Recently in Codecs Category

As we were on holiday last week, in the chilly snows of Austria, we almost missed an important announcement regarding the Schrödinger implementation of the Dirac codec.

There's a great article called How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web by Micheal Calore over at WebMonkey, dealing with the HTML 5 <video> tag and Firefox's native Ogg Theora support. The piece outlines the technical details of the <video> tag and includes an interview with Mozilla director of Firefox Mike Beltzner and Mozilla director of platform engineering Damon Sicore.

An excerpt from the interview:

Webmonkey: How do you see these factors -- the HTML 5 video tag, putting the Ogg codecs right into the browser, presentation techniques that mimic the plug-in player experience -- affecting video on the web? What's it going to change in six months? Or six years?

Beltzner: In six months, you're going to see more sites like DailyMotion doing things where they detect that the browser supports Ogg and the video tag, and in that case, they're going to give those users an Ogg-and-video-tag-experience.

I think you'll see content sites doing this because they'll have the ability to re-encode their entire video libraries without having to pay any licensing fees. The Ogg Theora encoders are completely license-free and patent-proof. They don't need to worry about which player you've got. They also don't need to worry about which hardware you've got. Ogg Theora will run on Windows, Mac and Linux, or any embedded device or mobile device built on the Linux platform.

Here's a beta example page from DailyMotion demonstrating use of the HTML 5 <video> tag. If you have Firefox 3.5 installed, or a reasonably new version of Webkit/Safari and the XiphQT component install, you should have in browser video playback - Ogg Theora and no Flash player needed.

YouTube's demonstration page here.

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. 

We're only about two weeks late noticing that the BBC has released the second episode in their R&DTV series. Again they're providing a whole bunch of different video codecs - including Ogg Theora, but they're still not their offering files encoded in their own Dirac codec. More information available on the main page or the BBC Backstage blog, but a wider selection of files can also be found directly on the FTP site where both 30 minute and 5 minute versions are available, as well as an entire asset bundle with rushes.

This episode features interviews with David Kirby on the BBC's Ingex project, Matt Biddulph CTO of Dopplr and Jason Calacanis CEO of Mahalo.com.

The BBC has released this content under a Creative Commons attribution licence, allowing everyone to remix as they see fit, providing an original BBC credit is maintained.

Our post regarding Episode 1 of R&DTV goes into some more details regarding the technical details of the available files.