Sites with Ogg in HTML5 video tag
Yesterday, somebody mentioned that the HTML5 video tag with Ogg Theora/Vorbis can be played back in Safari if you have XiphQT installed (btw: the 0.1.9 release of XiphQT is upcoming). So, today I thought I should give it a quick test. It indeed works straight through the QuickTime framework, so the player looks like a QuickTime player. So, by now, Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Safari with XiphQT, and experimental builds of Opera support Ogg Theora/Vorbis inside the HTML5 video tag. Now we just need somebody to write some ActiveX controls for the Xiph DirectShow Filters and it might even work in IE.
While doing my testing, I needed to go to some sites that actually use Ogg Theora/Vorbis in HTML5 video tags. Here is a list that I came up with in no particular order:
- Chris Double’s Tinyvid
- Dailymotion’s Open Video Demo (restricted to Firefox 3.5)
- Michael Dale and Aphid’s Metavid
- Archive.org’s videos
- Wikipedia’s videos
- the FOMS workshop videos
I’m sure there’s a lot more out there – feel free to post links in the comments.
Firefox plugin to encode Ogg video
Michael Dale just posted this to theora-dev. Go to one of the given URLs to install the Firefox plugin that lets you transcode video to Ogg using your Web browser.
Firefogg is developed by Jan Gerber and lives at http://www.firefogg.org/. There is a javascript API available so you can make use of Firefogg in your own Website project to allow people to upload any video and transcode it to Ogg on the fly.
Enjoy!
On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 7:08 AM, Michael Dale
> I mentioned it in the #theora channel a few days ago but here it is with
> a more permanent url:
>
> http://www.firefogg.org/make/advanced.html
> &
> http://www.firefogg.org/make/
>
> These will be simple links you can send people so that they can encode
> source footage to a local ogg video file with the latest and greatest
> ogg encoders (presently thusnelda and vorbis). Updates to thusnelda and
> possible other free codecs will be pushed out via firefogg updates 
>
> Pass along any feedback if things break or what not.
>
> I am also doing testing with “embed” these encoder interface. For those
> familiar with jQuery: an example to rewrite all your file inputs with
> firefogg enhanced inputs: $(“input:[type='file']“).firefogg() … Feel
> free to expeirment based on those examples. The form rewrite has mostly
> only been tested in the mediaWiki context:
> http://sandbox.kaltura.com/testwiki/index.php/Special:Upload
> but with minor hacking should work elsewhere 
>
> enjoy
> –michael
>
> _______________________________________________
> theora mailing list
> theora@xiph.org
> http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/theora
>
FOMS 2009: video introductions available
In January this year we had the third Foundations of Open Media software workshop for developers. The focus this year was on legal issues around codecs, Xiph and Web video (HTML5 video and video servers), authoring/editing software, and accessibility. Check out the complete set of areas of concern and community goals that we decided upon.
As every year, at the beginning of the workshop every participant provided a 5 min introduction about their field of speciality and the current challenges. These are video recorded and shared with the community.
The videos and accompanying slides have been available for about 2 months now, but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about it – apologies everyone! So, here are your star videos in reverse alphabetic order published using open source video software only:
- Viktor Gal, Xiph / Annodex liboggplay
- Timothy Terriberry, Xiph – Theora codec
- Silvia Pfeiffer, Annodex/Xiph – video a11y
- Shane Stephens, Google – liboggplaya
- Robin Gareus, linuxaudio.org
- Rob Savoye, Gnash
- Peter Ross, Xvid & FFMpeg
- Michael Dale, Wikipedia & Metavid
- Jan Gerber, Xiph hacker
- Edward Hervey, Collabora – PiTiVi
- Conrad Parker, Annodex/Xiph hacker
- Charles McCathieNevile, Opera
- Benjamin Otte, swfdec
- Anuradha Suraparaju, BBC – Dirac codec
Enjoy!
FFMPEG release
Quick Press: the awesome guys from FFmpeg have made an official release this week. The days of pain for compiling and packaging FFmpeg have come to an end. FFmpeg is being used in many Web video sites to provide backend transcoding – FAIK that includes YouTube. I use FFmpeg for all my transcoding needs and it has never let me down. Open media software to the win!
Progress on captions for HTML5 video
Paul Rouget this week published another example implementation for using srt with HTML5 video with a javascript library. This is at least the fourth javascript implementation that I know of for attaching srt subtitles to the video element.
It is great to see such a huge need for this. At the same time I am also worried about the amount of incompatible implementations of this feature. It will inhibit search engines from realising which text relates to and describes a particular video. It will also inhibit accessibility technology such as screen readers or braille devices from realising there is text that would be necessary to be rendered.
A standard means of associating srt (or other format) subtitle files with the video tag is really necessary. So, where are we at with this?
Recently, Greg Millam from Google posted a proposal to WHATWG, that shares a lot of elements with the proposal that has been previously discussed between Mozilla, Xiph, and Opera, the current state of which is summarised in the Mozilla wiki. No implementation into a Browser has been made yet, but initial implementations in javascript exist. I think that we will ultimately come out with a harmonised solution between the browser vendors. It just needs implementation work and continuous improvement.
At the same time, in-band captions that come multiplexed within the Ogg file are also being progressed. At Xiph we are now focusing on using Ogg Kate for these purposes – it really don’t make much sense to invent another codec when Ogg Kate is already so close to solving most problems. So, between the developer of Ogg Kate and myself, we are preparing a Google Summer of Code project that should see a implementation for Firefox 3.1 that is capable of extracting the text from an Ogg file that has a Kate track and displaying that track as though it was a srt file. If you are interested, shoot me an email!
UPDATE: Firefox 3.1 is apparently now called Firefox 3.5 – sorry guys.
ANOTHER UPDATE: My post seemed to imply that Firefox 3.5 will have Ogg Kate support. This is not the case. There is a patch for Firefox and liboggplay to provide Ogg Kate support into Firefox and this patch will be the basis of the Summer of Code project. The student will then work mostly on implementing a comprehensive javascript library to display Ogg Kate encoded time-aligned text (read: captions, Karaoke etc) in the Web browser. This is a proof-of-concept and a first step towards standardising the handling of time-aligned text in Web browsers that suppor the HTML5 video tag.
FOMS 2009 Awesomeness
I am a slacker, I know – sorry. FOMS happened almost 4 weeks ago and I have neither blogged about it nor uploaded the videos.
So, you will have to take my word for it for the moment: it was a totally awesome and effective workshop that led to a lot of work being started during LCA and having an impact far beyond FOMS.
Every year, the discussions we are having at FOMS are captured in so-called community goals. These are activities that we see as top priorities for open media software to be addressed to improve its use and uptake.
You can read up on our 2009 community goals here in detail. They fall into the following 10 sections:
- Patent and legal issues around codecs
- Ogg in Firefox: liboggplay
- Authoring tools for open media codecs
- Server Technology for open media
- Time-aligned text and accessibility challenges
- FFmpeg challenges
- GStreamer challenges
- Dirac challenges
- Jack challenges
- OpenMAX challenges
In this post, I’d just like to point out some cool activities that have already emerged since FOMS.
I’ve already written on the patents issue and how OpenMediaNow will hopefully be able to make a difference here.
Liboggplay provides a simple API to decoding and playback of Ogg codecs and is therefore in use for baseline Ogg Theora support in Firefox 3.1. A bunch of bugs were found around it and the opportunity of having Shane Stephens, its original developer, together with Viktor Gal, its new maintainer, in the same room made for a whole lot of bug fixes. The $100K Mozilla grant towards the work of Xiph developers that was announced at FOMS will further help to mature this and other Xiph software. Conrad Parker, Viktor Gal, and Timothy Terriberry, the Xiph developers that will cut code under this grant, were incidentally all present at FOMS.
The discussion about the need for authoring software support for open media codecs is always a difficult one. We all know that it is important to have usable and graphically attractive authoring tools in order to get adoption. However, looking at reality, it is really difficult to design and implement a GUI authoring tool such as a video editor to a competitive quality. In other areas, it has also taken quite some time to gain good authoring software such as e.g. the Gimp or Inkscape. Plus there is the additional need to make it cross-platform. With video, often the underlying editing functionality is missing from media frameworks. Ed Hervey explained how he extended gstreamer with the required subroutines and included them into the gstreamer python plugin, so now he will be able to focus on user interface work in PiTiVi rather than the underlying video editing functionality.
The authoring discussion smoothly led over to the server technology discussion. Robin Garvin explained how he implemented a server-side video editor through EDLs. Michael Dale showed us the latest version of his video editor in the Mediawiki Metavid plugin. And Jan Gerber showed us the Firefogg Firefox plugin for transcoding to Ogg. Web-based tools are certainly the future of video authoring and will make a huge difference in favor of Ogg.
Then there was the accessibility discussions. During FOMS I was in the process of writing up my final report on the Mozilla video accessibility project and it was really important to get input from the FOMS community – in particular from Charles McCathyNevile from Opera, Michael Dale from Metavid/Wikipedia/Archive.org and Jan Gerber. In the end we basically agreed that a lot of work still needs to be done and that a standard way of providing srt support into HTML5 through Ogg, but also out-of-band will be a great step forward, though by far not the final one.
The remaining topics were focused discussions on how to improve support, uptake or functionality of specific tools. Peter Ross took FOMS concerns about ffmpeg to the ffmpeg community and it seems there will be some changes, in particular an upcoming ffmpeg release. Ed Hervey took home a request for new API functions for gstreamer. Anuradha Suraparaju talked with Jan Gerber about support of Dirac in firefogg and with Viktor Gal about support in liboggplay. Further, the idea of libfisheye was born to have a similar abstraction library for Ogg video codecs as libfishsound is for Ogg audio codecs.
As can be seen, there are already some awesome outcomes from FOMS 2009. We are looking forward to a FOMS 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand!
News from the open media world
Today, there were so many news that I can only summarise them in a short post.
The guys from Collabora have announced that they are going to support the development of PiTiVi – one of the best open source video editors around. They are even looking to hire people to help Christian Schaller, the author of PiTiVi. The plan is to have a feature-rich video editor ready by April next year that is comparable in quality to basic proprietary video editors.
The BBC Dirac team have today announced a ffmpeg2dirac software package, which is built along the same lines as the commonly used ffmpeg2theora and of course transcodes any media stream to Ogg Dirac/Vorbis. With Ogg Dirac/Vorbis playback already available in vlc and mplayer, this covers the much needed creation side of Ogg Dirac/Vorbis files. Dirac is an open source, non-patent-encumbered video codec developed by the BBC. It creates higher quality video than Theora at comparable bitrates.
The FOMS – Foundations of Open Media Software hacker workshop for open media software announced today the current list of confirmed participants for the January Workshop. It seems that this year we have a big focus on open video codecs, on browser support of media, on open Flash software, and on media frameworks. It is still possible to take part in the workshop – check out the CFP page.
Finally an important security message: Mozilla has decided to put a security measure around the HTML5 audio and video elements that will stop them from being exploited by cross-site scripting exploits. Chris Double explains the changes that are necessary to your setup to enable your published audio or video to be displayed on domains that are different to the domain on which these files are hosted.
FOMS submission deadline extended
The Foundations of Open Media Software workshop has just extended its deadline for submission of registrations requests with travel sponsorship.
FOMS addresses hot topics – such as the new <video> and <audio> tags in HTML5, the uptake and development of open video codecs like Ogg Theora, BBC’s Dirac and SUN’s OMS codec and their native support in Firefox, open audio & media frameworks and players such as gstreamer, ffmpeg, vlc or xine, or the standardisation of audio APIs across platforms. Further topics are listed in the CFP.
In previous years, FOMS has stimulated heated technical discussions and amazing new developments in open media software, such as the creation of libsydneyaudio, the uptake of liboggplay, the creation of Xiph ROE, or the creation of the new Ogg CELT codec.
Video proceedings of last years’ workshops are here. There are also community goals that were set in 2008 and 2007 and provide ongoing challenges.
You should definitely attend, if you are an open media software hacker. This is a chance to get to know others in the community personally and clear up those long-standing issues that need a face-to-face to get solved. Also, it’s a great social event not to be missed. As a bonus, you can spend the week after FOMS at LCA, the world-famous Australian Linux hackers conference, and deepen your relationships in the community. Come and join in the fun in January 2009, Summer in Hobart, Tasmania.
Seeking a maintainer for liboggplay
liboggplay is a library that vastly simplifies the decoding and playback of Ogg encapsulated audio-visual content for programmers. It abstracts away from the complexity of libogg’s encapsulation pages, codec packets, and encoded data, giving the programmer the freedom to work with audio-visual streams, video frames, and audio samples. It does everything apart from the actual display of audio and video and has thus been selected as the thinnest library to provide support for Ogg Theora/Vorbis in Firefox’s new HTML5 <video> and <audio> tag implementation.
Shane Stephens, now with Google, implemented most of liboggplay while working at CSIRO on the Annodex project. Chris Double picked up liboggplay for Mozilla/Firefox, where it got committed to trunk only this week. Many others have and continue to provide patches. And finally, yesterday, I made an actual first tarball release of liboggplay.
There is only one little hick-up: liboggplay doesn’t actually have a maintainer. So, we are now looking to find somebody who is highly enthusiastic about open media codecs, has experience in C programming, can compile and test liboggplay on all major operating systems (probably set it up on a build farm) and has enough time to react swiftly to the need of bug fixes. We don’t want people’s Firefoxes to choke on Ogg content, but rather amaze them about how easy to handle and nicely integrated Ogg works on the Web.
One of the big next challenges for liboggplay is the implementation of support for Ogg Dirac – the BBC’s wavelet-based video codec. Mozilla, would be very keen to get Dirac support into liboggplay and thus diversify the open codecs supported in Firefox.
If you want to become the new maintainer for liboggplay, or want to implement Ogg Dirac support into liboggplay, or do both, get in touch with me and we’ll get you set up.
Native Ogg Theora support in Firefox
What a day for great news!
Chris Blizzard and Chris Double of Mozilla have just announced that native Ogg Theora and Vorbis support is now available in the trunk of Firefox’s codebase. Compiles of that codebase have the support enabled by default, which means that very soon now any Firefox that gets installed on any platform will come with built-in Ogg Theora/Vorbis support out of the box.
This is exciting in more than one way.
First of all: it is a browser implementation of the new HTML5 video tag currently in the process of standardisation. Opera is the only other browser that has support for the video tag also using Ogg Theora as the baseline codec, but Opera’s support is in an experimental branch, while Firefox will be the first to have native support.
The choice to include Ogg Theora natively is a huge step forward on Mozilla’s behalf considering the submarine patent debate that has been raging around this codec ever since it was removed from the HTML5 specification as baseline codec. So, maybe the Mozilla lawyers believe the risk of this threat is negligible and if they have, other browser vendors may follow.
This is a big day for open media technology and a big day for the future of video on the Web.
It is important because the availability of free and unencumbered video and audio codecs that are natively supported on the Web will make a huge difference in progressing the capabilities of video on the Web. As an example, look at the efforts of Annodex, where we are creating video webs through a video format with embedded hyperlinks and annotations. To make this feasible, you need a standard and open format for the time-aligned hyperlinks and annotations, which will only work with a flexible open video format. This is just an example: open captioning and karaoke formats, open overlay formats and many other extensions to video formats will now be feasible. The golden age of online video is starting.
Michael Dale‘s metavid project is giving us a taste of this future. Video can be searched on time-aligned annotations and only the relevant video segment will be retrieved. Video segments can be addressed by temporal hyperlinks and recombined easily into new mash-ups simply through the creation of a list of temporal hyperlinks. How powerful this will be when we do it across sites! This takes video into a completely new dimension.
Now, let’s step back again from the future to the current exciting news. I am particularly proud of the input that Annodex people have made to this development – code from people like Conrad Parker, Andre Pang, Zen Kavanagh, Shane Stephens, and many others.
Chris Double from Mozilla has been implementing the Firefox Ogg Theora support for more than a year and is using Shane Stephens’ liboggplay library, which was originally developed by CSIRO and is in the code repository of the Annodex Association. liboggplay requires libraries from Xiph.org (libogg, libvorbis, libtheora) and from Annodex (liboggz and libfishsound) to work. All of this has to work across operating system platforms.
It is an enormous achievement and I congratulate the open media technology community on this big success.