Mozilla and Wikimedia Join Forces to Support Open Video

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Mozilla has awarded a grant of $100,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation to help coordinate improvements to the development of Ogg Theora and related open video technologies. Mozilla and Wikimedia share a strong commitment to open standards. Version 3.1 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser will include built-in support to play audio and video in the open source Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora formats. All audio and video in Wikipedia is stored in these formats. Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering at Mozilla has blogged about this great news, as has Chris Blizzard, Director of Evangelism for Mozilla.
Open standards for audio and video are important because they can be used by anyone for any purpose without royalties, and can be inspected and improved by an open community. Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets. Wikimedia and Mozilla want to help to build a web where video and audio are first class citizens: easy to use and manipulate by anyone, without compulsory royalty schemes or other barriers to participation.
The $100,000 grant will be used to support the work of long-time contributors to the Ogg Theora/Vorbis codebase and related tools, such as libraries for network seeking. The improvements will be made over a 6 month period.
Erik Möller,
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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I suggest you put the “awarded” link directly to the post ( http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2009/01/26/in-support-of-open-video/ )instead of the index page, else it won’t make much sense once there’s more recent entries.

Dear
We Gerardo Cabero and Eduardo Xamena, both live in Salta / Argentina
we are developing an Audio And Video Player For OpenSource Ogg Theora / Vorbis Firefox 3.1 For the project name is “Xagon” urls: http://code.google.com/p/xagon/, The objective is Xagon simple and elegant …
Greetings
Gerardo And Eduardo

I hope Google Chrome too, will soon have built-in support to play OGG audio and video.

Now you just need to get Adobe into the Boat to add Ogg Vorbis/Theora to Flash…

Michael, it’s already possible to play back ogg vorbis using actionscript 3 – see http://barelyfocused.net/blog/2008/10/03/flash-vorbis-player/. Don’t think it would be possible to do Theora without native support though.

If anything, it would be greatly helpful to develop an open-source conversion tool for OGG and have it on a hosted site or even Wikipedia’s servers. I can see reason for it as people can upload things and they automatically “convert” to the OGG propriety — much like how YouTube converts things during upload to the FLV format.