Chrome Removing Theora Support • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#11

Post by ur-whale » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 1:44 AM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #9

a1o wrote: post #4

Is there any good video codec that the library is as small or not much bigger as Theora and that has no patent/license issue? I tried to use VP9 in the past but it's like 20-40MBs a dll. The lowest I could find was dav1d and it's still around 4MB for the library dll and encoding AV1 and getting good compression rate was not trivial.

This feels like an absurd ask. Who cares how big the codec is? If you watch a 480p video for 10 minutes, won't that have overwhelmingly dwarfed 20MB or whatever of savings? This feels like a gross gross misoptimization that is actively harmful to 99.999999999% of user experiences.

esp32 with encoded video being streamed out to Wifi?

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#12

Post by donatj » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 1:59 AM UTC

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #5

sillywalk wrote: post #3

FTA: "Chrome will deprecate and remove support for the Theora video codec in desktop Chrome due to emerging security risks. Theora's low (and now often incorrect) usage no longer justifies support for most users. "

So I guess, regarding a theoretical "everything in the browser" future, the swiss-army tools like VLC and ffmpeg would either have to pack their own performant codecs in wasm, or stay as desktop / CLI applications. (Not that it would make any sense to implement ffmpeg on top of WebCodecs on top of ffmpeg. Just needed an example.) I hope I have not completely missed the train by focusing on other areas outside of web.

WASM ffmpeg already exists. It was GREAT before SPECTRE lead to massive restrictions in SharedArrayBuffer.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#13

Post by hardcopy » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 2:12 AM UTC

TIL filename extensions .ogv, .ogg = Theora

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#14

Post by brigade » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 2:19 AM UTC

a1o wrote: post #4

Is there any good video codec that the library is as small or not much bigger as Theora and that has no patent/license issue? I tried to use VP9 in the past but it's like 20-40MBs a dll. The lowest I could find was dav1d and it's still around 4MB for the library dll and encoding AV1 and getting good compression rate was not trivial.

Strip out debug symbols if you care about size? There’s no reason either of those libraries should be that large unless you’re including them.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#15

Post by userbinator » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 2:20 AM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #9

a1o wrote: post #4

Is there any good video codec that the library is as small or not much bigger as Theora and that has no patent/license issue? I tried to use VP9 in the past but it's like 20-40MBs a dll. The lowest I could find was dav1d and it's still around 4MB for the library dll and encoding AV1 and getting good compression rate was not trivial.

This feels like an absurd ask. Who cares how big the codec is? If you watch a 480p video for 10 minutes, won't that have overwhelmingly dwarfed 20MB or whatever of savings? This feels like a gross gross misoptimization that is actively harmful to 99.999999999% of user experiences.

Just because DVDs are several GB doesn't mean it's acceptable for the decoder to be a few hundred MB.

...and in fact it doesn't need to be, as I can say so from having written an MPEG-2 (+MPEG-1) decoder myself, whose binary turned out to be less than 16KB.

When one hears about a codec being dozens of MB, the natural instinct should be "for what?" and not "who cares?" The latter attitude is responsible for why software has gotten so much more inefficient, and serves only to line the pockets of hardware manufacturers.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#16

Post by amlib » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 2:52 AM UTC

a1o wrote: post #4

Is there any good video codec that the library is as small or not much bigger as Theora and that has no patent/license issue? I tried to use VP9 in the past but it's like 20-40MBs a dll. The lowest I could find was dav1d and it's still around 4MB for the library dll and encoding AV1 and getting good compression rate was not trivial.

Maybe the best option will be just waiting for h264 patents to expire, just like happened with mp3s a while ago. On that note, does anyone knows when h264 expires? Or it's earlier siblings like avc? It also has the benefit of having vast access to an array of hardware decoders/encoders, although those might have their own can of IP worms.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#17

Post by jauntywundrkind » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 2:56 AM UTC

ur-whale wrote: post #11

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like an absurd ask. Who cares how big the codec is? If you watch a 480p video for 10 minutes, won't that have overwhelmingly dwarfed 20MB or whatever of savings? This feels like a gross gross misoptimization that is actively harmful to 99.999999999% of user experiences.

esp32 with encoded video being streamed out to Wifi?

There's mjpeg for that. Is there any evidence anyone has streamed to such a platform over real video codecs? No there's not. People just make up endless shit to justify anti use cases.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#18

Post by tedunangst » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 2:58 AM UTC

belltaco wrote: post #8

Uberzi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. In which scenario do you care so much about the size of the DLL , these days ?

Maybe to encode/decode video on a Mars rover.

Your primary concern is almost certainly power draw, so you're using a hardware encoder. The weight of a few more megabytes ROM would be inconsequential.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#19

Post by gjsman-1000 » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 2:59 AM UTC

I won’t miss Theora - but I am as part of my job helping a business migrate from some old open-source software which inexplicably re-encoded almost all audio uploads into Ogg Vorbis audio files.

I can just play those as they are, in any browser, except Safari. Painfully, macOS actually supports Vorbis, but only in a CAF (Core Audio Format) container instead of an Ogg container. Still hoping; because shipping an entire Ogg decoder in the browser with WASM works but is ugly.

Of course, I could also just re-encode them with a microservice but it’s just… bleh.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#20

Post by krackers » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 3:07 AM UTC

hardcopy wrote: post #13

TIL filename extensions .ogv, .ogg = Theora

ogg is just a container, the actual contents can be audio (usually opus, but other audio codecs are supported) or video (theora, plus some obscure ones)