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Chrome Removing Theora Support

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Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#91

Post by eviks »

psnehanshu wrote: post #90
eviks wrote: post #63

I wish the browsers were modular and you could simply disable/enable the codecs you wanted and get and use the relevant libraries

Someone will still have to invest engineering resources to maintain those codecs.

Not really, I didn't assume all the outdated codes would be maintained even if no one uses them. You could just as well disable them all before the global chrome team wakes up to all the insecurities and flips the switch for everyone

But even then, in a modular environment the potential pool of engineering resources is much broader

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#92

Post by tenebrisalietum »

jdietrich wrote: post #39
toast0 wrote: post #36

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. 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.

VLC is a mistake?

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#93

Post by account42 »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #50
photonbeam wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yet websites can run arbitrary JS?

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#94

Post by dawidpotocki »

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…

Apple has always been an asshole when it comes to codec support.

VP9 on Safari? Sure, on desktop. On mobile? Oh yeah, only via WebRTC(why???).

Want to import FLACs into Apple Music? Nope, only inferior ALAC is supported for lossless.

AV1? Only just added to iPhone 15 Pro series (not in 15 cause old SoC) and still not on Macbooks.

HEVC? Oh yeah, of course we use it as HEIC for photos and support HEVC playback in Safari, how could we not?

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#95

Post by account42 »

bandrami wrote: post #54
hardcopy wrote: post #13

TIL filename extensions .ogv, .ogg = Theora

It's like if source tarballs didn't include the compression algorithm in the extension but just used .tar for .tar.bz2, .tar.gz, etc. and just left the extractor to figure it out (which they can do).

It's more like .zip (which technically supports more compression algorithms and not just deflate) as the outer container format is the same for both Vorbis in .ogg and OPUS in .ogg (more commonly with the .opus extension) unlike tarballs where the archive format is wrapped by the compression format so a .tar.bz2 and a .tar.gz look nothing alike until you remove the compression.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#96

Post by acdha »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #70

Aren't modern video codecs prohibitively computationally expensive for mediocre office-class PCs?

That depends on what you mean by modern - AV1 is definitely a struggle, but VP9, H.265, H.264, and even VP8 are all much better than Theora in terms of quality and performance, and hardware supported decode goes back many years even on things like Intel integrated graphics hardware.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#97

Post by neckro23 »

Ygg2 wrote: post #71
pdntspa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winamp, foobar2000

Winamp still exists? I thought it was resold twenty times to various shady entities.

There’s a modernized fork of it: https://getwacup.com/

The official one is still around, but last I checked it had a crash bug in the media library plugin.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#98

Post by wwalexander »

Nursie wrote: post #44
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Just FYI, Apple Music supports automatic iCloud syncing of your personal music files that you drag into your library. Most of what I listen to is on streaming, but I can have non-streaming music, bootlegs, vinyl rips, Bandcamp purchases, and music only available on SoundCloud or YouTube (via yt-dlp) seamlessly alongside the streaming stuff.

I’ve tried to explain how limiting any other streaming service is to friends, but I’ve mostly been met with blank stares at the mere concept of wanting to listen to off-streaming music or even where one would come across actual music files these days.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#99

Post by toast0 »

jdietrich wrote: post #39
toast0 wrote: post #36

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. 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.

Is there one codec that's universally available on all supported versions of iOS and all versions of Android with significant use? With an encoder and a decoder? If not, something has to make up the difference, and that something is probably a server that can see all the content.

Is it space efficient? (Compared to whatever you're prepared to license and run on the cpu) Not shipping a codec to save app size but sending larger media doesn't help the user much.

Are all implementations secure? If you have to predecode to verify the file won't trigger buffer overruns etc, you've written half of a safe decoder, and maybe you should just include the rest of the owl. Media decoding is a bountiful area of security vulnerabilities... which brings risks to both using the system apis and using your own, but at least you have some control over your own.

Re: Chrome Removing Theora Support

#100

Post by pdntspa »

Ygg2 wrote: post #71
pdntspa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winamp, foobar2000

Winamp still exists? I thought it was resold twenty times to various shady entities.

It has always existed. The final release from years ago still works, and whoever owns it now has been updating it under version 5.9 fairly recently. There is a "Winamp 6" on the way supposedly...
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