Rich Fiscus
28 Jan 2009 10:39
In recent months the open source Theora video format has seen something of a renaissance with the long awaited transition from beta to release status. Much of the interest in Theora can be traced directly to Firefox developers.
Now the organization behind Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation is making yet another contribution to Theora. This time it's monetary. They've announced a grant of $100,000 for the development of Theora encoding and playback software. The grant will be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization which has operated Wikipedia since 2003.
Mike Shaver, Vice President of Engineering for the Mozilla Corporation, wrote on his blog, "Our commitment to the success of open video on the web requires that we select codecs for Firefox that are usable by everyone, without restriction or licensing fee. To that end, we’ve chosen Theora as the format for Firefox 3.1."
Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director Eric Möller made the announcement on that organization's blog, writing "Wikimedia and Mozilla want to help to build a web where video and audio are first class citizens: easy to use and manipulate by anyone, without compulsory royalty schemes or other barriers to participation."
The Theora video codec has been developed since 2001 by the Xiph.org Foundation as part of the OGG project. It's designed to offer quality and bitrates comparable to proprietary web-oriented formats like MPEG-4 ASP (DivX, XviD, Nero Digital, etc,...) without the need to pay any licensing fees. It's based on the VP3 codec from On2 Technologies, who donated it, along with their related patents, to the public domain.
Learn more about Theora video and OGG files in our OGG playback guide.