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Chrome Removing Theora Support

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Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#31

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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...

My entire music collection is encoded as ogg/vorbis (16k+ tracks).

Just about everything I own can play them. Including rockbox on my sansa clip+.

Writing about ogg vorbis as if it is a historical format is silly. Sure, it wasn't adopted by streamers, but everything on Bandcamp (for example) is available as ogg/vorbis.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#32

Post by justinclift »

saxonww wrote: post #23
amlib wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> something else

Isn't AV1 the "preferred" option as a replacement, at least by those who are looking for something high quality and without patents encumbrance?

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#33

Post by wahern »

justinclift wrote: post #32
saxonww wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> something else Isn't AV1 the "preferred" option as a replacement, at least by those who are looking for something high quality and without patents encumbrance?

According to Wikipedia it seems Safari is only now starting to support it, so there's still a large segment of the Apple market lacking support.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#34

Post by kmeisthax »

saxonww wrote: post #23
amlib wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that H.265's patent owners didn't form a single patent pool, so the licensing is a nightmare, with three separate pools, patent holders that never joined a pool, and lots of double-billing all over the place. H.266 isn't much better. So a lot of people just stuck with H.264 as the "good enough" codec as a result. The only people not using it were organizations who couldn't or wouldn't pay for any patented invention (e.g. most of the web standards people, Wikimedia, etc), who stuck with Theora and later VP8.

AV1 (itself derived from the On2 VP8 and VP9 formats) is supposed to be the answer to H.265's patent shenanigans, but support is very slow to manifest. Like, Apple only added it to the iPhone 15 - as in, the one that just came out a month ago. Implementations of AV1 in discrete GPUs similarly only landed last year with Nvidia 40 series, Intel Arc, and Radeon 7000 series cards.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#35

Post by ta988 »

rasz wrote: post #26
ur-whale wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

mpeg1 seems possible https://github.com/rossumur/espflix

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#36

Post by toast0 »

jdietrich wrote: post #21
userbinator wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 complex…

> The size of the codec is so unimportant as to be essentially irrelevant within reason outside of a few extremely niche cases.

Codec size matters if you're going to include the codec in a phone app, which is a huge niche.

You can try to rely on system codecs, but then you're at the mercy of system codec availability and system codec security.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#37

Post by userbinator »

saxonww wrote: post #23
amlib wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the very last patent, and I haven't looked at it in any detail to see whether it might even be relevant to a typical software implementation; a lot of patents are on special optimisations / hardware implementations, so may not be relevant to your use-case.

It's also noteworthy that of the full list of H.264 patents here:

https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists

...the majority of them have already expired. IANAL but since the original H.264 spec became public 20 years ago, everything in it should be usable as prior art.

Also, all existing MPEG-4 part 2 (infamous DivX etc.) patents and anything older, e.g. H.263, MPEG-1/2 and H.261, have certainly expired by now.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#38

Post by photonbeam »

jdietrich wrote: post #21
userbinator wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 complex…

> Removing support for dead formats is generally a very good idea, particularly in a web browser, because it reduces the attack surface;

This seems unfortunate, surely they could sufficiently sandbox the decoder

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#39

Post by jdietrich »

toast0 wrote: post #36
jdietrich wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 complex…

> The size of the codec is so unimportant as to be essentially irrelevant within reason outside of a few extremely niche cases. Codec size matters if you're going to include the codec in a phone app, which is a huge niche. You can try to rely on system codecs, but then you're at the mercy of system codec availability and system codec security.

If you're including a video codec in a phone app, you are almost certainly making a terrible mistake. Android and iOS have very comprehensive media APIs.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#40

Post by izacus »

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #2

Firefox as well: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860492 It's a shame Theora never "made it". The peak of its popularity is long past.

It was never good. We used it in spirit of OSS in our hackerspace, but it was always terrible and behind all the MPEGs of the time.
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