Looks like the code to support ogg vorbis/theora playback has made its way into the nightly builds of firefox! This is a really great development! Mozilla’s has announced support for native theora support in ff 3.1. This will have a hugely positive effect on promoting free formats and ensuring current “non-free” formats stay cheep or free-as-in-beer. This is particularly bold of Mozilla in they are pioneering a “more free web” than the standards groups were able to agree on. As previously discussed some industry participation in the htm5 group discouraged a free baseline web video format citing submarine patent concerns. The power of the premier open source projects to ensure support of a free software ecosystem can not be overstated. Mozilla role here is hugely important and its great to see they have taken the right path to ensure the possibility of a bright future for free and open media.
Update: see Ginger’s excellent summary with historical contextualization, Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan’s Why Ogg Matters post, coverage on bush coder blog (the firefox video integration branch developer) and Greg Maxwell’s post (one of the key supporters of ogg media on wikipedia)
posted by dale at 11:10 am
Firefox 3 download day was a huge success and it features many improvement over firefox2. But as they say you can’t please everybody, and download issues were not the only blip on this otherwise exciting launch. Perhaps lost in the hoopla over Fierfox 3 impressive new features set is the html5 video support which did not make it into this release. While Chris Double has done an excellent job in building cross platform ogg theora support into Firefox the new implementation strategy raises some questions about the future vitality of open media and open web standards.
Specifically Mozilla current implementation strategy proposes supporting video via hooks into the proprietary media platforms for windows and mac. i.e Firefox on mac will hook into quicktime, Firefox on windows will hook into direct show, while Firefox in Linux will hook into gstreamer… This approach risks abandoning support for a baseline free codec (ie ogg theora) for the video tag. We can only hope the base cross platform theora support code that is already written is not abandoned as they add in these hooks.
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posted by dale at 1:27 am
Thought I would send out a quick update of some open media happenings:
Super Open Media Platform: Everyone should check out Chris Doubles SVG + firefox3 video element demo. Similar to a silverlight demo for rotating still images, this demo takes the next step and swaps in ogg video inside SVG elements. This is done in an entirely free software and is patent unencumbered (for example notice the “we cant redistribute this edition” quote here in open source silverlight video implementations)
FOMS 2008: Building on the success of FOMS 2007 free & open source software developers will again converge in January to iron out the stumbling blocks to wide scale free-media adoption. Check out FOMS 2008
Miro road to 1.0: Miro previously known as Democracy Player is quickly nearing 1.0. Check out the latest feature set and get ready for the official release 
posted by dale at 4:09 pm
Given the many parallel projects to bring ogg theora into the many browser platforms it can easily get confusing. In this post I will give an update on the embed video projects that I have been following in the development of the latest mv_embed script. This script is a rewrite of the mv embed script with the intentions of bridging support for video tag from the html5 spec to non html5 browsers. Once the mv_embed script is included it goes through the page and rewrites all the html5 video tags with whatever playback method the client supports, letting web developers use the future html5 video tag today! See the sample page.
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posted by dale at 8:43 pm
From the DemocracyTV blog:
There’s a new version of XiphQT, which is the behind-the-scenes code that helps Democracy Player for OSX play Ogg files. We’ll be including this in an upcoming release of ours and it should make Ogg playback much more efficient. If you use the XiphQT plugin yourself, this version supports creation of Oggs, which is very handy.
This theora support means that the RSS feeds generated by MetaVid searches (those funny orange boxes: 
) are exportable as channels for your DTV player. You could use a channel for your own Congressman (here’s mine), an issue you care about (like peanut butter), or some combination of the two (Anna Eshoo saying Peanut Butter). The great thing about RSS and DTV is that as new matches to these searches occur, the clips will download automatically — giving you a new and efficient way to sousveil your representative and cause.
update: hmm, it looks like our feeds are broken in the latest democracyPlayer; we’re looking in to why.
posted by aphid at 10:52 am
Some interesting conversations have been taking place in the whatwg standards group as people set about to design the standards for the future web platform. Out of this discussion the video element has been proposed as a standard way of embedding video content into the page. Implementation details are being discussed such as css styles for video playback controls and annodex like temporal stream reference. But most of the discussion has centered around the video element and its single standard baseline codec that web developers can count on being supported if they use the new video element. As free software intermixes with the process of standardization proprietary solutions fall to wayside and free codecs/containers become the only broadly supportable solution.
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posted by dale at 6:54 pm
