November 5th, 2008
Theora codec hits Release 1.0
That’s one giant leap for open source content.
A codec under a modified BSD license, capable of playing video in high quality, is now ready for mass market adoption.
The corporate arm is On2 Technologies. The open source arm is called the Xiph Foundation.
One very important point is that, since the codec is unencumbered by royalties, it can be offered as a W3C standard, bringing video inside the Web standards world without relying on a plug-in.
It also means you can plug a DVD player into a Linux box and support a codec with the same basic license structure as the operating system.
The technical breakthrough came in July, when coding was completed allowing single-pass encoding and decoding of video streams at multiple bitrates.
Mirrors for the Theora libraries are being hosted by the Open Source Labs at Oregon State University, home of new first brother-in-law Craig Robinson. (Go Beavers.)
One more bit of trivia, in the picture above. The codec is named after Theora Jones, a character in the 1987 TV show Max Headroom. Theora was played by Amanda Pays, now the wife of actor Corbin Bernsen and a host on Fine Living.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Linux and Open Source via Email alerts or RSS.
| 11/05/08
