error. The inverse DCT in the decoder remains unchanged, for compatibility. Adaptive quantization The bitstream specification has supported changing the quantizer on a block-by-block basis since it was first published in 2004, however only an unreleased proof-of-concept encoder made use of this facility. The 1.1 encoder now uses it to allocate bits more effectively within a frame, giving improved quality at higher rates. Better quantization matrices The new matrices give much less ringing and mosquito noise at low rates, substantially improving the appearance of high-contrast edges (e.g., text). A real rate-control module As mentioned above, the new rate control actually meets its targets, can enforce hard buffer constraints, and has a two-pass mode to allow it to plan allocation decisions in advance. Expanded rate-control API It is now possible to change the target quality, bitrate, buffer delay, and keyframe interval in the while encoding. This gives an application using libtheora much more control over the final output. Explicit variable frame rate support in the encoder A new API allows an application to cheaply insert duplicate frames to maintain A-V sync during live streaming or for hybrid 24/30 fps content. The decoder still operates at a fixed frame rate, but can report these duplicates to the application, allowing it to skip expensive processing. Support for 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 video As with adaptive quantization, the specification has always supported the less common 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma subsamplings, useful for high contrast material like screencasts and special effects precursors. The 1.0 decoder supported these subsamplings properly. However, the 1.0 encoder couldn't produce streams in these formats. They are now supported in the 1.1 encoder.

There are many other improvements in this release. The codebase is substantially smaller, the examples have all been ported to the 1.x API, the MSVC assembly is now in sync with the gcc assembly, and much more. We strongly encourage all our users to upgrade.

This is not the end of the story, however. We are continuing to work on encoder improvements, and have made significant progress on optimizing the decoder on ARM and TI C64x DSP processors, important for Theora playback on mobile devices.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, and especially to the Mozilla Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, Red Hat, Inc. and private donors who supported this work.

Third beta release

Another week, another release.

Like the last one, the new beta release of the encoder rewrite fixes some problems with the new bitrate management. If you had trouble with uneven quality with previous 1.1 releases, please give this one a try; the behaviour is better.

Second beta release

A week after the first beta release of the "Thusnelda" encoder for the Theora format, Xiph.org has released a second beta.

This version improves bitrate management with some hard-to-encode files. It also contains build system fixes and a few polishing changes.

First beta release of the new encoder

Xiph.Org is pleased to announce the first beta release of our reference implementation of the free Theora video format, codename "Thusnelda".

This release incorporates extensive changes to the encoder's rate control. The encoder is both more configurable and functions better in all configurations. The new options include support for two-pass encoding, the ability to change the bitrate and quality targets dynamically during an encode, and the ability to drop frames to meet very low bitrate targets, all commonly-requested features.

This release includes all the major features we intend for 1.1 release. Please give it a try. We're particularly interested in sequences it does poorly on, and feedback from framework and applications developers on the new two-pass api. For details of how to use the two-pass mode, please check the code in the examples directory.

Many thanks to Red Hat and the Mozilla Foundation, who supported this work.

Firefox 3.5 released with native Theora support

Firefox 3.5 has been released including native Ogg Theora+Vorbis support as part of its implementation of the HTML5 media elment set. This is a great day for open media standards on the web, bringing Theora support to millions of new users.

Second alpha release of the new encoder

Xiph.Org is pleased to announce the second alpha release of our next generation encoder for the free Theora video format, codename "Thusnelda". The second release incorporates a number of changes which improve both compression efficiency and execution speed.

If you're comfortable building software, please download the source and give us some feedback.

New encoder alpha release

We're pleased to announce the first alpha release of the new theora reference encoder, code name "thusnelda".

This new version offers vastly improved quality/bitrate, making the reference encoder much more competitive with the current generation of encoders for other video formats. Currently in alpha, this code will be released at libtheora-1.1 when stable.

If you're comfortable building software, please download the source and give us some feedback.

Xiph.Org announces Theora full public release 1.0

The Xiph.Org Foundation is pleased to announce the 1.0 full public release of libtheora. More information is in the full press release here.

Complete source downloads of the 1.0 release are currently at http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/theora.

Final 1.0 release imminent; 1.0 release candidate 2 now available

The Xiph.Org Foundation is pleased to announce the second release candidate of libtheora 1.0. This second release candidate corrects all bugs found in final testing of the first release candidate, and will become 1.0 final in one week if no new 'blockers' are found.

Full source downloads of the second release candidate are currently at http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/theora.

Mozilla commits support for Theora in Firefox

The Xiph.Org Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation share the common goal of keeping the Web free and open for everyone, so it did not come as a surprise when Mozilla's Chris Blizzard announced that the upcoming Firefox 3.1 will support both Ogg Theora and Vorbis, alongside the HTML 5's <video> element.

This announcement paves the way for web developers to break away from proprietary media technologies. For the average user it means posting, hosting and playing video/audio data will become as easy an activity as it currently is for images. For private companies adopting these open standards it means getting rid off the middle man and his licensing fees.

With the <video> element and Theora, exciting development possibilities such as SVG desktops or annotated media will also be possible, creating new ways of interacting with video online. The adoption rate of this online revolution by other browsers soon joining the effort will help start a new age for multimedia. Be part of it.

Theora 1.0 beta3 released

This is the third beta release toward our first stable implementation of the reference library.

This release includes new separate encoder and decoder libraries supporting the new-style API based on theora-exp. Also included are assembly optimizations for gcc and MSVC builds, better documentation, general robustness and bug fixes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release. Please give it a try and report any remaining issues.

Theora 1.0 beta2 released

This is the second beta release toward, following three weeks after beta 1. This release fixes some bugs and improves the specification document. We recommend upgrading to all users.

Theora 1.0 beta1 released

Moving out of alpha status Theora is now available as version 1.0 beta1. This release features many changes since alpha7 - for example the beta1 decoder is a complete rewrite supporting the whole Theora specification.

Website Redesign

Maik Merten has kindly ported theora.org to match the look and feel of the Xiph.org website. We hope you like it!

Theora in SVG

Chris Double, who has been working on support for the HTML5 <video> tag for Mozilla Firefox, posted an amazing demo using Theora video as a live image texture in an SVG image.

You can move, rotate, and resize multiple videos playing at once. Looks really cool. Check out the video here.

Debconf 7 webcasts

DebConf(7) is happening this week, with live streams available. Archives will be posted overnight.

They have an impressive setup this year, testing several new pieces of software, including dvswitch for software mixing, Pentbarf integration for pulling metadata from the rest conference site, and CMMLbot for integration of the live irc commentary.

And of course, there are a great number of interesting talks about the Debian free software distribution, and open source in general. Check it out.

Jukola 2007 in Theora

A large orienteering competiton, Jukola 2007, is planning to webcast their event next week in Theora!

It should be a large event, with 10-15k viewers expected. Server-side support is provided by Kepit Streaming Systems. Way to go guys.

A link should be available on the front page when the stream is live (2007 June 16-17). More information about the webcast is available in Finnish.

HTML5 video now!

The folks at Metavid are continuing to prove their worth. Michael Dale has updated his mv_embed script to dynamically rewrite its host web page to use whatever support or Ogg video is available from the browser.

That means you can just use, now, the HTML5 <video> tag to embed Theora in your webpage, and simply by including the javascript, have it work on browsers which do not yet support it.

You can read about the details on the Metavid blog.

Theora Cookbook

There's a Theora Cookbook with some helpful HOWTOs up at FLOSS Manuals.

Thanks to Adam Hyde for making this nice resource available.

Linux Audio Conference

The Linux Audio Conference takes place this week 22-25 March, 2007. As in past years LAC2007 will be streamed live in Vorbis and Theora via Icecast. If you would like to watch or listen to the streams please check out the conference wiki streaming page.

Information on the conference itself, including talks, abstracts, schedule and procedings: http://www.kgw.tu-berlin.de/~lac2007/index.shtml

Native Theora support in Opera?

One of the Opera developers apparently demonstrated native Theora+Vorbis playback in their browser. Very cool! If we can get free video formats implemented as the baseline for web video, we'll have taken a major step away from the current morass of competing, incompatible, proprietary media on the web.

This follows up on a discussion on the What WG mailing list.

LCA 2007 video online

Just a heads up that video from all the talks at LCA 2007 has now been posted, in Theora format, of course.

A lot of interesting talks here. They're all linked from the programme page.

Metavid theora wrapper

Michael Dale of the metavid project sent us a pointer to a standalone, packaged version of their cortado embedding scripts.

See the metavid blog for more information. Thanks, Michael!

ITheora php wrapper for cortado

Project contributor ZikZak has posted ITheora, a GPL php wrapper to skin the cortado java player. In addition to making it pretty, it adds a few nice buttons like play/stop, download, and so on. Instructions are in French, but the code package contains everything you need to set it up.

This makes embedding theora in webpages much nicer.

Creative Commons talk

Robert Albrecht wrote to say he has posted video and slides of his introduction to the creative commons movement and licenses. (In German)

Thanks Robert!

23C3 streams in Theora

Helmut Pozimski reports that the 23rd Chaos Communication Conference is now streaming their panels in Theora and Vorbis audio only

Update: Unofficial archives of the talks are online.

twibright vncrec outputs YUV4MPEG

Clock has hacked vncrec To output the YUV4MPEG format, useful for feeding to the video encoders, including ffmpeg2theora and the libtheora encoder_example.

A release with the modification is available here.

Thanks for this, clock!

Theora on TI DM642 DSP

This is actually old news, but in February Adrian Cox got SD theora decode working in realtime on an TI DM642 DSP.

Way to go Adrian!

Theora video on Dell.com

The Linux section of Dell Computer's collective blog includes Theora alternatives to their apparently standard wmv vlog entries. Well done, Dell, for realizing no one can watch those!

Recent examples include Logan McLeod advertising their clusters and Michael Dell's Keynote at Oracle OpenWorld.

Now, if they'd just make it the default link...

Democracy shipping XiphQT

The MacOS version of the excellent Democracy Internet TV platform now ships with and installs to XiphQT components. This means that if you've installed Democracy, you can play Vorbis and Theora in other Quicktime-based applications!

Way to support open media!

EATV switches to streaming theora

Archive Entertainment has switched their EATV streaming video feed to Icecast and Theora! They say the switch to open technology has been very successful for them.

Great news. Check out their streams or read more here.

International Free Software Forum video

People from International Free Software Forum (the largest brazilian event about FLOSS) have done it two times in a row. They've put online the whole video coverage for this year's event (also online are the videos from last year).

It's almost 300 hours in Theora. It's a shame there's no subtitles, for most of the lectures are not in English...the English ones are really good, though.

Also posted to digg.

libtheora 1.0alpha7 release

There's a new release of the libtheora reference implementation.

This release contains build fixes from the alpha6 release. There are no new features. The new MMX asm is enabled by default, and a problem with that same code on SELinux machines has been fixed.

Cinelerra supports distributed theora encoding

Cinelerra is a well known nonlinear video editor with support for renderfarms, enabiling use of distributed cpu power to do faster rendering.

A year after getting import and export support for theora, Cinelerra now has distributed theora encoding support, which makes theora content creation much faster.

Thanks to Andraz Tori for this.

libtheora 1.0alpha6 release

We're pleased to announce a new release of the libtheora reference implemenation. This is an incremental update over alpha 5, consisting primarily of bug fixes and a merge of the encoder optimizations from the theora-mmx branch.

Changes since the 1.0 alpha 5 release:

Merge theora-mmx simd acceleration (x86_32 and x86_64)

Major RTP payload specification update

Minor format specification updates

Fix some spurious calls to free() instead of _ogg_free()

Fix invalid array indexing in PixelLineSearch()

Improve robustness against invalid input

General warning cleanup

The offset_y member now means what every application thought it meant (offset from the top). This will mean some old files (those with a non-centered image created with a buggy encoder) will display differently.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Live installfest streams

The 2006 FLISOL (Festival de Instalacion de Software Libre en Latin America) is webcasting live streams from today's event. See here and here for more information.

Malagasy TV in Theora

Browsing the Icecast stream directory today I noticed Telegasy has an online Malagasy language stream in Theora. Very cool.

YSTV webcast in Theora

York Student Television is now available online in Theora, both as a live stream and downloads of past shows. Take a look or read about how they're using open source technology to distribute their content in open formats.

Way to go, YSTV, this is great to see!

Note that the programs are also generally under a CC license with a wierd additional advance notification requirement. We're not sure how exactly that's intended to work...

libtheora 1.0 alpha 5 release

We're pleased to announce a new release of the libtheora reference implemenation. This is an incremental update over alpha 4, to draw a line under recent work before we start adding optimization work.

There are two important bugfixes as well, so we recommend upgrading to everyone. This release is source and binary compatible with 1.0 alpha 4.

Changes since the 1.0 alpha 4 release:

Fixed bitrate management bugs that caused popping and encode errors.

Fixed a crash problem with the theora_state internals not being intialized properly.

new theora_granule_shift() utility function

dump_video example now makes YUV4MPEG files by default, so the results can be fed back to encoder_example and similar tools. The old behavior is restored with the '-r' switch.

./configure now prints a summary

simple unit test of the comment api under 'make check'

misc code cleanup, warning and leak fixes

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Cinelerra edits Theora

The Cinelerra video editor which has supported encoding to theora for some time, recently got decode support as well. This means you can edit theora video clips in Cinelerra!

Thanks to Andraz for adding this new feature.

Live streams of Guadec talks

Fluendo is again streaming all the talks from the Guadec conference this year in Theora format.

Live streams are available and will be posted to the archive as they are available.

systm episodes in Theora format

Kevin Rose of The Screen Savers and G4 tech tv, is doing a new show for direct internet distribution. The first episode is up and available in a number of formats, including Theora.

Here is a torrent link to the large format version.

Cinelerra adds export support for Theora

The latest CVS version of Cinelerra non-linear edit and compositing tool for Linux supports exporting video in Theora format.

See cvs.cinelerra.org to try out the code.

Elphel Theora camera in Xcell magazine

Andrey Filippov has an article on his FPGA Theora encoder in Xcell Journal this month. While the earlier article at LinuxDevices focussed on the software, this one covers in more detail the hardware and use of the FPGA to achieve the elphel camera's remarkable encoding speed.

Andrey and other hackers will be demonstrating the cameras at the Open Source Forum in Moscow next weekend.

Theora decoder ported to C#

Ogre developer pjcast has a C# port of the Theora decoder, based primarily on the JOrbis and Cortado java decoders.

He reports both video and sound are working, and performance is pretty good. The decoder components should be usable under any of the C# frameworks, but the example playback application is still a bit rough and not portable outside MS Windows.

A development snapshot is available for those who would like to try out the code.

Fedora Conference Video

Video from the Fedora Users & Develper Conference last month in Boston is up in Theora format. The files are available here, or you can get a complete torrents of the Developer and User tracks. Versions with only Vorbis audio are also linked.

It's great to see stuff like this going up.

Update as of 20050405, the direct file links no longer work, but the torrent is still available.

In related news, Seth Nickell has video of the experimental Luminocity OpenGL compositing engine and window manager in Theora. Video screenshots! Quite cool.

Elphel FPGA camera encodes Theora

Andrey Filippov has an article today on LinuxDevices describing his open source hardware theora encoder, embedded in the reconfigurable network camera he designed, which is also open source. Now this is what computing should be like!

JRoar streaming server

The JRoar streaming server now supports Theora. Has for a while actually, but then have a nice set of test streams up.

JRoar is a pure Java Ogg streaming server from the folks at JCraft. I can serve static files, mirror external streams, or serve a source stream from a number of clients. It can also serve the JOrbis Vorbis player directly, for a pure-url playback experience.

Thanks to the JRoar team for putting up such a nice demo of theora.

Katiuska 0.7 for KDE released

Katiuska can now rip dvds by simply selecting subtitle and audio language + audio and video quality. Katiuska also allows you to transcode any video file to Theora.

Requires:

KDE with kommander1.1development2

mplayer

lsdvd

Get it here:

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=17831

Thoggen 0.2 released

Thoggen is a DVD backup utility ('DVD ripper') for Linux, based on Gtk+ and GStreamer. It creates Theora video files and features an extremely easy and intuitively to use interface. Thoggen supports picture cropping and resizing.

Get Thoggen 0.2 from:

http://thoggen.net/download/

GeeXBox live CD supports theora playback

The GeeXboX bootable CD media player/linux distribution now supports Theora playback. Thanks guys!

Cortado 0.1.0 released

Fluendo announces the first public release of Cortado, a java-based media player applet. Since it's a first release, building it might still be rough around the edges, but should be possible using at least Jikes with GCJ classpath libraries, or the Sun compiler. You can also download built .jar files of this release.

Visit Fluendo zoo to have a look at cortado in action.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone at Fluendo !

libtheora 1.0 alpha 4 release

We're pleased to announce a new release of the libtheora reference implemenation. This is an incremental update over alpha 3, in support of Icecast's use of some new utility calls to provide theora streaming support.

Changes since the alpha3 release:

first draft of the Theora I Format Specification

API documentation generated from theora.h with Doxygen

fix a double-update bug in the motion analysis

apply the loop filter before filling motion vector border in the reference frame

new utility functions: theora_packet_isheader(), theora_packet_iskeyframe() , and theora_granule_frame()

, and optional support for building without floating point

optional support for building without encode support

various build and packaging fixes

pkg-config support

SymbianOS build support

We still plan to make incompatible api changes before the first beta release, but this new alpha provides a stable base including all the work that has happened up to those changes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Theora support in LiVES

Theora is now fully supported in LiVES is a Video Editing System (LiVES), as of version 0.9.1. If you are interested in having a nice, user friendly interface for testing out theora, then download LiVES and try it.

(http://lives.sourceforge.net)

The encoder plugin for theora is written in Python and can be found here: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/lives/lives-plugins/marcos-encoders/theora_encoder.py

Fluendo funds RTP streaming of Theora and Vorbis

Streaming media startup Fluendo.com announced today they will be funding a spec and reference implementation for encapsulation of Theora video and Vorbis audio over the RTP streaming protocol, important for multicast, digital broadcast, and conferencing applications.

A press release was issued this morning.

While HTTP streaming of Ogg-encapsulated multimedia has been supported for most of the history of our free codecs, RTP support is an oft-requested feature that we've never had a good solution for. We're very happy to see Fluendo driving this new work.

Phil Kerr will be managing the developement of the new drafts. The development process is open, with discussion taking place in the new xiph-rtp mailing list. Please join if you're interested in these issues.

Theora encoder, Katiuska 0.6.1, released

Katiuska is a theora encoder frontend that runs on KDE. It uses ffmpeg2theora, mencoder, the encoder_example that comes with the theora libs and a little gpl bash script. It can encode mostly any kind of video that ffmpeg and mencoder can (avi, mpeg4 and 2, quicktime etc).

On a KDE system, first install libtheora (see navigation links to the left).

Make sure Kommander is installed:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/kommander/kommander-executor-1.1devel2.tar.bz2?download

Then download Katiuska, and install it by unpacking it, change to the katiuska directory, use "su" to login as root, and then enter the command "./setup.sh". Katiuska can be downloaded from:

http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=17831

Windows installer for RealPlayer plugins

A Windows installer for version 0.5 of the Helix Theora & Vorbis plugins for RealPlayer 10/10.5 and RealOne Player has been released. There are no code changes from the 0.5 zip file that was posted earlier. This just replaces the zip file with an installer. You can get the installer at:

Flumotion streaming media server updated

Flumotion 0.1.3, Fluendo's streaming media server based on Theora, was released today.

It is available from http://www.fluendo.com/downloads.

Packages for FC3 are available from the GStreamer repository.

This release features a lot of end-user polishing based on the feedback from our brave testers. If something didn't work in a previous release, please try this one and give us some feedback.

New Theora and Vorbis plugins for RealPlayer 10

New versions of the Helix Theora and Vorbis plugins are now available for RealPlayer 10. The major feature of this release is adding chaining support.

Kino 0.7.4 exports in Theora format

The new plugins can be downloaded at:

Kino, an actively developed non-linear video editing program for Linux, now supports the export of video in Theora format.

Flumotion streaming media server

The Kino website is at: http://kino.schirmacher.de/

The first release for public consumption of Fluendo's Flumotion streaming media server is available.

Yes, there will be bugs. Feel free to report them. But there are also lots of cool features, for which Fluendo owes a debt of gratitude to both the GStreamer and Twisted developers.

Fluendo test stream

The Fluendo website is at: http://www.fluendo.com The development site is at https://core.fluendo.com/trac/cgi-bin/trac.cgi The tarball is at: http://www.fluendo.com/downloads/flumotion-0.1.0.tar.bz2

Fluendo has posted a stable test stream for those wanting to try theora's network aspect. It's mostly just a webcam of their office, and often rather dull at night (or when the power is out) but it's nice to have something that's generally available for testing. Thanks, Fluendo!

The stream url is http://mirror.fluendo.com:8800/, or click here to open the stream in your player application.

v2v posts theora content

Florian Schneider has posted video from the neuro conference this past February in Munich, all in theora format. This includes a panel discussion with Enno Patalas, revered film preservationist; Brian Holmes; Sebastian Lütgert; and Ralph Giles, one of the theora developers. General documentation of the conference and its other sessions is available here.

Florian has also posted versions of a programme he produced for the German French tv station arte. Torrents for unorg and world are available.

Interview with Fluendo CEO, Julien Moutte

OSNews has an in inteview with Julien Moutte discussing upcoming products and services based on Theora, including a java version of the Theora client that will allow viewing of Theora format video inside web browsing windows.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=8218

kfile_theora 0.2 announced

kfile_theora is a KDE kfile plugin that will display infos about Theora video files in konqueror & meta data dialog.

Currently gives info about size, length, quality and some audio settings.

Requires libogg, libvorbis and libtheora.

For more information, please go to:

http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=15553

Richard Stallman on software patents

Videos in Theora format of Richard Stallman of FSF + Christian Engström and Marco Schulze of FFII visiting the Estonian Information Technology College, and talking about the danger of patenting software have been put on the net.

General info:

http://kwiki.ffii.org/Tallinn040722En

http://www.itcollege.ee/koostoo/avalikudloengudarhiiv.php

Videos themselves:

http://www.itcollege.ee/dl/OGG/avaloeng10_1.ogg

http://www.itcollege.ee/dl/OGG/avaloeng10_2.ogg

Mirror:

http://www.nightlabs.de/anti_swpat/BalticTour/040722/avaloeng10_1.ogg

http://www.nightlabs.de/anti_swpat/BalticTour/040722/avaloeng10_2.ogg

Videos are encoded as described in ogg-theora-microhowto. They are half of the original size, and qualities are Vorbis: 2/10 and Theora: 4/10.

aKademy broadcast in theora

Streaming startup fluendo.com is doing it again.

This time live from the KDE World summit in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

During the conference, the live streams are available from http://streamingserver.akademy.kde.org/ along with viewer suggestions.

Archives are available at http://ktown.kde.org/akademy/

Guadec broadcast in theora

Streaming startup fluendo.com has been demonstrating their encoding and server application at GUADEC this year, broadcasting the presentations live in theora. This is a great demonstration of open media technology. Congratulations to fluendo and a big thanks to everyone who made this possible!

During the conference, the live streams are available from http://stream1.hia.no/ along with viewer suggestions. Archives are available at the same url if you missed something.

What a change a year makes. Last year, we were very sad to see GU4DEC 2003 broadcasting the talks in the proprietary RealVideo format. Now, not only are the talks in a free video format, but you can use RealPlayer to watch them!

Creative Commons videos

In honor of our slashdotting, we've made torrents available for small and large versions of the top three winning promotion videos for the Creative Commons licenses, encoded in theora. Free content in a free format.

We also have a feature film, David Ball's edgy relationship drama Honey. You can download both small and large versions via bittorrent. These are distributed under an Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial license.

Share and enjoy!

Theora I bitstream freeze

Big news. The Theora I bitstream format is now frozen! This means it's safe to start distributing videos in the theora format.

Files produced by the alpha 3 reference encoder will be supported by all future decoders.

Beta 1 was going to be the official freeze point, but was delayed by continuing work on the draft specification document; however we have reviewed enough of the design in writing the spec that we no longer need to reserve the right to make corrections to the encoder behavior.

So go ahead, there's no reason to delay adopting a free alternative any more!

Theora alpha 3 release

We're pleased to announce the alpha 3 release of the theora reference implementation.

The main differences over alpha 2:

The encoded image has been flipped to match the sense used in VP3, with the origin at the lower left. This allows lossless transcoding of VP3 content.

The decoder data tables included in the bitstream header are more complete and have more scope for future encoder improvements.

Some experimental tools are available in the win32 directory, including a transcoder for avi vp3 files.

We hope there were be no more incompatible bitstream changes, but as with previous alpha releases we make no promises that the format will not change again.

Experimental playback support is now available (separately) for Helix/Realplayer 10, Xine and mplayer; you might look at those if you want a more full-featured player. Be sure to use an alpha-3 compatible version.

Source now in subversion

We've switched our version control system to subversion from cvs, along with all the other Xiph.Org Foundation projects.

Please make a fresh checkout if you're following the development tree:

svn checkout http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/theora

as cvs is no longer updated. You can also mount the dav url directly on your desktop for read-only access.

See our instruction page for details. You can find more information about this great new tool at definitive reference book's website.

Status update

There hasn't been much progress of late. Derf has been working on a new encoder, and in doing so came up with some suggested bitstreams changes to increase the scope for future encoder improvements. These will be integrated into the reference encoder and released as 'alpha 3' for testing.

The main hold-up for the beta release is still a draft spec. Everyone's waiting for this because it means the format will be frozen and encoded files will be supported by future versions of the reference implementation. So if you want to help things along pull out the code and help with the documentation, or donate something to help pay for the work.

Theora alpha 2 release

The libtheora reference implementation has reached its 'alpha 2' milestone. A lot of bugs have been fixed and new features added, including all the planned changes to the bitsteams format.

This is more of an internal milestone than a public release, but we are making a source tarball available for convenience. Nevertheless we recommend using the svn version if possible. This release also requires svn libogg and libvorbis to compile; you might try the svn nightly tarball if you don't already have these checked out. You will need to build and install the 'ogg' and 'vorbis' modules.

VP3 Legacy Codec binaries

Mauricio Piacentini has been maintaining the original VP32 sources upon which theora is based. He's pooling his efforts with Xiph a bit and has decided to keep his work in xiph.org svn, in the 'vp32' module where the code was originally released. We hope this will help concentrate efforts related to theora and bring additional focus to both projects.

He is also making his binary builds for Quicktime 6 and Video for Windows available on this site. Please visit the legacy VP3 page for file links and complete information.

Status update

Things have been slow for some time, so we just wanted to say what's been happening. Monty's been busy with unrelated contract work since finishing the zero-copy libogg, and no one has stepped up to act as maintainer in the meantime. We've been working on a wiki todo for theora and for xiph generally. So feel free to look (and contribute) there.

Test Suite

We've posted a test suite for your encoding pleasure. Feel free to post comments and questions to the Theora mailing lists.

Robot Roll Call

The first part of Theora Alpha Two, the delicious Video Layer FAQ is now available on the FAQ page, written by Dan Miller. The second part is libogg hacking, the results of which will be posted just a little after December 27th. Alpha Two is really more of an informational release than a big downloadable install-fest, so don't fire up the testbeds just yet.

Welcome to theora.org, the official website for Theora, a video codec and integration project maintained and supported by the Xiph.Org Foundation for the benefit of all humankind.

What is Theora? Theora will be a video codec that builds upon On2's VP3 codec. While Vorbis has reached 1.0, Theora is currently being integrated into the Ogg multimedia framework, as well as being optimized from the VP3 codebase at its heart.

Theora will be released in June of 2003, with three major milestones, the first being released today, September 25th, 2002. Today's piece is available for download in the 'theora' module of the Xiph.Org FoundationSVN repository, as well as a UNIX tarball available here.

There's a lot of useful information under the hood, so please have a look around by using the navigation links at the top of the page. If there's anything you think that we need on this page, please contact us and let us know what you'd like to see.

For the legal terms on the usage of the VP3 codec, please check out the SVN page. If you would like to help sponsor the development of Theora and other open technologies from the Xiph.Org Foundation, please consider a donation! More information is available at this link.

Thanks for stopping by, and happy hacking!