lore used our newssubmit to tell us that Ogg Vorbis and VP3 will combine their forces to make a free open source multimedia package that should be able to compete with the rather expensive MPEG-4 format.
VP3 is developed by ON2 technologies who will pay the lead developer of Ogg Vorbis to work on the project. VP3 is an open source video codec, Ogg Vorbis an open source lossy compression format:
We think that the whole MPEG-4 licensing thing is unhealthy for the industry, and having an end-to-end Open Source solution quite frankly is a very nice flanking maneuver against MPEG-4," says Doug McIntyre, president and CEO of On2. "They're going out and saying they want to charge more than anybody else does because this is going to be a standard, and our counter-play to that is, 'Here's ... a video codec that's better than MPEG-4, an audio codec that we think is better, and in addition to that, there's no fee." |
McIntyre says the lack of a "truly integrated multimedia system" is one weakness of the Open Source software catalog now. "This puts the Open Source community in a position where that's no longer the gaping hole in the way that Open Source software operates."
McIntyre sees another weakness in Open Source projects that are controlled by for-profit companies. "I think Open Source initiatives that are operated by corporations like ours are probably somewhat suspect, just because people look at them and say, 'All they want to do is take the ideas they get and put it into their proprietary technology.' It's what I would describe as potentially fair paranoia."
To avoid that paranoia, On2 is turning the project, codenamed Theora, over to the non-profit Xiph.org Foundation. McIntyre sees Ogg Vorbcis as the "audio equivalent" of On2's VP3. Combining those two with VpVision, the TrueCast 5 server and its video player, will eventually yield an Open Source multimedia system that "works off the shelf
Unfortunately the software will probably ready in about one year, while MPEG-4 is already available in Quicktime 6.0. If only this project could find a big company to support it...
Source: Newsforge
