Wikipedia to roll out video using Ogg Theora
By Michael W. Jones
Wikipedia is getting ready to roll out their long-awaited video component, but their selection of Ogg Theora as a format bucks the current trend of using H.264 as a video standard.
Wikipedia’s entry on Ogg Theora opens with “Theora is an open and royalty-free lossy video compression technology being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation as part of their Ogg project. Based upon On2 Technologies’ VP3 codec, Theora competes with MPEG-4, WMV, and similar low-bitrate video compression schemes.” It is that “competes with” clause near the end of the sentence that may cause problems.
It is important to Wikipedia, of course, that their video services consist of open source components. It is also critical the the video software chosen is able to treat video in the same way that their Wiki software treats articles. And that means that the chosen video software must allow for downloading, remixing, and re-uploading, all without licensing fees. For all of these reasons, Wikipedia chose Ogg Theora.
That selection does, however, buck the recent video codec selection trends in the industry, according to a CNET story. Both Google and Apple have embraced the H.264 codec, about which Wikipedia has this to say: “H.264/AVC is the latest block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), and it was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content.”
That codec apparently was just not open enough for the folks at Wikipedia, and the basics of H.264 do not allow for downloading, editing, and re-uploading in any native manner. It is unfortunate though, that a wide variety of modern video hardware, including mobile hardware, directly supports H.264 decoding, which takes a lot of the processing load off the device’s min CPU. Support for H.264 has been growing and it was beginning to be sen as an emerging standard.
Still, very few sites have broader usage than Wikipedia. They are therefore one of a few 800-pound Gorillas in every Web room. It is very hard for anyone to ignore what Wikipedia does in an area as critical as video. Their decision to use Ogg Theora may well reopen the search for a single video standard for all common Web uses. Only time will tell.
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July 19th, 2009
It’s also unfortunate to have reduced functionality and degraded quality because of deep pocketed media companies paying off law makers and regulatory bodies.