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> Note that until recently, there was almost no open source development of media codecs. Vorbis was released in 2002. That's 16 years ago. That's hardly 'until
by vetinari 9y ago
> Note that until recently, there was almost no open source development of media codecs.
Vorbis was released in 2002. That's 16 years ago. That's hardly 'until recently'.
- icebraining 9y agoAlso FLAC and Musepack, which I think are even older. Plus for video, Theora's initial release was in 2004.
- rayiner 9y agoTheora was the result of open sourcing a proprietary patented codec (VP3). Musepack is based on MPEG.
- pgeorgi 9y agoOgg Tarkin predates Theora and tried some completely new ideas in a time when digital video wasn't as ubiquitous (and so there wasn't as much incentive to keep going when problems arose). Tarkin also suffered from the patent minefield everybody else put up (so they couldn't go for the obvious solutions because these were already locked down for another 15 years)
- icebraining 9y agoI'm not sure about Theora, but Musepack was further developed already as a free software project.
- brigade 9y agoAnd it was under development all the back to 1993 or 1998 depending on your opinion. Including image codecs, PNG was 1996. For video codecs, Huffyuv was 2000. (Though to be fair lossless codecs are relatively easier to create, which is why there’s an unnecessarily large variety of them.) And even lossy video codecs had some OSS experimental developments in the early 2000s that admittedly never went too far - Tarkin predates VP3 open sourcing if you want to count that, and Snow got somewhat decent results if you ignore that H.264 predates it.