Xiph.org has announced the release of Theora 1.0. As if we didn’t have enough video solutions and codecs (I thank my lucky stars we have software like VLC and Perian to help avoid trying to understand the mess of them), we have yet another. Theora’s big claim to fame is that it’s royalty free.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s great. The fact that it’s supposed to have a small CPU overhead is also great. I’m just afraid we have another Ogg Vorbis on our hands. It could be yet another well intentioned media format that fractures the spectrum yet more, but never gains any real traction.
The strongest argument that it won’t quickly become irrelevant is Opera and Mozilla’s support for the format. With approximately 20% of the browser market, Firefox brings a lot of clout (I’m not going to pretend the Opera support is a big deal). I honestly don’t expect to see this video in the iPhone any time soon though.
Now to wait and see if Mozilla and Opera get sued for violating submarine patents.
Theora might be royalty free for now, as its not clear whether Theora violates any patents or not.
I don't see how this will make any inroads when everyone is embedding flash players and videos in webpages these days (I wish they wouldn't, the quicktime plug-in is so much easier to work with than the craptastic flash players everyone uses).
What is up with the fudged up antialiasing of their logo? Every time I see "xiph" on their webpage I feel like I need a Lasik touch-up.