<videovortex> Fwd: breakthrough for open video on the web

[Geert Lovink]

> Resent-From: nettime at kein.org
> From: Florian Schneider <fls at kein.org>
> Date: 2 August 2008 2:05:18 PM
> Resent-To: Nettime <nettime-l at kein.org>
> To: nettime-l at kein.org
> Subject: <nettime> breakthrough for open video on the web
>
> It was my last day  at ISEA 2008 in Singapore and we were supposed to
> have a dinner with noborder/no one is illegal activists and the
> panelists of the bordercrossing theme, when jaromil came down the  
> street
> smiling all over the face: "I have great news" he screamed.  
> "Firefox 3.1
> wil support OGG Theora!"
>
> In other words: This is most likely the breakthrough for open video on
> the web! OGG THEORA is the only open source video erncoding suite.  
> It is
> available for general use after the bitstream format for Theora was
> frozen Thursday, 2004 July 1. <http://theora.org>
>
> Native support in Firefox means that end-users on proprietary  
> platforms
> like windows or mac do no longer have to install additional  
> software in
> order to watch OGG encoded video. If you want to publish a video you
> can  just use the <video> tag like for any image. There is no need for
> additional  javascript or flash!
>
> Slashdot writes:
> <http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/31/1752206&from=rss>
> "Ogg Theora support for the HTML5 <video> tag is in the Firefox 3.1
> nightlies. Theora is the only video format allowed on Wikimedia  
> Commons,
> so Wikimedia people are pushing Wikipedia readers to download a  
> nightly
> and try it out. Break it, crash it, report bugs, get it into good  
> shape
> and nullify Apple and Nokia's FUD the best way possible. They may have
> gotten the words 'Vorbis' and 'Theora' removed from the HTML5 spec,  
> but
> the market will tell them when their browsers are sucking."
>
> Christopher Blizzard wrote in his blog
> <http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=492> "Mozilla is committing to
> include native support for OGG video and audio in its next release  
> that
> includes support for the video element tag. (Very likely to be Firefox
> 3.1 if there no huge change in course.) The code landed for ogg  
> support
> last night. I suspect that the effects of this will take a long  
> while to
> be felt but it’s a great first step in bringing open video to the  
> web by
> delivering it to a couple hundred million people around the world."
>
> At KEIN.ORG and in many related projects (like the "Dictionary of  
> War")
> we have been insisting on the use of an open video compression format
> for many years now. Despite all the complaints about additional  
> software
> installations it seemed crucial to us to give proove of the
> possibility to
> publish digital video without the licensing and royalty fees or vendor
> lock-in associated with proprietary formats.
>
> In summer 2003 we started the open source video platform V2V
> <http://v2v.cc> which is entirely based on open source code. Ralph
> Giles, the maintainer of the THEORA project, was one of the  
> speakers at
> "NEURO -- networking europe" <http://neuro.kein.org> in Munich in
> February 2004. Some months later Jan Gerber has developed  
> ffmpeg2theora
> <http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora> a simple converter to create Ogg  
> Theora
> files.
>
> I am looking forward very much to a wide range of new projects and
> initiatives which may come up now. For example jaromils video mixing
> software FreeJ seems a great tool with huge potential: <http://
> freej.org>
>
> Let's build an open video alliance!
>
> very best,
> florian
>
>
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