Theora
Encyclopedia
Theora is a free lossy video compression format
. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation
and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis
audio format and the Ogg
container.
libtheora is a reference implementation of the Theora video compression format being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation.
Theora is derived from the proprietary
VP3
codec, released into the public domain
by On2 Technologies
. It is broadly comparable in design and bitrate efficiency to MPEG-4 Part 2
, early versions of Windows Media Video
, and RealVideo
while lacking some of the features present in some of these other codecs. It is comparable in open standards philosophy to the BBC
's Dirac
codec.
Theora is named after Theora Jones, Edison Carter's Controller on the Max Headroom
television program.
, DCT
-based video compression scheme. Like most common video codecs, Theora also uses chroma subsampling
, block
-based motion compensation and an 8-by-8 DCT block. Pixels are grouped into various structures, namely super blocks, blocks and macroblocks. Theora supports intra-coded frames and forward-predictive frames, but not bi-predictive frames which are found in H.264 and VC-1
. Theora also does not support interlacing, or bit-depths larger than 8 bits per component.
Theora video streams can be stored in any suitable container format. Most commonly it is found in the Ogg
container with Vorbis
or FLAC
audio streams which provides a completely open, royalty-free multimedia format. It can also be used with the Matroska
container.
The Theora video-compression format is essentially compatible with the VP3 video-compression format, consisting of a backward-compatible superset. Theora is a superset of VP3, and VP3 streams (with some minor syntactic modifications) can be converted into Theora streams without recompression (but not vice versa). VP3 video compression can be decoded using Theora implementations, but Theora video compression usually cannot be decoded using old VP3 implementations.
and patented video codec
developed by On2 Technologies
. VP3.1 was introduced in May 2000 followed three months later by the VP3.2 release, which is the basis for Theora. In August 2001, On2 Technologies announced that they would be releasing an open source version of their VP3.2 video compression algorithm. In September 2001 they published the source code
and open source license for VP3.2 video compression algorithm at www.vp3.com. The VP3.2 Public License 0.1 granted the right to modify the source code only if the resulting larger work continued to support playback of VP3.2 data.
license. On2 also made an irrevocable, royalty-free license grant for any patent claims it might have over the software and any derivatives, allowing anyone to use any VP3-derived codec for any purpose. In August 2002, On2 entered into an agreement with the Xiph.Org Foundation to make VP3 the basis of a new, free video codec, called Theora. On2 declared Theora to be the successor in VP3's lineage. On October 3, 2002 On2 and Xiph announced the completion and availability of the initial alpha code release of Theora (libtheora). The libtheora reference implementation reached its alpha 2 milestone on June 9, 2003 and alpha 3 on March 20, 2004.
There is no formal specification for the VP3 bitstream format
beyond the VP3 source code published by On2 Technologies. In 2003, Mike Melanson created an incomplete description of the VP3 bitstream format and decoding process at a higher level than source code, with some help from On2 and Xiph.Org Foundation. The Theora specification adopted some portions of this VP3 description.
in June 2004 after the libtheora 1.0alpha3 release. Videos encoded with any version of the libtheora since the alpha3 will be compatible with any future player. This is also true for videos encoded with any implementation of the Theora I specification since the format freeze. The Theora I Specification was completely published in 2004. Any later changes in the specification are minor updates.
The Theora reference implementation libtheora spent several years in alpha and beta status. The last alpha version was libtheora 1.0alpha7 released on June 20, 2006. It was followed by libtheora 1.0 beta1 on September 22, 2007. The last beta version was libtheora 1.0 beta3 released on April 16, 2008. The first stable release of libtheora as version 1.0 was made in November 2008. Work then focused on improving the codec performance in the "Thusnelda" branch, which was released as version 1.1 in September 2009 as the second stable libtheora release. This release brought some technical improvements and new features, e.g. the new rate control module and the new two-pass rate control.
The codename for the next version of Theora reference implementation (libtheora) is Ptalarbvorm.
Theora is well established as a video format in open source
applications, and is the format used for Wikipedia
's video content. However, the proposed adoption of Theora as part of the baseline video support in HTML5 resulted in controversy.
and early Theora encoders
found their subjective visual quality was inferior to contemporary video codecs. More recently however, Xiph developers have compared the 1.1 Theora encoder to YouTube
's H.264 and H.263+ encoders, in response to concerns raised in 2009 about Theora's inferior performance by Chris DiBona
, a Google
employee. They found the results from Theora to be nearly the same as YouTube's H.264 output, and much better than the H.263+ output.
The performance characteristics of the Theora 1.0 reference implementation are dominated mostly by implementation problems inherited from the original VP3 code base. Work leading up to the 1.1 stable release was focused on improving on or eliminating these. A May 2009 review of this work shows a considerable improvement in quality, both subjectively and as measured by PSNR, just by improving the forward DCT
and quantisation matrices. A flaw in the version of FFmpeg
used in the test initially led to incorrect reports of Theora PSNR surpassing that of H.264
. Although not achieving this goal, the improvement in the measured PSNR and the perceived quality is considerable. In any case, the differences in quality, bitrate and file size between a YouTube H.264 video and a transcoded Ogg video file are negligible. Further work on adaptive quantization, as well as overall detailed subjective tuning of the codec, is still to come.
VHDL code base for a hardware
Theora decoder in development. It began as a 2006 Google
Summer of Code project, and it has been developed on both the Nios II
and LEON
processors. However there are currently no Theora decoder chips in production, and portable media player
s, smartphones and similar devices with limited computing power rely on such chips to provide efficient playback. However since decoding Theora is less CPU intensive than decoding H.264, the need for hardware acceleration may be somewhat obviated.
, these browsers support Theora when embedded by the
The libtheora library contains the reference implementation of the Theora specification for encoding and decoding. libtheora is still under development by the Xiph.Org Foundation
. The library is released under the terms of a BSD-style license
.
Also, several media frameworks have support for Theora.
http://gollum.artefacte.org/tss Theora Streaming Studio is a complete client to connect to an Icecast
server.
Video compression format
A video compression format or a video compression specification is a specification for digitally representing a video as a file or a bitstream. Examples of video compression formats are MPEG-2 Part 2, MPEG-4 Part 2, H.264 , Theora, Dirac, RealVideo RV40, and VP8...
. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation
Xiph.Org Foundation
Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit organizationthat produces free multimedia formats and software tools. It focuses on the Ogg family of formats, the most successful of which has been Vorbis, an open and freely licensed audio format and codec designed to compete with the patented MP3 and AAC...
and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis
Vorbis
Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation . The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation for lossy audio compression...
audio format and the Ogg
Ogg
Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The creators of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia.The Ogg container format can multiplex...
container.
libtheora is a reference implementation of the Theora video compression format being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation.
Theora is derived from the proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
VP3
VP3
On2 TrueMotion VP3 is a lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies....
codec, released into the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
by On2 Technologies
On2 Technologies
On2 Technologies , formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly-traded company , headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that designs video codec technology. They created a series of video codecs called TrueMotion...
. It is broadly comparable in design and bitrate efficiency to MPEG-4 Part 2
MPEG-4 Part 2
MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression technology developed by MPEG. It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It is a discrete cosine transform compression standard, similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2...
, early versions of Windows Media Video
Windows Media Video
'Windows Media Video is a video compression format for several proprietary codecs developed by Microsoft. The original video format, known as WMV, was originally designed for Internet streaming applications, as a competitor to RealVideo. The other formats, such as WMV Screen and WMV Image, cater...
, and RealVideo
RealVideo
RealVideo is a suite of proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks – the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and is at version 10. RealVideo is supported on many platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and several mobile...
while lacking some of the features present in some of these other codecs. It is comparable in open standards philosophy to the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
's Dirac
Dirac (codec)
Dirac is an open and royalty-free video compression format, specification and system developed by BBC Research at the BBC. Schrödinger and dirac-research are open and royalty-free software implementations of Dirac...
codec.
Theora is named after Theora Jones, Edison Carter's Controller on the Max Headroom
Max Headroom (TV series)
Max Headroom is a British-produced American science fiction television series by Chrysalis/Lakeside Productions that aired in the United States on ABC from March 1987 to May 1988. The series was based on the Channel 4 British TV pilot Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future...
television program.
Technical details
Theora is a variable-bitrateVariable bitrate
Variable bitrate is a term used in telecommunications and computing that relates to the bitrate used in sound or video encoding. As opposed to constant bitrate , VBR files vary the amount of output data per time segment...
, DCT
Discrete cosine transform
A discrete cosine transform expresses a sequence of finitely many data points in terms of a sum of cosine functions oscillating at different frequencies. DCTs are important to numerous applications in science and engineering, from lossy compression of audio and images A discrete cosine transform...
-based video compression scheme. Like most common video codecs, Theora also uses chroma subsampling
Chroma subsampling
Chroma subsampling is the practice of encoding images by implementing less resolution for chroma information than for luma information, taking advantage of the human visual system's lower acuity for color differences than for luminance....
, block
Block (data storage)
In computing , a block is a sequence of bytes or bits, having a nominal length . Data thus structured are said to be blocked. The process of putting data into blocks is called blocking. Blocking is used to facilitate the handling of the data-stream by the computer program receiving the data...
-based motion compensation and an 8-by-8 DCT block. Pixels are grouped into various structures, namely super blocks, blocks and macroblocks. Theora supports intra-coded frames and forward-predictive frames, but not bi-predictive frames which are found in H.264 and VC-1
VC-1
VC-1 is the informal name of the SMPTE 421M video codec standard, which was initially developed as a proprietary video format by Microsoft before it was released as a formal SMPTE standard video format on April 3, 2006...
. Theora also does not support interlacing, or bit-depths larger than 8 bits per component.
Theora video streams can be stored in any suitable container format. Most commonly it is found in the Ogg
Ogg
Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The creators of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia.The Ogg container format can multiplex...
container with Vorbis
Vorbis
Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation . The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation for lossy audio compression...
or FLAC
FLAC
FLAC is a codec which allows digital audio to be losslessly compressed such that file size is reduced without any information being lost...
audio streams which provides a completely open, royalty-free multimedia format. It can also be used with the Matroska
Matroska
The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks in one file. It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows...
container.
The Theora video-compression format is essentially compatible with the VP3 video-compression format, consisting of a backward-compatible superset. Theora is a superset of VP3, and VP3 streams (with some minor syntactic modifications) can be converted into Theora streams without recompression (but not vice versa). VP3 video compression can be decoded using Theora implementations, but Theora video compression usually cannot be decoded using old VP3 implementations.
Origin
The predecessor On2 TrueMotion VP3 was originally a proprietaryProprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
and patented video codec
Video codec
A video codec is a device or software that enables video compression and/or decompression for digital video. The compression usually employs lossy data compression. Historically, video was stored as an analog signal on magnetic tape...
developed by On2 Technologies
On2 Technologies
On2 Technologies , formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly-traded company , headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that designs video codec technology. They created a series of video codecs called TrueMotion...
. VP3.1 was introduced in May 2000 followed three months later by the VP3.2 release, which is the basis for Theora. In August 2001, On2 Technologies announced that they would be releasing an open source version of their VP3.2 video compression algorithm. In September 2001 they published the source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
and open source license for VP3.2 video compression algorithm at www.vp3.com. The VP3.2 Public License 0.1 granted the right to modify the source code only if the resulting larger work continued to support playback of VP3.2 data.
Move to free software
In March 2002, On2 altered licensing terms required to download the source code for VP3 to LGPL. In June 2002 On2 donated VP3 to the Xiph.Org Foundation under a BSD-like open sourceOpen source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
license. On2 also made an irrevocable, royalty-free license grant for any patent claims it might have over the software and any derivatives, allowing anyone to use any VP3-derived codec for any purpose. In August 2002, On2 entered into an agreement with the Xiph.Org Foundation to make VP3 the basis of a new, free video codec, called Theora. On2 declared Theora to be the successor in VP3's lineage. On October 3, 2002 On2 and Xiph announced the completion and availability of the initial alpha code release of Theora (libtheora). The libtheora reference implementation reached its alpha 2 milestone on June 9, 2003 and alpha 3 on March 20, 2004.
There is no formal specification for the VP3 bitstream format
Bitstream format
A bitstream format is the format of the data found in some stream of bits used in a digital communication or data storage application. The term typically refers to the format of the output of an encoder or the format of the input to a decoder when using data compression.Standardized...
beyond the VP3 source code published by On2 Technologies. In 2003, Mike Melanson created an incomplete description of the VP3 bitstream format and decoding process at a higher level than source code, with some help from On2 and Xiph.Org Foundation. The Theora specification adopted some portions of this VP3 description.
Theora I specification
The Theora I bitstream format was frozenFreeze (software engineering)
In software engineering, a freeze is a point in time in the development process after which the rules for making changes to the source code or related resources become more strict, or the period during which those rules are applied...
in June 2004 after the libtheora 1.0alpha3 release. Videos encoded with any version of the libtheora since the alpha3 will be compatible with any future player. This is also true for videos encoded with any implementation of the Theora I specification since the format freeze. The Theora I Specification was completely published in 2004. Any later changes in the specification are minor updates.
The Theora reference implementation libtheora spent several years in alpha and beta status. The last alpha version was libtheora 1.0alpha7 released on June 20, 2006. It was followed by libtheora 1.0 beta1 on September 22, 2007. The last beta version was libtheora 1.0 beta3 released on April 16, 2008. The first stable release of libtheora as version 1.0 was made in November 2008. Work then focused on improving the codec performance in the "Thusnelda" branch, which was released as version 1.1 in September 2009 as the second stable libtheora release. This release brought some technical improvements and new features, e.g. the new rate control module and the new two-pass rate control.
The codename for the next version of Theora reference implementation (libtheora) is Ptalarbvorm.
Theora is well established as a video format in open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
applications, and is the format used for Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
's video content. However, the proposed adoption of Theora as part of the baseline video support in HTML5 resulted in controversy.
Encoding performance
Evaluations of the VP3and early Theora encoders
found their subjective visual quality was inferior to contemporary video codecs. More recently however, Xiph developers have compared the 1.1 Theora encoder to YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
's H.264 and H.263+ encoders, in response to concerns raised in 2009 about Theora's inferior performance by Chris DiBona
Chris DiBona
Chris DiBona is the open source and public sector engineering manager at Google. His team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches on Google...
, a Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
employee. They found the results from Theora to be nearly the same as YouTube's H.264 output, and much better than the H.263+ output.
The performance characteristics of the Theora 1.0 reference implementation are dominated mostly by implementation problems inherited from the original VP3 code base. Work leading up to the 1.1 stable release was focused on improving on or eliminating these. A May 2009 review of this work shows a considerable improvement in quality, both subjectively and as measured by PSNR, just by improving the forward DCT
Discrete cosine transform
A discrete cosine transform expresses a sequence of finitely many data points in terms of a sum of cosine functions oscillating at different frequencies. DCTs are important to numerous applications in science and engineering, from lossy compression of audio and images A discrete cosine transform...
and quantisation matrices. A flaw in the version of FFmpeg
FFmpeg
FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...
used in the test initially led to incorrect reports of Theora PSNR surpassing that of H.264
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...
. Although not achieving this goal, the improvement in the measured PSNR and the perceived quality is considerable. In any case, the differences in quality, bitrate and file size between a YouTube H.264 video and a transcoded Ogg video file are negligible. Further work on adaptive quantization, as well as overall detailed subjective tuning of the codec, is still to come.
Playback performance
There is an open sourceOpen source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
VHDL code base for a hardware
Hardware
Hardware is a general term for equipment such as keys, locks, hinges, latches, handles, wire, chains, plumbing supplies, tools, utensils, cutlery and machine parts. Household hardware is typically sold in hardware stores....
Theora decoder in development. It began as a 2006 Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
Summer of Code project, and it has been developed on both the Nios II
Nios II
Nios II is a 32-bit embedded-processor architecture designed specifically for the Altera family of FPGAs. Nios II incorporates many enhancements over the original Nios architecture, making it more suitable for a wider range of embedded computing applications, from DSP to system-control.Nios II is...
and LEON
LEON
LEON is a 32-bit CPU microprocessor core, based on the SPARC-V8 RISC architecture and instruction set. It was originally designed by the European Space Research and Technology Centre , part of the European Space Agency , and after that by Gaisler Research. It is described in synthesizable VHDL...
processors. However there are currently no Theora decoder chips in production, and portable media player
Portable media player
A portable media player or digital audio player, is a consumer electronics device that is capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, video, documents, etc. the data is typically stored on a hard drive, microdrive, or flash memory. In contrast, analog portable audio...
s, smartphones and similar devices with limited computing power rely on such chips to provide efficient playback. However since decoding Theora is less CPU intensive than decoding H.264, the need for hardware acceleration may be somewhat obviated.
Native browser playback
As originally recommended by HTML 5HTML 5
HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, and is a core technology of the Internet originally proposed by Opera Software. It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard and is still under development...
, these browsers support Theora when embedded by the
video element:- Mozilla Firefox 3.5Mozilla Firefox 3.5Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is a version of the Firefox web browser released in June 2009, adding a variety of new features to Firefox. Version 3.5 was touted as being twice as fast as 3.0...
and later versions including Firefox for mobile (Fennec). - Google ChromeGoogle ChromeGoogle Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...
as of version 3.0.182.2 including ChromiumChromium (web browser)Chromium is the open source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code. The project's hourly Chromium snapshots appear essentially similar to the latest builds of Google Chrome aside from the omission of certain Google additions, most noticeable among them: Google's...
as of 14 July 2009. - SeaMonkeySeaMonkeySeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...
as of version 2.0. - KonquerorKonquerorNot to be confused with the Conqueror web browser.Konqueror is a web browser and file manager that provides file-viewer functionality for file systems such as local files, files on a remote ftp server and files in a disk image. It is a core part of the KDE desktop environment...
4.4.2 - OperaOpera (web browser)Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...
as of version 10.50. It was also supported in Opera 9.5 experimental video builds. - EpiphanyEpiphany (web browser)Epiphany is an open source web browser for the GNOME desktop environment. The browser is a descendant of Galeon, and was created after developer disagreements about Galeon's growing complexity...
uses WebKitGTK+ as its rendering engine from 2.28.0 onwards. WebKitGTK+ uses GStreamerGStreamerGStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework written in the C programming language with the type system based on GObject.GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback, recording, streaming and editing...
to implement the HTML5 media player, and thus provides the same support as it does. Midori is another example of browser that supports Theora by using WebKitGTK+.
Browser plugins
- AnnodexAnnodexAnnodex is a digital media format developed by CSIRO to provide annotation and indexing of continuous media, such as audio and video.It is based on the Ogg container format, with an XML language called CMML providing additional metadata...
plugin via OggPlay - CortadoCortado (software)Cortado is a streaming Java applet for Ogg formats Vorbis, Theora and Kate, µ-law, MJPEG and Smoke , released under the GPL. With Cortado a webpage can be set up to download the applet on the fly in the background, providing embedded support for Ogg based media in Java-enabled web browsers without...
, a JavaJava (programming language)Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
based appletAppletIn computing, an applet is any small application that performs one specific task that runs within the scope of a larger program, often as a plug-in. An applet typically also refers to Java applets, i.e., programs written in the Java programming language that are included in a web page...
- Itheora, a PHP wrapper for Cortado
- Mv Embed HTML 5 video tag wrapper for numerous plugin types.
- VLC media playerVLC media playerVLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project.VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to...
browser plugin for IE or Firefox
Supporting media frameworks
- DirectShowDirectShowDirectShow , codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's earlier Video for Windows technology...
with use of DirectShow filters - GStreamerGStreamerGStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework written in the C programming language with the type system based on GObject.GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback, recording, streaming and editing...
supported via Theora or FFmpeg module, supports GStreamer based applications e.g. TotemTotem (media player)Totem is a media player for the GNOME computer desktop environment which runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, BSD and other Unix and Unix-like systems. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10 , but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments...
and SongbirdSongbird (software)Songbird is a free and open source software audio player and web browser, with a stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web."... - PhononPhonon (KDE)Phonon is the multimedia API provided by Qt and is the standard abstraction for handling multimedia streams within the KDE Software Compilation 4....
- QuickTimeQuickTimeQuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
(including but not limited to Safari) with use of Xiph QuickTime Components - Silverlight Highgate media suite is going to bring an Open Source Theora/Vorbis implementation in Silverlight. It will enable installation-free support for HTML5 streaming video.
Supporting applications
- FFmpegFFmpegFFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...
(own implementation) - Helix PlayerHelix projectHelix DNA is a project to produce software that can play audio and video media in various formats, aid in producing such media, and serve them over a network. It is intended as a largely free and open source digital media framework that runs on numerous operating systems and processors and was...
- Miro Media Player (formerly known as Democracy PlayerDemocracy PlayerMiro is an Internet television application developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation. It is supported on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux...
) - MPlayerMPlayerMPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor...
and front-ends - SongbirdSongbird (software)Songbird is a free and open source software audio player and web browser, with a stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web."...
, TotemTotem (media player)Totem is a media player for the GNOME computer desktop environment which runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, BSD and other Unix and Unix-like systems. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10 , but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments...
, Moovida and all GStreamerGStreamerGStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework written in the C programming language with the type system based on GObject.GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback, recording, streaming and editing...
-based players - VLCVLC media playerVLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project.VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to...
(native support) - xineXinexine is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. xine is built around a shared library that supports different frontend player applications. Another important feature of xine is the ability to manually correct the synchronization...
and all libxine-based players like KaffeineKaffeineKaffeine is a media player for Unix-like operating systems running KDE.By default it uses xine-lib media framework but also supports GStreamer. It also supports the use of MPlayer project's binary codecs for proprietary formats... - Dragon player and all Phonon-based players
Encoding
There are several third-party programs that support encoding through libtheora:| Name | Description | Operating Systems Supported | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unix-like | Mac OS X | Windows | ||
Firefogg |
A Firefox browser extension implementation of ffmpeg2theora | |||
ffmpeg2theora |
A command-line program that transcodes video by decoding with FFmpeg FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line... and reencoding with libtheora to encode it |
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VLC VLC media player VLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project.VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to... |
Can transcode to single-pass Theora 1.0 and optionally stream it | |||
OggConvert OggConvert OggConvert is an Open source tool, released under the GNU LGPL, for converting audio and video files of various types into the free Ogg Vorbis audio format, and the Theora, VP8 and Dirac video formats. It supports Ogg, Matroska and WebM containers for output. It is developed by a single author,... |
Transcodes supported media to Vorbis, Theora, or Dirac | ? | ||
FreeJ FreeJ FreeJ is a modular video mixer for GNU/Linux systems. It is marketed as a "vision mixer". It is capable of real-time video manipulation, for amateur and professional uses. It can be used as an instrument in the fields of dance theater, veejaying, medical visualisation and TV... |
"Video DJing" software that can encode to and stream Theora | ? | ||
Kdenlive Kdenlive Kdenlive is an open source video editing software package based on the MLT Framework that focuses on flexibility and ease of use... |
The video editor supplied with KDE KDE KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems... |
? | ? | |
PiTiVi PiTiVi PiTiVi is a open source non-linear video editor developed by Collabora and contributors from the worldwide community. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. PiTiVi is designed to be intuitive video editing software that integrates well in the GNOME desktop... |
The video editor supplied with GNOME GNOME GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software... |
? | ? | |
LiVES LiVES LiVES is a free software video editing software and VJ tool, released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. There are binary versions available for most popular Linux distributions... |
Video editing software for Linux. Can edit, encode and stream theora. | ? | ||
Thoggen Thoggen Thoggen is a DVD ripper for Linux within the GNOME project. It is based on GStreamer and Gtk+. Thoggen can back up DVDs by re-encoding them using the Ogg Theora video codec.Thoggen is designed to be easy and straightforward to use... |
A GTK+ and GStreamer GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework written in the C programming language with the type system based on GObject.GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback, recording, streaming and editing... based DVD backup utility |
? | ? | |
HandBrake HandBrake HandBrake is a general-purpose, open-source, cross-platform, multithreaded video transcoder software application. HandBrake was originally developed by titer in 2003 as a general-purpose video transcoder to make ripping a film from a DVD to a data storage device easier... |
Can output to Theora only with the Matroska Matroska The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks in one file. It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows... container |
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Recordmydesktop RecordMyDesktop RecordMyDesktop is a free and open source desktop screencasting software application written for GNU/Linux. The program is separated into two parts; a command line tool that performs the tasks of capturing and encoding, and an interface that exposes the program functionality graphically... |
Records the screen to Ogg Theora with optional Vorbis audio | ? | ? |
The libtheora library contains the reference implementation of the Theora specification for encoding and decoding. libtheora is still under development by the Xiph.Org Foundation
Xiph.Org Foundation
Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit organizationthat produces free multimedia formats and software tools. It focuses on the Ogg family of formats, the most successful of which has been Vorbis, an open and freely licensed audio format and codec designed to compete with the patented MP3 and AAC...
. The library is released under the terms of a BSD-style license
BSD licenses
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses. The original license was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix-like operating system after which it is named....
.
Also, several media frameworks have support for Theora.
- The open-source ffdshowFfdshowffdshow is a media decoder and encoder mainly used for the fast and high-quality decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP and AVC formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as well...
audio/video decoder is capable of encoding Theora videos using its Video for WindowsVideo for WindowsVideo for Windows was a multimedia framework developed by Microsoft that allowed Microsoft Windows to play digital video.-Overview:...
(VFW) multi-codec interface within popular AVI editing programs. It supports both encoding and decoding Theora video streams and uses Theora's alpha 4 libraries. However, many of the more refined features of Theora aren't available to the user in ffdshow's interface. - The GStreamerGStreamerGStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework written in the C programming language with the type system based on GObject.GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback, recording, streaming and editing...
framework has support for parsing raw Theora streams, encoding and decoding raw Theora streams to/from YUV video
Editing
| Name | Description | Operating Systems Supported | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unix-like | Mac OS X | Windows | ||
LiVES LiVES LiVES is a free software video editing software and VJ tool, released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. There are binary versions available for most popular Linux distributions... |
Video editing software for Linux. Can edit, encode and stream theora. | ? | ||
Kdenlive Kdenlive Kdenlive is an open source video editing software package based on the MLT Framework that focuses on flexibility and ease of use... |
The KDE KDE KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems... video editor. |
? | ? | |
OpenShot OpenShot Video Editor OpenShot Video Editor is open-source, video editing software package for Linux, built with Python, GTK, and the MLT Framework. The project was started in August 2008 by Jonathan Thomas, with the objective to provide a stable, free, and friendly to use video editor.-OpenShot features:* Support for... |
? | ? | ||
PiTiVi PiTiVi PiTiVi is a open source non-linear video editor developed by Collabora and contributors from the worldwide community. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. PiTiVi is designed to be intuitive video editing software that integrates well in the GNOME desktop... |
The GNOME GNOME GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software... video editor. |
? | ? | |
Cinelerra Cinelerra Cinelerra is prosumer video editing software. It is designed for the GNU/Linux operating system. It is produced by Heroine Virtual, and is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License... |
CVS Concurrent Versions System The Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ... versions of the Cinelerra Cinelerra Cinelerra is prosumer video editing software. It is designed for the GNU/Linux operating system. It is produced by Heroine Virtual, and is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License... non-linear video editing system Non-linear editing system In video, a non-linear editing system is a video editing or audio editing digital audio workstation system which can perform random access non-destructive editing on the source material... support Theora, as of August 2005. |
? | ||
oggz-tools by Xiph.org |
Command line programs to examine and edit Ogg files. | ? | ||
Ogg Video Tools by yornstreamnik |
Tools to resize, cut, split, join, and others | |||
AVS Video Editor AVS Video Editor AVS Video Editor is a shareware video editing software tool produced by Online Media Technologies Ltd., the direct vendor of multimedia video and audio solutions, UK. The program is intended for those who are new to video editing, it also is a real-time, timeline-based video editing software... |
? | ? |
Streaming
The following streaming media servers are capable of streaming Theora video:| Name | Description | Operating Systems Supported | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unix-like | Mac OS X | Windows | ||
VLC VLC media player VLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project.VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to... |
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Icecast Icecast Icecast is a streaming media project released as free software maintained by the Xiph.org Foundation. It also refers specifically to the server program which is part of the project. Icecast was created in December 1998/January 1999 by Jack Moffitt and Barath Raghavan to provide an open source... |
? | |||
FreeCast FreeCast FreeCast is a free software application which allows peer-to-peer streaming, sometimes called peercasting. It makes possible an audio or video stream broadcast to a large number of listeners from a simple DSL connection.... |
Peer-to-peer streaming. Written in Java Java (programming language) Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities... |
? | ||
LiVES LiVES LiVES is a free software video editing software and VJ tool, released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. There are binary versions available for most popular Linux distributions... |
Can stream ogg/theora/vorbis in realtime to a file or fifo. | ? | ||
Flumotion Flumotion Flumotion Services, S.A. is a Spanish company based in Barcelona, which has developed a multiformat streaming media platform to publish audio and video content via the internet... |
Streaming media server. | ? | ? |
http://gollum.artefacte.org/tss Theora Streaming Studio is a complete client to connect to an Icecast
Icecast
Icecast is a streaming media project released as free software maintained by the Xiph.org Foundation. It also refers specifically to the server program which is part of the project. Icecast was created in December 1998/January 1999 by Jack Moffitt and Barath Raghavan to provide an open source...
server.
See also
- Dirac (codec)Dirac (codec)Dirac is an open and royalty-free video compression format, specification and system developed by BBC Research at the BBC. Schrödinger and dirac-research are open and royalty-free software implementations of Dirac...
- Video editing softwareVideo editing softwareVideo editing software, is application software which handles the post-production video editing of digital video sequences on a computer non-linear editing systems...
- Comparison of video codecsComparison of video codecsA video codec is software or a device that provides encoding and decoding which may or may not include the use of video compression and/or decompression for digital video....
- Comparison of video encodersComparison of video encoders-General information:-Features:-Supported Import Codecs:-Supported Export Codecs:-Related lists on other projects:* :m:Open Source Toolset - short sections on Audio editing and Video editing* Software - short lists of Ogg audio and video editors...