Chrome Removing Theora Support

[hannob]

Interesting enough, I'm probably one of the few people who still has some theora videos on the web in some very old blogposts of mine.

Some history for people who are not aware: Theora became somewhat popular in free software / open source circles, because at the time, it was the best codec which was believed to be either free of patents or the patents were explicitly opened up for free use. Therefore, if you were concerned about patents and their impact on free software, you'd use it. But Theora wasn't a great codec, which we always knew, it just was the best we had before google bought and opened up VP8.

It's an interesting tradeoff. Theora was never particularly popular, so you probably will have a low number of sites being impacted. But we kinda have a tradition that the web plattform rarely breaks things. You mostly can still use old html from 20-30 years ago, gif will probably stay supported in browsers forever, and I don't think there are many examples of media formats in browsers being deprecated. Even odd things like bmp are still supported.

[The_Colonel]

For videos there's an easy workaround - download the video file and open it in VLC. FFMPEG will likely never drop its support.

Dropping e.g. HTML/CSS features is much harder, since there likely won't be any workaround other than running older version of the browser.

[jplona]

I suppose Flash could be considered a notable exception there.

[qingcharles]

Can't we do what Ruffle has done and just create a WebAssembly decoder for Theora? That way either the site host just needs to add a tiny piece of code to the page, or the browsee just needs to install a plugin to re-enable this functionality.

[berkes]

I'd gladly accept if my daily browser traded some backwards compatibility for speed, security and the ability to move forward faster.

Obviously only if I'd be certain some other browser can still open it, or maybe some emulator would be able to display it. My earliest websites are 27 years old now (and live on a floppy disk) I'D hate to find that they're no longer readable in any software.

But I'm perfectly fine with my Firefox, with which I spend hours a day on the modern web, dropping support for that, when they need to shed some cruft or weight.

[sandyarmstrong]

Firefox as well: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860492

It's a shame Theora never "made it". The peak of its popularity is long past.

[izacus]

It was never good. We used it in spirit of OSS in our hackerspace, but it was always terrible and behind all the MPEGs of the time.

[a1o]

Is there any good video codec that the library is as small or not much bigger as Theora and that has no patent/license issue?

I tried to use VP9 in the past but it's like 20-40MBs a dll. The lowest I could find was dav1d and it's still around 4MB for the library dll and encoding AV1 and getting good compression rate was not trivial.

[amlib]

Maybe the best option will be just waiting for h264 patents to expire, just like happened with mp3s a while ago. On that note, does anyone knows when h264 expires? Or it's earlier siblings like avc? It also has the benefit of having vast access to an array of hardware decoders/encoders, although those might have their own can of IP worms.

[brigade]

Strip out debug symbols if you care about size? There’s no reason either of those libraries should be that large unless you’re including them.

[Uberzi]

Honest question. In which scenario do you care so much about the size of the DLL , these days ?

[jauntywundrkind]

This feels like an absurd ask. Who cares how big the codec is? If you watch a 480p video for 10 minutes, won't that have overwhelmingly dwarfed 20MB or whatever of savings?

This feels like a gross gross misoptimization that is actively harmful to 99.999999999% of user experiences.

[p1mrx]

How big is the VP8 codec? Did you try building libvpx with --disable-vp9?

[gjsman-1000]

I won’t miss Theora - but I am as part of my job helping a business migrate from some old open-source software which inexplicably re-encoded almost all audio uploads into Ogg Vorbis audio files.

I can just play those as they are, in any browser, except Safari. Painfully, macOS actually supports Vorbis, but only in a CAF (Core Audio Format) container instead of an Ogg container. Still hoping; because shipping an entire Ogg decoder in the browser with WASM works but is ugly.

Of course, I could also just re-encode them with a microservice but it’s just… bleh.

[notRobot]

You might find this helpful: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js

From the FF announcement linked elsewhere in these comments.

[dawidpotocki]

Apple has always been an asshole when it comes to codec support.

VP9 on Safari? Sure, on desktop. On mobile? Oh yeah, only via WebRTC(why???).

Want to import FLACs into Apple Music? Nope, only inferior ALAC is supported for lossless.

AV1? Only just added to iPhone 15 Pro series (not in 15 cause old SoC) and still not on Macbooks.

HEVC? Oh yeah, of course we use it as HEIC for photos and support HEVC playback in Safari, how could we not?

[hardcopy]

TIL filename extensions .ogv, .ogg = Theora

[krackers]

ogg is just a container, the actual contents can be audio (usually opus, but other audio codecs are supported) or video (theora, plus some obscure ones)

[bandrami]

It's like if source tarballs didn't include the compression algorithm in the extension but just used .tar for .tar.bz2, .tar.gz, etc. and just left the extractor to figure it out (which they can do).

[renewiltord]

Interesting. Aligns with my belief that Wikipedia videos are rarely viewed. They’re often ogg theora.

[eviks]

I wish the browsers were modular and you could simply disable/enable the codecs you wanted and get and use the relevant libraries

[psnehanshu]

Someone will still have to invest engineering resources to maintain those codecs.

[qwerty456127]

Aren't modern video codecs prohibitively computationally expensive for mediocre office-class PCs?

[acdha]

That depends on what you mean by modern - AV1 is definitely a struggle, but VP9, H.265, H.264, and even VP8 are all much better than Theora in terms of quality and performance, and hardware supported decode goes back many years even on things like Intel integrated graphics hardware.

[iopq]

Not really, my laptop is intel 5000 series dual core, it can handle 720p AV1 video. I did get a few dropped frames, but I had to go into "Stats for nerds" to see that they dropped. When I switched to vp9, I still had some dropped frames anyway, so it's slow regardless

My laptop doesn't have a 1080p screen, but trying 1080p it could do some videos better than others.

in this one I only dropped 2 frames:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1jY2VLCRmY&list=PLAMlLc3Zgg...

[Sesse__]

dav1d can decode 4K video in realtime on a pretty normal office-class PC. The real issue for is mobile.

[nicman23]

havent use actual theora (opus i still daily use) since gta:sa

[sillywalk]

FTA:

"Chrome will deprecate and remove support for the Theora video codec in desktop Chrome due to emerging security risks. Theora's low (and now often incorrect) usage no longer justifies support for most users. "

[ReactiveJelly]

So I guess, regarding a theoretical "everything in the browser" future, the swiss-army tools like VLC and ffmpeg would either have to pack their own performant codecs in wasm, or stay as desktop / CLI applications.

(Not that it would make any sense to implement ffmpeg on top of WebCodecs on top of ffmpeg. Just needed an example.)

I hope I have not completely missed the train by focusing on other areas outside of web.

[yuhong]

I am asking the WMF to add support for MP4: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T329258