Xiph.org releases Theora 1.0

Tuesday November 4, 2008

A codec is a pieces of software that can both code and decode video hence the name, just like modem is short for modulator demodulator. If you've seen any video on Wikipedia it's in Theora format. Theora is the bit format now nearly five years old and the version 1.0 codec for it was released yesterday. It comes from the same family Ogg (produced by the Xiph.org Foundation) as the widely known Ogg Vorbis audio format.

The Xiph.org foundation has the worthwhile aim of protecting the foundations of Internet multimedia from control by private interests. Both Samsung and Microsoft use Ogg codecs because they are unlikely to be sued (no worries over Patent infringement as the codec was originally given to Xiph.org). Since then they have worked on improving the performance until finally version 1.0. Other video codecs particularly MPEG have had legal problems.

The Theora download has plenty of C code with projects for VS2005, VS2008, ,Xcode and make files for Linux. The code is in C and I've added a link to the usual place.