HTML5 Theora Video Codec for Silverlight

· by alp · in Mono, Nuanti

I’m glad to announce the first release of our fully managed Theora audio / video decoder implementation for the Silverlight platform! The Highgate media suite will bring installation-free support for HTML5 streaming video to an additional ~40% of web users overnight.

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So, a few drinks will be in order to celebrate the release at the FOSDEM beer event, Friday — drop by! And of course, I’d like to invite anyone excited about making open codecs a first class citizen of the Silverlight / Moonlight ecosystem to visit the Mono dev room over the weekend for source code and some frivolous demos between sessions.

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Technology

We’ll be releasing a high-performance decoder for Theora video / Ogg Vorbis audio streams that plugs into the Silverlight 3 streaming media abstraction, as well as a reference front-end player interface and JavaScript bridge layer providing basic compatibility with standard HTML5 media tags, adding support for the standard to Internet Explorer and extending the capabilities of WebKit-based browsers like Safari and Epiphany. A cunning plan, one might say!

50 Responses

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    Anonymous at · Reply →

    High-performance managed theora / vorbis decoder? This is sorely needed, not only for Silverlight / Moonlight but also for standalone applications and especially games written in Mono/.Net.

    Something is telling me that “Highgate media suite” won’t be a free offering, though… What are the chances of a reasonable pricing scheme for hobbyist developers?

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    mike at · Reply →

    @Anon: let’s see. I don’t think people will pay to get webvideo with theora, they’d rather invest in flash/h264 licences.

    And I think someone started an open implentation of Theora in C#/Mono already, so maybe this is just the final product?

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      alp at · Reply →

      Mike: Yeah, there is some history. A port of just the Vorbis audio codec from jorbis (Java) was done many years ago in the early days of Mono (in fact I wrote Platano media player built around that almost a decade ago). This was actually a great test suite for the fledgeling mcs compiler.

      The task of decoding video and synchronising it with audio has proved a significantly more complex challenge and the existing C# projects stalled at an early stage as far as I’m aware.

      Indeed even Highgate media suite is not a ground-up re-implementation but reuses many algorithms and ideas from existing implementations. It is however finely tuned to the capabilities of the CLR platform and takes full advantage of what’s available there.

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      Han Solo at · Reply →

      Yes, I will pay for h264 lincences instead a free and better theora codec for my next product. It sounds very smart.

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    Silvia Pfeiffer at · Reply →

    You mention a release. Will this be open source? Where can it be downloaded from?

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    alp at · Reply →

    Anonymous, Silvia: We’re going open source with this! Over the last few years we found that our main business of developing mobile / custom web browser technology is getting more difficult with the demand for proprietary and patent-encumbered formats on the web which we simply can’t support. Perhaps a quarter of our developer time last year was spent trying to hack around bugs in the Adobe Flash player product, for example. So part of the strategy has been to encourage open formats, which means getting it in the hands of as many people as possible spacer

    These are the exact same reasons for our push on web standards and web accessibility incidentally.

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      Silvia Pfeiffer at · Reply →

      That totally rocks! Awesome!

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    pvanhoof at · Reply →

    Alp, I owe you a Westvleteren for this at the Delirium cafe in Brussels. Promised.

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      alp at · Reply →

      Philip! I shall take you up on that.

      Meanwhile, there’s a new compiler I need to show you..

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        pvanhoof at · Reply →

        Hmm, crap, looks like they don’t have Westvleteren at Delirium

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          speaker at · Reply →

          Lol, Westvleteren is sold at the abbay store exclusively, and you need to make a reservation by telephone, several days in advance.

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    Ben at · Reply →

    Alp: That is great, great, great, great news!

    Great news.

    Thank you!

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    Jeff at · Reply →

    Wow Planet GNOME has turned in to a Microsoft partner site. Wow congrats GNOME for selling out.

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      Stifu at · Reply →

      Never mind HTML5, Theora, open codecs or anything that might be mentioned in the article, it’s all an evil Microsoft plot in disguise!… So obvious!

      ¬_¬

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      Anonymous at · Reply →

      What twisted mind equates an implementation of Theora and Vorbis to a Microsoft sellout? How can someone be so blind to the fact that this effort promotes an *open* and *patent-free* standard over proprietary solutions that are in wide use today (MP3/H.264)?

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    Anonymous at · Reply →

    Beautiful!

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    Miguel de Icaza at · Reply →

    Absolutely brilliant!

    I cant wait to see you at FOSDEM!

    Miguel

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      alp at · Reply →

      Likewise Miguel! Should do dinner. I know good place for mussels, even if it’s not quite Legals..

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    Baris at · Reply →

    Nice to see you back into blogging Alp! Keep pumping great tools. Too bad I won’t be able to attend Fosdem.

    Baris.

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    Mikko Rauhala at · Reply →

    This is wonderful news, leveraging Silverlight for good for once. And to all you h.264 fans out there, aside from dissing Theora you might remember that a free viable competitor will help to keep the mpeg-la protection racket from skyrocketing their fees too much.

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    emmanuel at · Reply →

    great effort! unfortunately it doesn’t cover the iPhone but of course for the iPhone nobody can do anything about it except Apple… let’s see how this whole format war pans out but currently it doesn’t look too good for theora spacer

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    xurfa at · Reply →

    Could this be incorporated into to the “video for everybody” [camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody]
    so that only OggTheora would be needed on a website?

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    The Outside at ·

    Web-videon vapauden näkymät paranevat…

    Tulipa juuri hyviä uutisia, jotka vaativat vielä pienen lisäyksen aiempiin Web-videota koskeviin kirjoituksiini: Alp Toker julkisti Microsoftin Silverlight-alustalla toimivan Ogg Theora-soittimen. Soitin ei vaadi käyttäjältä mitään asennustoimenpiteitä…

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    Jeffrey Stedfast at · Reply →

    Rock on, Alp! This is awesome news!

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    Prosthetic Conscience at · Reply →

    Given that Ogg Theora support is baked-into Firefox and Chrome, what’s the benefit of this? Allowing Windows users to view Theora in IE? Shouldn’t we just be encouraging them to use better products?

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      Anonymous at · Reply →

      Windows/IE is not the whole world. Plus, desktop applications also stand to profit from this initiative.

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        Prosthetic Conscience at · Reply →

        How? Shouldn’t desktop applications just be using gstreamer?

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