Thomas Jost wrote:
There is another free alternative: the XviD codec. It's free software (GPL). It's stable. Lots of people use it. It's included in popular codec packs (like Nimo Codecs Pack or K-Lite Codecs Pack). And I'm quite sure the DivX decoder can read XviD-encoded videos.
Is XviD legal in the US? My understanding is that it's an MPEG-4 codec, and that there are patents covering fundamental parts of that standard. [IANAL] Surprisingly, this isn't mentioned in the FAQ though talk about it appears in their devel list archives.
I think we'd want some clarification on this before declaring our support for it.
This little note raises all kinds of alarms: "Distributing XviD is allowed and it is encouraged by the fact it is published under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2. But, here at xvid.org, we don't distribute binaries for legal reasons."
http://www.xvid.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&am...
I've nothing against Theora. But why should we use it if there is another, much more known and probably better alternative ?
The patent issue which makes it difficult to support with free software; this is the same reason we recommend Vorbis instead of MP3.
I suspect it's premature to distribute anything with Theora at this time, but it's worth looking at. We're in this for the long term, and videos can always be recoded from the original source material. [Of course that's the thorny issue with video: the original source material is *huge*.]
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)