Xiph.org releases version 1.0 of open source Theora codec (original) (raw)

The Xiph.org Foundation announced today the official release of Theora 1.0. Theora is an open video codec that can be broadly used and redistributed without having to pay patent royalties. The latest version of the reference implementation, which is distributed under the permissive BSD license, offers an improved decoder with better performance and full support for the Theora specification.

Firefox 3.1, which is currently under active development and reached beta status last month, includes native support for the Theora codec in its implementation of the HTML 5 video element. Theora isn't nearly as popular as mainstream multimedia codecs but it has been adopted by many in the open source software community and by some free content web sites, including Wikipedia.

"Open media formats are critical for ensuring a future where everyone can create and share media freely," said Wikipedia representative Kat Walsh in a statement. "We congratulate Xiph.org on this important achievement."

The next major goal for the Theora project is to improve encoding quality. The next-generation Theora encoder is called Thusnelda and it is being developed with funding from Red Hat. Chris Montgomery, the founder of Xiph.org and the primary developer behind the new encoder, recently published a report that demonstrates the improvement.

Theora 1.0 can be downloaded from the Xiph.org web site. For more details, see the official release announcement.