[Wikipedia-l] Theora and video policy...

[Ralesk Ne'vennoyx]

Robert Graham Merkel wrote:

> With regards to the discussion I prompted on Video formats, might I
> suggest those people interested have a look at 
> 
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_policy 
> 
> To my knowledge, however, nobody has yet tried to actually add video to the
> Wikipedia.
> 
> As far as all the charges of excessive idealism at work here in the
> existing choice of Ogg Vorbis for sound and (prospectively) Theora 
> for video, might I just repeat the key point I made on that page: 
> there are no other open, unencumbered video formats available.  
> The choice is Theora or nothing.  
> 

Theora is built on On2’s VP3 codec, about which we know the following:

| VP3 was originally a proprietary video codec developed by On2
| Technologies (http://www.on2.com/). It is closely comparable in
| quality and bitrate to MPEG-4 video codecs.
|
| In September, 2001 it was donated to the public as open source, and
| On2 disclaimed all rights to it, including their patents on the
| technology. In 2002, they entered into an agreement with the Xiph.org
| Foundation to make VP3 the base of a new, free video codec, Ogg
| Theora. It will operate alongside Ogg Vorbis to provide a set of
| patent and royalty free open source multimedia codecs. Theora is
| currently still in alpha stage, as of May 2004.

VP3 is just as unknown to the general public as is Theora at the moment, 
Theora is probably a less known project.  However, it’s “ready for use”, 
something I don’t know if I can really say Theora yet (frozen or not).

The attitude some have taken against Theora reminded me of Mozilla 
developments attitude towards MNG, which led to its removal from the 1.4 
trunk in favour of Flash (?!), Animated GIF (!!) and SVG.