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Chrome Removing Theora Support

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Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#61
post #60
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.

IIRC flash was a plugin but it was integrated into chrome install. I don't remember if it was part of FF default install or not, but I can guess it wasn't.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#62
post #45

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.

> 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.

A larger codec doesn't mean it's more inefficient in other areas than a smaller codec. A 400KB codec is not necessarily less laggy or janky than a 4MB codec.

Otherwise, why use a bunch of larger algorithms for map routing when BFS/DFS are so simple and small?

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#64

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)

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

I once made a custom Ogg stream for a simple multimedia document format [1]. The idea was that I wanted to have AV streams in the same file as basic vector graphics slides, and back in 2008 it was Ogg that had some open source momentum.

It worked, but my experience was that Ogg isn't really a well-designed container at all. Even QuickTime / MPEG-4 with its 1990s warts is more flexible and efficient. I would definitely pick Matroska today if I really wanted to torture myself with this kind of document format again.

Somebody else wrote more eloquently about Ogg's bizarre design choices:

https://hardwarebug.org/2010/03/03/ogg-objections/

"The variable overhead in the Ogg format comes from the page headers, mostly from the segment_table field. This field uses a most peculiar encoding, somewhat reminiscent of Roman numerals. In Roman times, numbers were written as a sequence of symbols, each representing a value, the combined value being the sum of the constituent values.

"The segment_table field lists the sizes of all packets in the page. Each value in the list is coded as a number of bytes equal to 255 followed by a final byte with a smaller value. The packet size is simply the sum of all these bytes. Any strictly additive encoding, such as this, has the distinct drawback of coded length being linearly proportional to the encoded value. A value of 5000, a reasonable packet size for video of moderate bitrate, requires no less than 20 bytes to encode."

- -

[1] https://github.com/pojala/twentytwenty/blob/master/twtw-ogg....

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#65
post #62
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A larger codec doesn't mean it's more inefficient in other areas than a smaller codec. A 400KB codec is not necessarily less laggy or janky than a 4MB codec. Otherwise, why use a bunch of larger algorithms for map routing when BFS/DFS are so simple and small?

it does contribute to software bloat, I’m always impressed when I install an app and it weighs in at 20MB

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#66

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)

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

.logg - haha

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#67
post #6
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.

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

Well I'm looking for the same thing, for a lightweight 2D game engine supporting decades old hardware (the game player is 2MB zipped, 1MB for a minimised build). Animations are likely to be low resolution and seconds long, so a huge decoding library would be pointless. Sure, most users don't care about file sizes, but some (including me) still do. Especially for the wasm and Win95 ports.

I considered libtheora, the library size is good but the compression/visual quality is awful compared to the alternatives.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#68
post #60
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.

Flash was proprietary. Open standards and formats are what we've always kind of expected would keep working.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#69
post #40

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.

> It was always terrible and behind all the MPEGs of the time.

So was VP8, which Google ended up pushing at nearly the same time they were rejecting Theora as an inferior H.264 clone. The irony being that VP8 wasn't that different either[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150301015756/http://x264dev.mu...

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