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

51–60 of 116 posts

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#51

Post by ReactiveJelly »

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)

You can put basically anything in Ogg. I toyed with the idea of putting logs in it - A log file is append-only, same as encoding a video. It has a field for timestamps already. You can use Ogg's binary seeking to quickly find positions / ranges within a log file without building up an index. It's got checksums too, I think.

It was a "nifty but who really needs it?" idea

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#52

Post by ReactiveJelly »

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...

Uh, Firefox? Chromium? Did everyone else but me give up on Vorbis? It works great. Opus is nicer for bitrate but for a long time Vorbis used way less CPU to decode than Opus.

All my music is Vorbis, Opus, or ripped m4as, and browsers take it all fine.

The first version of WebM actually used Vorbis. It's the newer ones that are Opus.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#53

Post by ReactiveJelly »

donatj wrote: post #12
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I figured. But last time I toyed with decoding audio in wasm, the speed was I think 5x worse. Not sure if it's cause SIMD was not implemented or what.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#55

Post by dawidpotocki »

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.

AVC is not an older sibling, it is H.264, just like H.265 is HEVC.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#57

Post by tambre »

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…

> Implementations of AV1 in discrete GPUs similarly only landed last year with Nvidia 40 series

NVIDIA has supported AV1 hardware decoding since the 30 series. I believe they were the first to market with it.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#59

Post by hannob »

Interesting enough, I'm probably one of the few people who still has some theora videos on the web in some very old blogposts of mine.

Some history for people who are not aware: Theora became somewhat popular in free software / open source circles, because at the time, it was the best codec which was believed to be either free of patents or the patents were explicitly opened up for free use. Therefore, if you were concerned about patents and their impact on free software, you'd use it. But Theora wasn't a great codec, which we always knew, it just was the best we had before google bought and opened up VP8.

It's an interesting tradeoff. Theora was never particularly popular, so you probably will have a low number of sites being impacted. But we kinda have a tradition that the web plattform rarely breaks things. You mostly can still use old html from 20-30 years ago, gif will probably stay supported in browsers forever, and I don't think there are many examples of media formats in browsers being deprecated. Even odd things like bmp are still supported.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#60

Post by jplona »

hannob wrote: post #59

Interesting enough, I'm probably one of the few people who still has some theora videos on the web in some very old blogposts of mine. Some history for people who are not aware: Theora became somewhat popular in free software / open source circles, because at the time, it was the best codec which was believed to be either free of patents or the patents were explicitly opened up for free use. Therefore, if you were co…

I suppose Flash could be considered a notable exception there.
Post reply on HN