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Chrome Removing Theora Support
- sandyarmstrong 3y agoFirefox as well: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860492 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860492 It's a shame Theora never "made it". The peak of its popularity is long past.
- izacus 3y agoIt was never good. We used it in spirit of OSS in our hackerspace, but it was always terrible and behind all the MPEGs of the time.
- koito17 3y ago> It was always terrible and behind all the MPEGs of the time. So was VP8, which Google ended up pushing at nearly the same time they were rejecting Theora as an inferior H.264 clone. The irony being that VP8 wasn't that different either[1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150301015756/http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/486 https://web.archive.org/web/20150301015756/http://x264dev.mu...
- Sesse__ 3y agoTheora is VP3 with some more leeway in the hope that the encoder can use the additional parameter freedom to produce better video (which never really happened; most of the 1.1 branch was, as I understand it, just cleaning up a lot of old mistakes around e.g. rate control). It's pretty clear that VP8 outperforms it.
- izacus 3y agoInteresting you claim that - I actually put together a rather in-depth report at the time and VP8/H.264 performed very closely as formats (that is, quality metrics vs. filesize were very comparable even if encoding time of x264/libvpx wasn't) and theora was just awful (SSIM and similar quality metrics were behind for like 30-40% which was a lot). The article you've linked it talking about some decoder implementation details which I'm not sure were all that relevant for end users - x264 was always the superior encoder, libvpx was "ok", libtheora was terrible when it came to actual encoded video results. Not sure what the article you posted really proves around that.
- sillywalk 3y agoFTA: "Chrome will deprecate and remove support for the Theora video codec in desktop Chrome due to emerging security risks. Theora's low (and now often incorrect) usage no longer justifies support for most users. "
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoSo I guess, regarding a theoretical "everything in the browser" future, the swiss-army tools like VLC and ffmpeg would either have to pack their own performant codecs in wasm, or stay as desktop / CLI applications. (Not that it would make any sense to implement ffmpeg on top of WebCodecs on top of ffmpeg. Just needed an example.) I hope I have not completely missed the train by focusing on other areas outside of web.
- donatj 3y agoWASM ffmpeg already exists. It was GREAT before SPECTRE lead to massive restrictions in SharedArrayBuffer.
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoYeah, I figured. But last time I toyed with decoding audio in wasm, the speed was I think 5x worse. Not sure if it's cause SIMD was not implemented or what.
- thresh 3y agoVLC has a port to WebAssembly: https://code.videolan.org/jbk/vlc.js#vlcjs-vlc-for-wasmasmjs https://code.videolan.org/jbk/vlc.js#vlcjs-vlc-for-wasmasmjs (it's actually usable to some extent)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- a1o 3y agoIs there any good video codec that the library is as small or not much bigger as Theora and that has no patent/license issue? I tried to use VP9 in the past but it's like 20-40MBs a dll. The lowest I could find was dav1d and it's still around 4MB for the library dll and encoding AV1 and getting good compression rate was not trivial.
- Uberzi 3y agoHonest question. In which scenario do you care so much about the size of the DLL , these days ?
- belltaco 3y agoMaybe to encode/decode video on a Mars rover.
- tedunangst 3y agoYour primary concern is almost certainly power draw, so you're using a hardware encoder. The weight of a few more megabytes ROM would be inconsequential.
- mort96 3y agoI mean the Ingenuity helicopter runs Linux, which seems to suggest that a few megabytes here and there isn't such a big deal; whatever the constraints of mars are, they seem to have a fair amount of onboard storage. I can't imagine that the improved video compression of AV1 compared to Theora or H.264 wouldn't outweigh the cost of that 4MB extra storage space.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoThat hardware selection was locked-in years ago, I think that's the major hold up with ginny in particular. I don't think even the next helicopter they're building now will be able to get hardware AV1 encoding. Would be moderately funny if they could eek better performance out of ffmpeg with remote updates.
- hardcopy 3y agoTIL filename extensions .ogv, .ogg = Theora
- krackers 3y agoogg is just a container, the actual contents can be audio (usually opus, but other audio codecs are supported) or video (theora, plus some obscure ones)
- Nursie 3y agoI still have a few Ogg Vorbis audio files from many years ago too. Wonder if I can still play them on anything...
- tech234a 3y agoProbably VLC
- pdntspa 3y agoWinamp, foobar2000
- Ygg2 3y agoWinamp still exists? I thought it was resold twenty times to various shady entities.
- lproven 3y agoRelaunched about a year ago. The website is so unremittingly awful I didn't even spin up a Windows VM to try it. Massive, all bitmaps, almost no text, no actual info at all, mentions blockchain. https://www.winamp.com/ https://www.winamp.com/
- neckro23 3y agoThere’s a modernized fork of it: https://getwacup.com/ https://getwacup.com/ The official one is still around, but last I checked it had a crash bug in the media library plugin.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI won’t miss Theora - but I am as part of my job helping a business migrate from some old open-source software which inexplicably re-encoded almost all audio uploads into Ogg Vorbis audio files. I can just play those as they are, in any browser, except Safari. Painfully, macOS actually supports Vorbis, but only in a CAF (Core Audio Format) container instead of an Ogg container. Still hoping; because shipping an entire Ogg decoder in the browser with WASM works but is ugly. Of course, I could also just re-encode them with a microservice but it’s just… bleh.
- notRobot 3y agoYou might find this helpful: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js https://github.com/brion/ogv.js From the FF announcement linked elsewhere in these comments.
- dawidpotocki 3y agoApple has always been an asshole when it comes to codec support. VP9 on Safari? Sure, on desktop. On mobile? Oh yeah, only via WebRTC(why???). Want to import FLACs into Apple Music? Nope, only inferior ALAC is supported for lossless. AV1? Only just added to iPhone 15 Pro series (not in 15 cause old SoC) and still not on Macbooks. HEVC? Oh yeah, of course we use it as HEIC for photos and support HEVC playback in Safari, how could we not?
- yuhong 3y agoI am asking the WMF to add support for MP4: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T329258 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T329258
- nicman23 3y agohavent use actual theora (opus i still daily use) since gta:sa
- renewiltord 3y agoInteresting. Aligns with my belief that Wikipedia videos are rarely viewed. They’re often ogg theora.
- hannob 3y agoInteresting enough, I'm probably one of the few people who still has some theora videos on the web in some very old blogposts of mine. Some history for people who are not aware: Theora became somewhat popular in free software / open source circles, because at the time, it was the best codec which was believed to be either free of patents or the patents were explicitly opened up for free use. Therefore, if you were concerned about patents and their impact on free software, you'd use it. But Theora wasn't a great codec, which we always knew, it just was the best we had before google bought and opened up VP8. It's an interesting tradeoff. Theora was never particularly popular, so you probably will have a low number of sites being impacted. But we kinda have a tradition that the web plattform rarely breaks things. You mostly can still use old html from 20-30 years ago, gif will probably stay supported in browsers forever, and I don't think there are many examples of media formats in browsers being deprecated. Even odd things like bmp are still supported.
- jplona 3y agoI suppose Flash could be considered a notable exception there.
- stanac 3y agoIIRC flash was a plugin but it was integrated into chrome install. I don't remember if it was part of FF default install or not, but I can guess it wasn't.
- thraxil 3y agoFlash was proprietary. Open standards and formats are what we've always kind of expected would keep working.
- hannob 3y agoYeah, and java applets + some more tech enabled by plugins. But I guess we always considered the "plugin-web" to be "different" in that regard.
- The_Colonel 3y agoFor videos there's an easy workaround - download the video file and open it in VLC. FFMPEG will likely never drop its support. Dropping e.g. HTML/CSS features is much harder, since there likely won't be any workaround other than running older version of the browser.
- eviks 3y agoI wish the browsers were modular and you could simply disable/enable the codecs you wanted and get and use the relevant libraries
- psnehanshu 3y agoSomeone will still have to invest engineering resources to maintain those codecs.
- eviks 3y agoNot really, I didn't assume all the outdated codes would be maintained even if no one uses them. You could just as well disable them all before the global chrome team wakes up to all the insecurities and flips the switch for everyone But even then, in a modular environment the potential pool of engineering resources is much broader
- qwerty456127 3y agoAren't modern video codecs prohibitively computationally expensive for mediocre office-class PCs?
- Sesse__ 3y agodav1d can decode 4K video in realtime on a pretty normal office-class PC. The real issue for is mobile.
- iopq 3y agoMobile doesn't have 4K screens, any phone released in the last few years can handle 1080p or 1440p AV1 I mean ANY phone. My phone is $160 from 2019 and it can play 1440p AV1 on youtube (with a few frame drops, but nothing noticeable), even though it has a 720p screen. I'd have to get my OnePlus 3 (2016) to stutter in 1440p note that the OnePlus 3 would stutter in h264 1440p as well, it's just old
- Sesse__ 3y agoIt's not only about “handle”, it's about not eating through all of your battery before you're done watching the video. But no, “any” phone cannot reliably play 1080p AV1: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/12226/122260T/Benchmarking-and-analysis-of-AV1-software-decoding-on-Android-devices/10.1117/12.2633692.short?SSO=1 https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of... “Overall AV1 real-time playback of 720p 30fps @ 2Mbps is feasible for low-end devices with 4 threads and 1080p 30fps @ 4Mbps is feasible for high-end and mid-range devices with 4 threads using Dav1d decoder.”
- iopq 3y ago> it's about not eating through all of your battery before you're done watching the video we're talking about hours of playtime before you run out of power, you can verify this on your own phone on youtube right now, go enable av1 and marvel at how YOUR phone can play these videos at 1080p > Overall AV1 real-time playback of 720p 30fps @ 2Mbps is feasible for low-end devices with 4 threads and 1080p 30fps @ 4Mbps is feasible for high-end and mid-range devices with 4 threads using Dav1d decoder Why only 4 threads? My phone from 2020 has 8 cores/8 threads and a 720p screen https://www.gsmarena.com/oppo_a32-10454.php https://www.gsmarena.com/oppo_a32-10454.php So even if it doesn't handle some 1080p videos that I haven't tested, I should probably be watching them at 720p since that's all my phone can do.