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Chrome Removing Theora Support

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Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#41

Post by shiroiuma »

kmeisthax wrote: post #34
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.

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 paten…

>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.

h.265 is very popular in the piracy scene, since you can get a file size about half that needed for equivalent-quality h.264. Of course, being pirates, they don't worry about patents. And since decoders are freely downloadable for players like VLC, there's no good reason not to use it.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#42

Post by nicman23 »

ur-whale wrote: post #10
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 ?

Embedded would be my guess.

an embedded machine that 1. has a software decoder, 2. has presumably some ram for that decode and 3. cant afford like 128megs flash on its design for its rom?

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#44

Post by Nursie »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #31
Nursie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did have a little sansa clip+ with rockbox a few years back, great little machine.

I think I thought of it more as a historical format because Xiph have said that Opus supersedes it.

I mostly stopped caring because of streaming some years ago now. I have my 'old' collection as a mix of mp3 and some ogg vorbis, dating from before the streaming era. These days I buy some CDs from bands I want to support, but listen to everything by streaming.

I get the whole " pays nothing to the artists!" argument. OTOH most the stuff I stream I also own, I'm just using streaming services to save me the hassle of ripping and hosting somewhere for access by all my devices.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#45

Post by cuu508 »

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.

> Who cares how big the codec is?

Small inefficiencies add up and in the end you have the janky laggy mess that is modern software.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#46

Post by mort96 »

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.

I mean the Ingenuity helicopter runs Linux, which seems to suggest that a few megabytes here and there isn't such a big deal; whatever the constraints of mars are, they seem to have a fair amount of onboard storage. I can't imagine that the improved video compression of AV1 compared to Theora or H.264 wouldn't outweigh the cost of that 4MB extra storage space.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#47

Post by jrmg »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #31
Nursie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe Spotify still uses Vorbis in at least some circumstances?

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#48

Post by oezi »

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…

Just because you can't fanthom a legitimate case for needing a small codec lib doesn't mean there isn't one.

Typical engineering myopia.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#49

Post by not_your_vase »

ur-whale wrote: post #10
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 ?

Embedded would be my guess.

Embedded machine with big enough CPU for video encoding, but not having 10-20 MB flash? Doesn't sound too plausible.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#50

Post by ReactiveJelly »

photonbeam wrote: post #38
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…

> 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

They do, but it's defense in depth
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