just to keep the days as sunny as it is: You will be relieved to hear that there were some people whom decided that dirac will be included in oggplay.

Dirac may fare better. It seems to me it’s the only hope for a truly open source codec. I don’t know how it is at the moment but my gut feeling is it has the chance of competing with H264 on efficiency. The fact it’s in a newer area means there’s hopefully fewer patents to worry about. (I personally wonder if it was a mistake for the BBC to their application lapse, if they had the patents they could use them in case any wavelet competitor emerged who had patents Dirac allegly infringed.) Really I think Mozilla choose the wrong horse when they picked Theora. Yes it’s more mature. But it’s also pretty shit (and the fact it’s mature and shit is not a good sign).

Having said that, I wonder whether any codec has any real hope. Whether we like it or not the threat of submarine (or not so submarine) patents is real. For large companies, the risk is real. H264 is well implemented enough that for most providers the risk is far less. Yes it’s possible there’s something (it always is) but if you haven’t come out of the woodwork to sue Sony, Apple, (soon) Microsoft, et al, who are you going to sue? With Theora who has there been to sue? Wikimedia? Now Mozilla? A few small Korean companies and some small game producers? No one worth your while (remembering you may only have one shot at it). Most of them don’t have the resources plus sueing a nonprofit is never likely to go down well (people care far less if you sue Apple, Nokia or Microsoft, indeed some may even support you David vs Goliath and all that). Whether we like it or not, it’s a real risk with the current patent system

While I completely understand (and agree) that the benefit of Ogg Theora over the main proprietary alternative (Adobe Flash video) is its legally-free nature rather than the technology itself, it does seem to be the case – and please correct me if I’m wrong here – that at a given bit rate Flash video will tend to be higher quality than the same video in Theora at the same rate.

On the other hand, Ogg Vorbis audio in my experience not only is Legally Free as well, but also is a step up in quality from its main proprietary alternative (mp3) at the same bitrate in my experience. I’m surprised that there’s been no real mention of this. I think it’s a serious selling-point. Being able to post homebrew audio Legally Free, in a much simpler manner then the proprietary alternative (<audio> tag vs. the obnoxious <embed>/<object>-with-embedded-player-and-plugin) AND have the result be higher quality is an unambiguous improvement.

(I think Theora would have done better if Xiph hadn’t ended up delegating it to one guy who was too busy to work on it most of the time for 8 years before finally releasing it…)

Examples are: Theora Sea, iTheora, Editing Archive TV, TV Mallorca, Visonair.tv, Okto’s Theora Livestream, VagueTV, modulix.org, and many more. Streaming Ogg Theora is not at all new, and it can even be done with JavaScript and a multimedia backend.

Why this is exciting is because it is W3C-standard-compliant video playback within Firefox, without any external programs.