Mozilla and Xiph's new Daala video codec to compete with h.265

by mtgx • 14 years ago

95 52 14 years ago

I'm a bit out of the loop, but what was wrong with Theora?

Daalas goal "is to provide a free to implement, use and distribute digital media format and reference implementation with technical performance superior to h.265."

Wasn't that exactly what Theora was as well?

jfb2• 14 years ago

Well, Theora wasn't, was the problem.

Avshalom• 14 years ago

mostly theora lost it's momentum because during the web video "debate" there were many articles shitting on theora for not having hardware support and being slightly to fairly worse in various cases.

and now they need a new attempt to get people back on the open codec wagon.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

Since H.265 doesn't (?) have hardware decoders yet, maybe Daala will have a fair chance competing.

Xcelerate2• 14 years ago

Theora was never very good. Not really the fault of its creators -- rather, all the good methods of compression are being hoarded by patent trolls (MPEG LA and friends), even though most of the methods are obvious. I believe this new attempt at a codec will also face the same issues.

nullc5• 14 years ago

>rather, all the good methods of compression are being hoarded by patent trolls

Nah, that is simply untrue. Theora was designed in the late _90s_ and targets a different computational envelope than AVC— it's pretty darn good compared to MPEG-2 (or even MPEG4 part-2/DivX) which are more contemporary.

Today there is a much large computational budget available, plus new experience and understanding.

butterflyhug• 14 years ago

H.264 != H.265. Theora tried to compete with the former, Daala will try to compete with the latter.

shmerl2• 14 years ago

Theora can't compete with H.264. If something, VP8 could.

jfb2• 14 years ago

I'd be interested in some documentation. I wish them luck.

netvarun• 14 years ago

Obligatory XKCD link: http://xkcd.com/927/

tete• 14 years ago

A codec isn't exactly(!) a standard.

Klinky5• 14 years ago

I am going to have to say that MPEG-4, and specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 and MPEG-4 Part 10 are indeed video encoding standards. The different individual parts even have their own ISO numbers.

Thus I do feel the "relevant XKCD comic" is relevant, even if some find the posting of such comics annoying.

ldng• 14 years ago

Well it is different. The aim is not competing standard here but rather unencumbered alternative so to me that XKCD comic isn't very relevant.

aniket_ray• 14 years ago

On the contrary, is very relevant and this joke is an old one used many times in the codec community.

Theora was supposed to be the unencumbered alternative, then it was VP8 and now it's Daala. Unfortunately, all these and even closed/patented codecs have just muddied the waters rather than being the "alternative" that solves it all.

Getting adoption of codecs is much harder in today's world than it ever was. The online, mobile and browse worlds are so divided than no company would ever want to give another an advantage by adopting the other companies codec.

tommyka• 14 years ago

I don't see how they should have a better chance of adoption than Web.M which I havnt seen much support and usage since Google announced it.

pnathan• 14 years ago

IMO, Mozilla has a better trust with people than Google.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

I think it can beat h.264 in the same way h.264 beat DivX and others. We will soon have to switch to a new, more efficient codec anyway, and why not switch to a free and open source one like Daala or VP9, especially if they end up better than h.265?

h.264 won over VP8 because VP8 came too late, and it was unfinished and not even that good when Google bought it. By the time Google made it on par with h.264, h.264 already won the format war. But with a new format war coming up soon, and with other codecs like Daala and VP9 being ready to compete (hopefully) from day one, h.265 might not be the default option as h.264 was.

Also I think all new chips that came out this year had hardware acceleration support for VP8, and most media players support it now, too, as well as WebRTC. So even if h.265 wins again, hardware manufacturers may also support at least one of these open source codecs in the future, alongside h.265.

shardling• 14 years ago

The problem with WebM seems to be that even Google didn't embrace it.

I've seen a lot of speculation that they invested in it mainly to have more leverage when negotiating with the H.264 folk.

kevingadd2• 14 years ago

More details: http://wiki.xiph.org/Daala

ksec• 14 years ago

Well it is not very new as it has been discussed for a while. But at least now more people knows about it.

But as the recent Reference Implementation has shown H.265 is moving ahead faster then the previous H.264 has happened. Its quality is already quite good, and many manufacturers are ready to show their Encoder and Decoder in CES.

So for both Software and Hardware Encoder, they are waiting for the final draft and final validation before making them for sale.

VP9 is finally shaping up to be good. VP8 was never up to x.264 encoder standard. At least VP9 is making some quality improvement. But most of the current VP9 material just reads like marketing BS.

While i would love to see Daala, or a codec from Mozilla rather then Google to succeed. It is just not going to happen. Mozilla has never been known for fast moving, and the amount of engineering required for a Video Codec is just huge. Even Google couldn't pull it off. And i doubt Mozilla can. Since Daala is still in research stage and it would take at least 2 year before anything done. By the time H.265 is already well ahead.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

I wonder why they feel the need to create a completely new open source video codec, though. Can't they just collaborate with Google on VP9? Or is their technology fundamentally different? Or maybe they think Google is controlling VP9 development more than they should. Was it a technical or political decision?

dietrichepp2• 14 years ago

This is basically the same way that standards like H.264 get developed. A bunch of people have good ideas, make reference implementations, and get together and choose one (or mix and match). If you skip the last step, you end up with multiple standards instead of one. Which is fine. It's less work.

See: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/360

I don't think there's a problem with creating new codecs. It's not that rare to get new codecs, and there are a lot of good reasons to create new codecs. Besides codecs like H.264, Theora, and VP8, there are also ones like FFV1, Dirac, Snow, Apple ProRes, and Apple Intermediate Codec. These can fill specific needs not met by H.264 or they can be used for research.

However, that's not all. VP8 was a bit of a mess when it was released. I'm sure VP9 will be better, but the VP8 spec was little more than a reference implementation. Bugs in the reference implementation therefore get baked into the spec. Xiph.org has more experience producing viable compression specs than Google, so if I were them, I wouldn't camp out under the Google brand if I were making a new video codec.

If anything, we should be asking why Google didn't just collaborate with Xiph for VP8. That's not to say Xiph hasn't screwed some things up too, like the Ogg container format, but at least they make it easier on people writing competing implementations.

espadrine• 14 years ago

> While i would love to see Daala, or a codec from Mozilla rather then Google to succeed. It is just not going to happen. Mozilla has never been known for fast moving, and the amount of engineering required for a Video Codec is just huge.

Clearly Mozilla and Xiph couldn't, in your world, have pulled off an audio codec that blows everything away. Oh, wait, they did!

http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/

zanny3• 14 years ago

I can't encode my video files or music with Opus because you can't arbitrarily seek the track without backing up around 80ms and playing back up to the point where I want. So it isn't available in webm containers yet for that reason.

graue• 14 years ago

Worth noting they also got Opus standardized through the IETF[1] and, furthermore, it's mandatory to implement in the WebRTC spec[2]. So Opus is not only technically superior to other audio codecs, it's also better situated politically than Xiph.org's past efforts (eg. Vorbis, which sounds great but never really achieved relevance).

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716

[2] http://jmspeex.livejournal.com/11042.html

pretoriusB2• 14 years ago

>Clearly Mozilla and Xiph couldn't, in your world, have pulled off an audio codec that blows everything away. Oh, wait, they did!

Clearly, in your misplaced sarcasm, you didn't read what he wrote. He didn't say anything about Mozilla being unable to write a codec that "blows everything away".

He wrote that Mozilla couldn't make that codec a _successful standard_. And, oh wait, they did not.

Even Opus (re: WebRTC) is a standard, but not successful at all, and it probably would not go anywhere.

Oh, and I would take the BS marketing page from Opus with a grain of salt, too, re: blowing everything away.

shmerl2• 14 years ago

How does it compare to VP8?

Mozilla and Xiph's new Daala video codec to compete with h.265

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