HOWTO make open/free video
Link (Thanks, Lachlan!)Codecs and Containers
The use of two FOSS video and audio codec combinations are recommended:
* Xvid/LAME Use of the Xvid codec for video and LAME codec for audio in the medium term as both codecs are well developed and generally well supported but are encumbered with patent issues that mean they may be plagued with legal issues into the future.
* Ogg Theora/Vorbis Use of the Ogg format, Theora video codec and Vorbis audio codec as they are patent-free technologies that have seen great improvements in usability and the number and quality of tools available to create and play them is increasing.Players
There are many good FOSS players of both Xvid/LAME and Ogg Theora/Vorbis available, some more suitable for certain purposes than others. However the recommendation is that Transmission projects promote the use of one player application primarily, VLC, in order to share documentation and training resources more easily by adopting the same software:
* VLC Use VLC as it is highly-developed FOSS media player for FOSS codecs available on all platforms.
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Reasons why I - as media producer - independent, creative commons loving, free software loving - will NOT support OGG Theora.
1. The quality is SH*T. Its substandard and nowhere near what a modern video codec should offer.
2. There is no support. You can not play it on any modern media player, noone has the plugins installed - they don´t even come with firefox. noone downloads plugins outside the hardcore geek community and in the end I want people to watch my video and not become entangled into an installer frenzy and then forgetting to watch the video in the first place.
3. the quality is sh*t.
4. Encoding speed is slow - about as slow as h264 on my machines. for the quality output this is not acceptable - its my wasted time and most indy video producers already don´t have any time waiting for their movies to finish rendering or managing all the other millions of tasks.
5. decoding speed uses as much resources as h264. I couldn´t trust my eyes but theora with its poor quality made the processor spin as much as a h264 VBR encoded movie. The whole reason why I would put theora into use would be so it would run on non up to date machines - yet it eats system resources for lunch.
6. browser plugin integration etc. there is none. the vlc browser plug in looks ugly.
7. flash is taking over - which is even worse then endorsing pure mp4 h264 that could at least be played with vlc. but it shows one thing: integration is the key, if flash would not have such a painfully big market penetration video on flash would have never been viable - its all about getting the content to as many people as possible even if these people see it at 10fps 120x80pixels, because once you spend 12 month of your spare time making a video you want as many people as possible to see your video - this is just not possible with theora.
8. all the problems that plaque free software: bad interfaces (starting on the plugin downloading websites, the player interfaces the embedding interfaces etc) a much to violently vocal community that does more harm then it helps the cause (the number one reason I do not use ogg audio either is that some geeks seem to force it into the net with brute, I have yet to see any person in my vincity to actually want to use ogg 99% of the non-geeks have no idea of what ogg is yet its available on most "alternative" p2p download sites.
and I probbaly could go on.
From a indy producer standpoint it would be better if all those forces would be bundled to make h264 a free open codec and then everyone endorces it before microsoft comes into the game and pushes an even more closed codec onto the net that will make flash even more dominant and make us all adobes slaves.
but i do understand that this is not how free software works. its all about anti doing things different as vocal and loud as possible.... sadly this approach will not and will never work for a video codec that needs cross browser cross platform full acceptence of mom and pop - because ripped game trailers are just 0.1% of the video watching market out there.
now rip me and reencode me with time shifted pixels....
Interesting comments however I don't think you read the actual report, only the posting here :) The report isn't a moralistic argument about free software being better purely because it's free, it looks at what would be required for FOSS codecs to be a real option for independent video makers. That is it looks at the issue from a developer _and_ a user perspective. The report exists exactly because the usability of FOSS video codecs is not what it could be and independent video makers won't pick them up until they are made far easier to use. I don't however agree with you that OGG is that far behind the other options and I'd refer you to this report for evidence of that http://montevideo.dyne.org/releases/video-streaming-on-wan.pdf
Cheers.
And.
That pdf link seems to be broken, but you can see it here on google cache.
...Falk, if we ever meet, I owe you a round of drinks! That's the best summation of why OGG blows chunks more than any other audio codec currently being used. As it stands right now, when movies and TV shows are ripped and posted, whenever some punk posts rips that have OGG as the audio codec, all hell breaks loose. The newsgroup in question jumps his ass en masse, and the schmuck either capitulates and reencodes using LAME, or tells everyone to fuck themselves and posts his crap anyway, thus winding himself in everyone's killfile.
...An almost identical flamefest occurs whenever someone posts using that wretched Matroska (sp?) "wrapper codec". Although VirtualDub has some support for it now I'm told, it's still a codec that provides no compression improvement, and even more dubious are the claims of "cross-platform support". And yet, there's idiots out there who refuse to acknowledge that it's far better to encode using accepted standards - read: Xvid/DiVX and LAME/Radius MP3 - claiming "if you want *MY* rips, you'll adopt *MY* standards". You'd fucking think that all the DRM flaps would have cured these young punks of that sort of attitude, eh?
...While I'm on my soapbox, there's one other "standard" that I wish would get dumped, and that's the use of Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding. My issue is that with VBR audio encoding, if I need to reencode the video so that the whole rip is smaller in size and quality - think "reading copies" to spare "mint condition" books combined with fitting more eps of a series on a hard drive for convenience - then in order to avoid massive loss of sync between audio and video in the reencode, I need to first decompress the audio - praying that it doesn't develop a massive case of the "pops" or gets remuxed into mono! - and then after recompressing the video mixing the two back together, again hoping that the two manage to mix back together in sync. VBR may be fine for a final product, but the space savings isn't worth the headaches that it causes everyone else. Stick with Constant Bit Rate (CBR) encoding, or at least have the courtesy to do a "DiVX for Dialup" version for those of us who either a) have dialup only or b) need smaller, low-Q versions for storage related needs.
Bottom Line: OM's Law #11 - Anytime someone posts a rip and claims it's in a "revolutinary new codec that's fast becoming the standard!", the probability that said codec is anything *but* is so close to 1 that the difference is negligible.
I will steer clear of the ogg quality debate for now except to say that if more encoders offer it as a choice then more people will use it and it will become better.
What I really wanted to say is that I use open source tools for all of my production work and I couldn't be happier. The quality of my work suffers at times, but not because the tools are lacking it's just because I spent the time to get all I can out of them. For example, my x264 encoded videos look way better now than they used to since I did some fine tuning on my encoding options. Now I have to go back and tune my options for my other formats.
Have a look at these two podcasts all done entirely with open source tools.
http://www.thesourceshow.org
http://www.opennewsshow.org
I just released this film called 'Route Irish' from Ireland with torrent networks as primary form of distribution. http://www.indymedia.ie/article/85188
It is very much an open source influenced project and carries a gpl license.
When I've released stuff before on the web people from open source activist communities have said - 'why didn't you use this codec for it?' usually talking about X - vid. Well my thoughts on this to date are that it is hard enough to get political activist content to a broad audience without giving people extra technical hurdles to jump through. I used Div-X because it's what most people are already set up for and comfortable with. I have a horrible feeling that people see the x-vid format on torrents and say - 'I don't recognise that - what is it? - I'm not going to wait x no of hours for something that mightn't work.'
I bigtime support the kind of work engage media are doing in general. It's very important. And understand the argument for this type of codec but when you've put a lot of work into something and the deck is already stacked against it being seen by a lot of people (no 'marketing' budget / too political for national broadcasters) you don't want to add the straw that may break the camels back.
So it's an uphill battle.
As someone involved in making Creative Commons media using Open-Source tools where possible (BloodSpell) I'd throw my weight behind the "use AVI/XVid/LAME MP3" recommendations. OGG may be good, but it's not in common usage. That's a real problem, as several people mention, if you want as many viewers as possible.
It's already hard enough to persuade people to watch your films - it's pretty much an absolute rule that your viewers shouldn't have to download anything else beyond a movie file.
(I'd reckon that you at least halve the chances of a viewer bothering to watch your video if they have to download a new piece of software to do so.)
I'm also quite astonished that the report doesn't recommend - in fact, discouages use of - VirtualDub. For my money, it's literally the best encoding tool, in terms of speed, features and usability, available on any platform - if it also encoded Quicktime I'd use it in place of Apple's multi-hundred-dollar Compressor or Canopus's equally expensive ProCoder. I know a lot of other video professionals hold the same opinion. In particular, its resizing capabilities are extremely controllable and far higher quality than anything else I've used, its compression is impressively quick, and it offers the "direct stream" option for either audio or video when you only need to alter one of the two elements.
Overall, I'd take the recommendations here with a pinch of salt.
EEEKKK - Every DivX-capable player I'm aware of will also play Xvid-encoded video. We used Xvid for all BloodSpell encodes, and as far as I'm aware it has worked like a charm.
I believe YouTube and Stage6 will also accept uploaded video encoded with XVid.
I agree this is an excellent analysis both of what the best option are, and what needs to be better. It certainly has been frustrating that we don't have a technically competitive video codec in Theora, the way we have with the audio codecs.
I'm always disappointed when people who say they care about software freedom ignore the patent issues with the MPEG codecs. I could understand civil disobedience, but that's not what I'm hearing here. Content producers are the ones that drive format adoption. And just like software piracy helps Microsoft, and file sharing helps Hollywood, posting your content in encumbered format helps those who can collect royalties on that format, even if they never hit you up personally.
Most of Falk's support complaints are addressed in the linked article, but to balance the discussion here a bit:
* Ogg is the recommended baseline format for the HTML5 proposed <audio> and <video> elements. This is being implemented by Opera, Firefox.
* Wikipedia is using Ogg as their standard media format. See the media commons index for examples of their playback support.
* The Metavid project is another fine example of embedded Ogg playback support. They even have some javascript that lets you use the <video> tag now, dynamically rewriting the page on the client to use the best support option.
Hopefully all these will continue to encourage use and improvement of unincumbered formats.
Congrats Anna and Andy for making Boingboing!
Matroska is a container format, not a codec. It's not supposed to compress anything.