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.

Update: I can’t find my draft for the first episode. I’m postponing the show until next week. Sorry.

2nd Update: I’m just going to postpone the show until Firefox 3.5 officially launches and I can be sure everyone has a chance to listen to it.

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.”