I’m passionate about Theora. I want it to rule the Internet. The main thing that makes me confident that it will eventually do so is that it’s free. A lot of computer games now use Ogg Vorbis, the audio codec, internally because it gives great quality and doesn’t cost the company a dime to use it. When companies realize that they can stream Theora without paying an MPEG tax, I think they’ll start switching.

But some extra things need to heppen if we really want Theora to go mainstream. First, of course, Theora needs to keep getting better. If you’re good with video compression, you might want to volunteer to help improve it. Another thing is that major streaming video centers need to adopt it. Dailymotion already has, and I hope YouTube will. Browsers need to adopt it, too. For the most part they are: Firefox already has, and the next versions of Chrome and Opera will, as well. Safari can use Theora if you install the XiphQT plugins for QuickTime.

Some myths also need to be dispelled. First, yes, Theora is ready. It’s a good codec; not the best codec, but then, JPEG isn’t the best image format, either. But they get the job done, everybody can use them, and they don’t cost a dime.

Secondly, one thing that I think will make many people and companies hesitate about direct <video> embedding of any kind is that it will be easy to download them. But the fact is that it’s never been hard. Anything sent over the Internet can be captured en route — Safari has an “Activity Window” that logs all files coming in, even from Flash applets — and there are several sites and bookmarklets that let you easily download videos from YT, etc. If you really feel that you need to keep people from watching your videos offline, you really need to use something like Silverlight with its support for Microsoft’s DRM scheme. But considering major companies feel comfortable enough using YouTube (the easiest vid site to download from) to distribute entire shows and movies, some in HD, you may want reconsider whether you really stand to gain anything by making it hard for your users to download to your videos to their computer.

More on Theora, with some tips on using it: Working with Ogg Theora and the video tag.

Guild cape for “Times New Gothic” — my new guild in Guild Wars.

Instead, you have to create an invisible form and submit it, like so:
javascript:myForm=document.createElement("form");myForm.style.display="none";myForm.method="post";myForm.action="http://ur1.ca/";myInput=document.createElement("input");myInput.setAttribute("name","longurl");myInput.setAttribute("value",document.URL);myForm.appendChild(myInput);document.body.appendChild(myForm);myForm.submit();document.body.removeChild(myForm); The above will work for any lilURL service; just change the address in myForm.action="http://ur1.ca/"; to the address of the lilURL service.

Finally, here’s the bookmarklet for ur1.ca: Shorten w/ ur1.ca.

I wish it were not so, especially now that they’ve released Opera Unite, which is something I’ve thought should be down for a while. Opera has also been pushing for browser-native audio and video support w/ Ogg. On top of that, their theme system is better than Firefox’s.

The problem comes down to its lack of compatibility with a lot of the sites I use. Not only the occasional site that flat out won’t work (which I don’t actually mind too much), but also the sites that it renders annoyingly wrong, like Twitter.

Now, the general response you get to this around the web is this: Those sites are written using bad HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Opera is highly standards-compliant. So it’s not Opera’s problem.

I really hate this elitism. It may not be Opera’s problem that people write poor HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but Opera should make it their problem. Otherwise, it becomes my problem when I use their browser. Standards be damned, the web needs to work.

I’ve read that Opera labs are working on better compatibility for the next version. I hope so, because I really like what they’re doing with Unite and would like to be able to add Opera to my browser repertoire.

The above audio file is encoded in Ogg Vorbis, a patent-free, royalty-free format. Mozilla Firefox 3.5 supports the HTML 5 <audio> and <video> tags that facilitate browser-native handling of audio and video playback. Vorbis, like other Ogg formats (Speex, CELT, FLAC, Theora), is a free multimedia codec. There are no royalties, and the source code for the codec is available for no charge under a free software license.

It will also work in Safari 4 if you have the XiphQT plugin installed.

What wrong with this picture is that, among the four codecs listed, Vorbis is the only one you don’t have to pay to use. The Mp3 format is restricted by a variety of software patents that won’t expire for several years yet. The early years of Mp3 were marred by controversy when many people who wrote implementations of the Mp3 format under the impression that it was royalty-free found themselves facing royalties. Because of this, many GNU/Linux distributions will not play Mp3 files out of the box. Users have to download additional software (usually illegally) to play the same files that will play on the cheap Mp3 player they got for Christmas.

Of course, most Windows and Mac users will never suffer this problem. It disproportionately affects users of free/open-source software because the nature of such software generally makes compliance with proprietary patent licenses nearly impossible in practice. Meanwhile Vorbis is caught in a catch-22: to get broad support, it needs many users; to get mroe users, it needs more widespread support. (Even so, I have to wonder why more audio software and devices don’t implement Vorbis — the format’s free, the implementation’s free, so it should cost very little to implement it anywhere.)

We have a chance to change this situation for the better. As web browsers move to adopt the draft HTML 5 standard, they’ll be picking up support for two new tags: <audio> and <video>. The idea behind these tags is to encourage browsers to implement native playback of audio and video files, without requiring bulky plugins like Adobe Flash. The Mozilla Foundation (makers of Firefox), Opera Software (makers of Opera) and Google (makers of Chrome) have all pledged to include support for Vorbis and it’s royalty-free cousin, the Theora video format.

The HTML 5 specifications originally required that all implementations of HTML 5 implement both Vorbis and Theora. This requirement was removed after an objection by Apple and Nokia (backing the proprietary MPEG-4 formats) for very flimsy reasons. Nevertheless, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome are all going to implement Vorbis and Theora relatively soon.

This is an opportunity to move away from expensive and restriction-encumbered formats. Audio compression is good enough that most people will never notice the difference between an .mp3, an .ogg, and an .m4a; so why pay anything for the .mp3 or .m4a? And while Theora’s not in the same league as MPEG-4, it gets the job done. I personally plan to start moving away from other formats to Ogg, and to start hosting Vorbis and Theora embedded media here as soon as Firefox supports <audio> and <video>.

Also see the Free Software Foundation’s Play Ogg campaign. They keep a list of sites that are “ogg-friendly.”

I found a nifty little bookmarklet: Download YouTube HD. Drag that link your bookmarks bar, go to a YouTube video with HD, and click on it, and a link will be added at the bottom of the info box saying “Download as 720p HD MP4.” Right click on it, and save the video wherever.

I also found a bookmarklet for saving the high-quality (but no HD) mpeg4 version of any video: Download YouTube MP4. Similar deal: drag that to you bookmarks bar, go to a YouTube video, and click on it. This time, however, you’ll simply be asked by your browser to save the file. You don’t have to click any other links.

As I said, these are especially useful under GNU/Linux, where there are a million great desktop video players but the Adobe Flash plugin, let alone the free implementations of swf, is not that great.

However, Schmownce has an annoying bug at the moment: the userpic associated with a post is the one you were using when you posted it. If you change userpics, the picture and for some reason also the post’s stand-alone page will be broken.

Cyndle also has a more interesting black-and-orange theme than Schmownce’s elegant and respectable black-and-white. Cyndle is also run by teenage furries, if that makes a difference either way.

SocialKloud is dead. Long live SocialKloud.

But early this morning, while watching the live feed of Democracy Now!, I paused the video to try to watch an .ogv I was ripping with Thoggen. No dice. So, I decided to try listening to a podcast with Banshee. Same problem: wouldn’t even start. So, I started cursing GNOME, assuming for some reason that the old problem of only one application being able to use the sound-system at a time had come back. So, I close the browser and try again. Nope.

So, I tried re-opening the browser and watching the video again. The browser hung. I opened the Terminal to kill it. The Terminal opened and immediately hung. I tried closing the two and re-opening. Nope. I tried restarting X, but it gave me a blank screen when I logged back in. Finally, I just restarted the whole machine, uninstalled Adobe Flash and installed libswfdec.

I can’t watch all YouTube videos, but at least my computer’s not crashing because Adobe doesn’t care about their GNU/Linux users.