Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome Removing Theora Support

groups.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 116 posts

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#21

Post by jdietrich »

userbinator wrote: post #15
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.

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 softwa…

The size of the codec is so unimportant as to be essentially irrelevant within reason outside of a few extremely niche cases. We care about video file size, we care about subjective quality, we care about power efficiency in compression and decompression, in many applications we care about latency; on all these metrics, modern codecs are stunningly well-optimised. Modern codecs are extremely complex, but that complexity is absolutely necessary for them to perform well on the dimensions that actually matter to users.

Nobody uses Theora, because it's a bad codec. It was worse than H.264 back in 2009 and it hasn't been updated since. Removing support for dead formats is generally a very good idea, particularly in a web browser, because it reduces the attack surface; we have recently seen a number of major vulnerabilities caused by archaic, neglected file formats and codecs that provided almost no value to users.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#22

Post by thresh »

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.

VLC has a port to WebAssembly: https://code.videolan.org/jbk/vlc.js#vlcjs-vlc-for-wasmasmjs

(it's actually usable to some extent)

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#23

Post by saxonww »

amlib wrote: post #16
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.

> does anyone knows when h264 expires

I was wondering about this too. https://www.osnews.com/story/24954/us-patent-expiration-for-... seems to think 12/2027.

Would it be surprising if H.264 was replaced by something else by that point? We have multiple subsequent standards, and it seems like everyone producing or providing content would want improved codecs by then.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#24

Post by notRobot »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #19

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 entir…

You might find this helpful: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js

From the FF announcement linked elsewhere in these comments.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#26

Post by rasz »

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?

You wont be encoding any video with algorithm more computationally intensive than jpeg on esp32, and even mjpeg will be excruciatingly slow.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#27

Post by Nursie »

krackers wrote: post #20
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)

I still have a few Ogg Vorbis audio files from many years ago too. Wonder if I can still play them on anything...

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#28

Post by tech234a »

Nursie wrote: post #27
krackers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I still have a few Ogg Vorbis audio files from many years ago too. Wonder if I can still play them on anything...

Probably VLC
Post reply on HN