20.09.09
Mozilla gives £70k grant for open-source video
Theora is a lossy video compression layer used in Ogg, which
is an
open container format used for streaming and multimedia. The most
popular audio layer used in Ogg is Vorbis. Theora's main proprietary
competitors are Mpeg-4
and WMV,
while Vorbis competes with MP3 and
others.
In a blog post
on Monday, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, said
Theora was "the best path available today for truly open, truly free
video on the internet".
"We also believe that
[Theora] can be improved in video quality,
in performance, and in
quality of implementation, and Mozilla is proud to be supporting the
development of Theora software with a $100k grant," Shaver wrote.
"Administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, this grant will be used to
support development of improved Theora encoders and more powerful
playback libraries."
Mozilla's director of evangelism, Christopher Blizzard, wrote
in his blog
on Monday: "Anyone can have an impact and anyone can affect the
technology direction of the web", but said video remains an exception,
as it is tied to proprietary formats.
"More
often than not, [video
formats] are subject to per-unit royalties,
large up-front fees and creating content in those formats [is] often so
expensive as to be prohibitive to all but only the deepest-pocketed
corporations or well-funded start-ups," Blizzard wrote.
Blizzard reiterated that the next version of Firefox, version
3.1, would include Ogg support
using the open-source Theora and Vorbis codecs. "They aren't perfect
formats, but they are certainly good enough for how video is
used on
the web today," he wrote. "And they are improving with time."
Source: ZDnet UK
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