DVD (video) and Fedora

[Martin Sourada]

On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 07:14 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> King InuYasha wrote:
> > Apparently, Fedora DOES expect that... Or somehow magically play DVDs in 
> > Ogg formats.
> > 
> > I have two things against Ogg formats:
> > 1) Not well used outside purist communities
> > 2) Theora has horrible quality compared to other video codecs.
> > 
> > I do though, like Ogg Vorbis and use it regularly.
> 
> 1) Firefox, Epiphany, Opera etc will play Theora by default in their 
> next major release. Native video support without the need for plugins is 
>   big deal and will push more people to generate that type of content
> 
Now, that's something I personally don't approve off. It's precisely the
same case as with your HW media player saying it will play only mp3's.
From what I heard, firefox will play *only* theora and/or vorbis in ogg
container, while webkit can play whatever gstreamer supports (which is
IMHO the right thing to do). I don't mind promoting free libre open
source codecs and formats, but this way of promoting is in my opinion
bad. Also it bans away all other FLOSS codecs/containers like matroska,
dirac or flac. Whither hath the choice gone?

> 2) Red Hat via Monty is working on improving the quality.
> 
> http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html
> 
> For a lot of web content, it is already good enough. Anything more and 
> we will run into patent issues again.
> 
Last time I tried, theora was second to h264 in terms of
quality/compression while dirac lagged behind. Having said that, I think
both need more work to be real competitors in real life, one of which is
flawless support in matroska (there are still some players that won't
play those even though both theora and dirac are officially supported by
the matroska container). Because due to its superiority, both in
features and design, to both ogg and avi, matroska is probably the
second most used container for video and growing, and in some areas it
is even the most important player. 

We cannot expect people to throw the features of matroska away and start
using ogg, I think they'd rather start promoting webkit based browsers
(in linux midori or epiphany, in windows google chrome, in mac safari).

> Rahul
> 
Martin

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