Spending the last two days at the
Open Video Conference has been a great experience, lots of interesting speakers and I've learned a few things. Perhaps I'll write more in general later, however it's worth mentioning, while still fresh in my mind, today's sessions around royalty-free codecs and the HTML 5 <video> tag.
The main focus of the Royalty Free Codecs session seemed to be around
Ogg Theora. Also present though were Sun, speaking about their new Open Media Stack, and David Schleef to represent his work on the
Schroedinger Dirac library. I would have loved to hear more about what was happening with Dirac, but the crowd wanted Theora news.
A short demonstation on the projector screen showed H.263/H.264 content versus the same Ogg Theora content at various bit rates, the highest less than 500Kbps. The results, from Theora's perspective, were very good. Visually I couldn't pick out any differences on the large screen. I would have liked to see the demonstration done at higher, greater than 1Mbps, bitrates, though. Not the one used today, but a similar demonstration is
available here.
Sun did not do themselves any favours at this Conference. A session yesterday gave them time to discuss the process they undertook to ensure there were no IP encumbrance in their new codec and
Open Media Stack, but right at the end the key revelation was that they're unable to Open Source their work.
David did not have much of a chance to talk in depth about Dirac, and I was disappointed not to have gained a better understanding the current development status, and community input velocity around Dirac. He did make a point that the BBC were using Dirac internally, which is true but only to a very small extent. In non-linear editing environments, DVCProHD, AVC-I 100 and ProRes are still the codecs of choice. In my opinion this due to the lack of tools available for Dirac work. Dirac tool development needs a great leap forward if this codec is to gain any significant traction.
The next session had representatives from all major browsers (
Firefox,
Webkit and
Opera), except IE, present to talk about HTML 5 and the new <video> tag.
Firstly, I was particularly interested in the
W3C Draft Web Fragments specification. Amongst other things, this will allow playback of just segments of video, based on a time specification in seconds. While not currently possible, if this could be extended to read an embedded timecode track and seek in a frame accurate manner, that would be truly powerful in an open standard.
With Safari on Mac, the <video> tag can be used to playback any video format for which the user has the relevant codec and QuickTime component installed. Thus we have Theora support through the
XiphQT component. In the latest version of iMovie, QuickTime Pro and Final Cut Pro, users can now also choose to export or render in Ogg Theora. If only the Dirac QT component was ready.
Metavid developers also demonstrated a cute javascript library embed
workaround that covered IE's lack of support for the <video> tag.
Full details are available on the Metavid website, as well as a
demonstration of the code in action. Even if you're browser doesn't currently support the HTML 5 <video> element, this script will take care of it.
The cross fade is particularly interesting. Do we no longer need to finish clips in a non-linear editor? Can we now perform hard cuts based on an edit decision list and let the browser deal with the fading or finishing element of the job?
Hopefully there's some exciting times ahead for open source, royalty free video codecs and ubiquity of embedded video on the Web.
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