Advogato blog for rillian

31 Dec 2009

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:53:28 GMT

Opera has a new experimental build with Theora and Vorbis HTML5 support.

Philip Jägenstedt has a nice blog post explaining what's new.

23 Dec 2009

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 05:14:41 GMT

Today I tried installing the experimental R600/700 3D drivers for Fedora 12. Surprisingly, nothing much broke. And now I have compiz, yay! Like the clutter gdm screen, it's a bit too slow though.

Unfortunately, blender seems to be slower than it was under software rendering. sigh.

17 Nov 2009

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:12:06 GMT

In the Future, we will embed machine images in our Ogg files, which, when booted and given network access to the other multiplexed data will decode, render, and export the results data in a variety of JSON responses.

24 Aug 2009

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:40:29 GMT

Cute demonstration of chrominance vs luminance sensitivity in the human visual system. With source code!

21 Aug 2009

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:21:31 GMT

State of theora

Monty has posted another of his excellent technical updates on the theora encoder rewrite which has been ongoing for more than a year now. It's a good summary of what went into the recent beta releases.

We still have a bit to go before the final 1.1 though; the new rate control still behaves badly on a some clips.

The complete set of status reports:

Part 1 early 2008
Part 2 2008 March 20
Part 3 2008 June 5
Part 4 2008 July 3
Part 5 2008 July 24
Part 6 2009 April 2
Part 7 2009 May 7
Part 8 2009 August 20

3 Apr 2009

Fri, 3 Apr 2009 23:01:46 GMT

State of theora

Yesterday Monty has posted another status update on the new theora encoder. It's a good summary of what went into the recent 1.1 alpha release, and what there is still to do.

The complete set of status reports:

Part 1 early 2008
Part 2 2008 March 20
Part 3 2008 June 5
Part 4 2008 July 3
Part 5 2008 July 24
Part 6 2009 April 2

18 Apr 2008

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:04:05 GMT

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

60 ls
59 cd
52 svn
44 nano
40 make
26 less
26 fgrep
14 wget
11 host
10 rm

Yeah, pretty much.

5 Mar 2008

Wed, 5 Mar 2008 00:48:56 GMT

Commentary commentary

Lawrence Lessig recently posted a summary on the fsfe-uk list about problems that were blocking Theora adoption. Here's a rebuttal, for what it's worth.

His first point, that Theora isn't technically competitive with the lastest batch of encoders for the encumbered MPEG codecs, is entirely true. From Xiph's point of view is that that's a little like saying there's no point in using Linux because it doesn't work as well as Windows, but the technical disparity does need to be addressed.

Monty and Derf have been working on a new encoder the past few months, but there's nothing to show yet. We believe the Theora format has scope to offer similar compression efficiency to h.263 with less complexity. Beyond that, we look to the BBC's Dirac. But in the absence of software to prove the capabilities of the format, one has to take our word, as well as being interested in long term planning, for that to be a meaningful argument.

His second point, about people believing Theora is patented is just FUD as far as I know. We're not aware of any patents. The original developer of the VP3 format which became theora grants rights to any patents they might have on the implementation. Submarine patents are of course always possible, but they affect MPEG and Microsoft codecs just as much as independent designs.

I've heard this argument from two different directions. First from corporations who have already bet on one of the MPEG codecs and want to dissuade any competition, and second from Free Software people, who don't understand how patents work, shrug, say it's all equally bad, and then get behind the proprietary technology.

What happened with the html5 flame fest was that some corporations said they didn't feel the current demand for web content in royalty-free formats justified the additional exposure implementing them would create. That's true so far as it goes, but a very specific statement about their own interests and hardly a reason for anyone else to eschew royalty free formats.

There was a lot of talk at the recent FOMS meeting about how to address the FUD issue and educate the free community about patents. Hopefully some public documentation will come of it. It's been quite difficult to find legal counsel who understands the FLOSS development model well enough to toss ALL the traditional wisdom about patent risk out the window: namely to never do or say anything at all.

All that said, I completely agree with the recommendation that we get people talking. It can only help. Free software can't compete with the installed base of flash video at this point, but we should all be working to offer an alternative for those who can use it, and prepare the toolchain so we can provide the greatest support for software and creative freedom in the next round of web video.

4 Mar 2008

Tue, 4 Mar 2008 01:36:40 GMT

The planet aggregator needs an advogato style trust metric for deciding which feeds to include. Solves that nasty maintainer bottleneck problem.

14 Jan 2008

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:56:43 GMT

Ogg podcast feed for Cory Doctorow's reading of Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown about events leading to the formation of the EFF.

CC BY-NC-SA.