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.

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.