VP3 is a video compression technique, which is just published Open Source. It's used by RealNetworks and Apple. On2 has given codec's licences to OGG team for free. In my own tests the codec's quality seems to be almost DivX quality with settings "High Detail", "Lowest allowed quality:16" and "Quick Compress" disabled. Please add to this forum results of your own experiments, it would be interesting to know if this patent free codec could beat MPEG-4 based codecs (for ex. DivX, Xvid), especially when XviD's (official) development is halted because of copyright disagreements. Download the codec from here: http://vp3.com/vp3/vfw/software/index.shtml FAQ here: http://www.vp3.com/support/faq/index.shtml You can participate to development: http://www.theora.org/
I seriously doubt Theora's success -- VP3 doesn't offer video quality that matches with DivX5 or XviD, but compares more to DivX3 (non-SBC). I'm a strong believer in OGG container format and in OGG Vorbis as an audio format and I'm certain that within next two years, we will finally get -- at least partially -- rid of AVI as a container format and MP3 as an audio format. 5.1 channel OGG Vorbis audio bundled with XviD encoded video and stored inside OGG container format is pretty nice package and shouldn't violate any patents, although I'm not certain about XviD's legal status on this, since it is still a MPEG-4 codec, nothing else. Just based on various tests, even VP5 -- the codec that On2 has developed FROM VP3 and did NOT release as an opensource -- loses to XviD and DivX5 in most of the comparision tests when re-encoding DVD material using decent bitrates. But still, I agree that VP3's gesture was nice and it will help various content prodivers to provide their video material using patent-free tools and formats. I'm hoping to see some development in OGG Tarkin, which I believe, will be more interesting project than Theora. Just my 2 eurocents (€0.02)...
You are very right, I guess. I'm not sure what happens XviD, over a month its main site has been closed. What so you think, when will we get OGM container support for more programs, like Virtualdub? Because it isn't too easy to use Graphedit for the job.
Despite the site being closed, the CVS repository seems to live anyway and Koepi puts out new binaries almost daily for XviD. The container format probably needs to be finalized and tested very throughoutly first before software developers start supporting it -- and I suspect VirtualDub would be one of the first ones to support it, Avery Lee being a big fan on OSS anyway.
