Google Chrome To Remove Theora Video Codec Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Chrome To Remove Theora Video Codec Support

The Xiph.Org-developed Theora lossy video compression format was once popular for open-source video compression but in an era of VP9 and AV1 its usage has waned. Google engineers are now working to remove Theora support from their Chrome/Chromium web browser...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Google-Chrome-Dropping-Theora

[oibaf]

Theora video are still used on Wikipedia. Also, it uses technology over 20 years old, so it's immune to any potential patented technology. Anyway, their decision make sense.

[szymon_g]

wow, theora is still alive?!

[Draget]

I think it is sad on one hand, but on the other, after 20 years it is okay to drop it in the browser. People can still download and play these with VLC and co.

At least this makes a lot more sense than dropping JPEG-XL!

[ayumu]

I remember it fondly as having very good quality relative to CPU usage.

Back in the day, I was a poor student and my cpu was a pass down, not very fast. It couldn't handle h264. I would transcode h264 videos to high bitrate theora and watch that instead.

[kurkosdr]

There are still old Theora embedded videos in Wikipedia (and possibly other websites) that won't play without a Theora code. I hate it when a part of the web becomes inaccessible because someone doesn't like maintaining the code for old formats. Look, I get it when it comes to proprietary stuff like Flash but Theora is open-source and any security vulnerabilities are fixable.

As an aside, this leaves VP8 as the only web-playable video format without current patent assertions. However VP8's status as a royalty-free format is dependent on Google's ongoing willingness to sublicense the patent licenses they got from MPEG LA. MPEG-1 and Theora are the only truly free video formats (that aren't completely obscure), and with MPEG-1 being so inefficient, Theora is the only viable truly free format. And now it's non-playable on the web.

[oibaf]

There are still old Theora embedded videos in Wikipedia (and possibly other websites) that won't play without a Theora code. I hate it when a part of the web becomes inaccessible because someone doesn't like maintaining the code for old formats. Look, I get it when it comes to proprietary stuff like Flash but Theora is open-source and any security vulnerabilities are fixable.

As an aside, this leaves VP8 as the only playable video format without current patent assertions (even MPEG-2 has non-expired patents in one country: Malaysia). However VP8's status as a royalty-free format is dependent on Google's ongoing willingness to sublicense the patent licenses they got from MPEG LA. MPEG-1 and Theora are the only truly free video formats (that aren't completely obscure), and with MPEG-1 being so inefficient, Theora is the only viable truly free format.

ogv.js -> can still be used to decode theora videos even without browser support.

[fallingcats]

There are still old Theora embedded videos in Wikipedia (and possibly other websites) that won't play without a Theora code. I hate it when a part of the web becomes inaccessible because someone doesn't like maintaining the code for old formats. Look, I get it when it comes to proprietary stuff like Flash but Theora is open-source and any security vulnerabilities are fixable.

As an aside, this leaves VP8 as the only video format without current patent assertions (even MPEG2 has non-expired patents in one country: Malaysia). However VP8's status as a royalty-free format is dependent on Google's ongoing willingness to sublicense the patent licenses they got from MPEG LA. Theora was the only truly free format.

It's not like wikipedia couln't transcode the few low-res videos to av1 and be safe for the next 20-30 years.

[schmidtbag]

It's not like wikipedia couln't transcode the few low-res videos to av1 and be safe for the next 20-30 years.

That's what I was thinking. Wikipedia in general very rarely has videos - of all the thousands of articles I've seen there, I'm not sure I've ever encountered one, let alone encoded with Theora.

[caligula]

The codecs should run in an isolated sandbox. Makes no sense why these would be a security risk.