Encoding Theora Help

William_Robinette

William_Robinette

Shallow Member
This is driving me up a wall.

And I'm really happy that Firefox has chosen to endorse a open web standard for HTML5 Video that is seemingly impossible for an average person without command line experience to encode. Smart move guys.
</rant>

All I want to do is end up with a 960x400pixel theora/vorbis > ogg file that will play back in Firefox. I am currently using the Firefogg Firefox add-on which seems to have all the parameters I need except I cannot get any playable file out of it. I think I have narrowed it down to my input files being unreadable by ffmpeg2theora that it is built on (but I don't know for sure).

I have tried Cineform, DNxHD, and Sony's YUV codec and the thing just sits and hangs every time. I still need to try an uncompressed file, but the problem is for my longer projects I just don't have the HDD space to hold these temp uncompressed files (if they even work) to be converted.

Is there any options out there?
 
William_Robinette said:
This is driving me up a wall.

And I'm really happy that Firefox has chosen to endorse a open web standard for HTML5 Video that is seemingly impossible for an average person without command line experience to encode. Smart move guys.
</rant>

All I want to do is end up with a 960x400pixel theora/vorbis > ogg file that will play back in Firefox. I am currently using the Firefogg Firefox add-on which seems to have all the parameters I need except I cannot get any playable file out of it. I think I have narrowed it down to my input files being unreadable by ffmpeg2theora that it is built on (but I don't know for sure).

I have tried Cineform, DNxHD, and Sony's YUV codec and the thing just sits and hangs every time. I still need to try an uncompressed file, but the problem is for my longer projects I just don't have the HDD space to hold these temp uncompressed files (if they even work) to be converted.

Is there any options out there?
Click to expand...


If you want a GUI / Front end you could use theoraconverter.net . It even does batch/folder processing, and simple to use
http://sourceforge.net/projects/theoraconverter/

If you know how to use avisynth you can feed basically anything into it, because it accepts .avs scripts. For simple frameserving it's just 1 line of text in a notepad file, with the extension renamed to .avs e.g.

AVISource("cineform.avi")

I was going to suggest another option, debugmode frameserver, so you don't have use any intermediate files, but it's doesn't seem to be working correctly by itself. (It might work though avisynth)

EDIT: yes it does work, so you don't need any intermediate files (except a dummy avi a few kb big, and a .avs file, a few kb big) , but debugmode only works in 8-bit mode for vegas
 
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OK so here are some findings.

Download the SUPER encoder. It has a GUI and comes with everything you need in one simple install.

Output from your NLE an uncompressed .avi file that is already scaled to your desired dimensions. It should look perfect. Import (via right-click) into SUPER.

Set your settings for OGG format/Theora for video/Vorbis for audio

Check NoChange in video scale, choose your bit-rate for video and audio and go.

Right now I am getting a 960x400 (2.40:1) 2,500kbps file that plays fine in Firefox and is of decent quality overall and only 15MB/min. It really rips apart text and wides with aliasing though. It's kinda painful and I don't know where it is coming from as I am not scaling the video in SUPER, and upping the bit rate does nothing to help the matter. My uncompressed avi file, of course, looks excellent with no aliasing at all.

So not perfect, but for now will get you to a Firefox comparable .ogg file without having to deal with command line BS.

Still on the hunt for better solutions.
 
I don't mean to sound incriminating, but might I ask why you're using Theora? Is this for a particularly forward-thinking reason? I perfectly understand if you want to stray away from H.264, but of course, Firefox doesn't support that, so I'm guessing you want to support iProducts? No, that can't be, since Safari doesn't support Theora anyway...

If so, why not use an HTML5/Flash fallback option, and simply rely on H.264 video? As of now, I really think Theora is pretty much out-of-the-question given it's quality, and that H.264's royalties won't be a problem anytime soon. I'd suggest using WebM video, but I'd wait for those tools to mature.

We all want to be rid of Flash, and to enjoy royalty-free video, but personally, I think you're better off avoiding Theora all together... In any event, good luck.
 
Yeah the situation kind of sucks - Theora's compression isn't that great. It's like several steps backwards

WebM is better in terms of quality but fricken slow to encode. Hopefully it will be improved by the time h.264 may become a licensing nightmare

h.264 using a good encoder (x264) is still king in terms of quality and speed
 
RX782 said:
I don't mean to sound incriminating, but might I ask why you're using Theora?
Click to expand...

Not at all! I'm currently trying to find the best solution for playback on the widest device/browser base possible.

Is this for a particularly forward-thinking reason? I perfectly understand if you want to stray away from H.264, but of course, Firefox doesn't support that, so I'm guessing you want to support iProducts? No, that can't be, since Safari doesn't support Theora anyway...

If so, why not use an HTML5/Flash fallback option, and simply rely on H.264 video? As of now, I really think Theora is pretty much out-of-the-question given it's quality, and that H.264's royalties won't be a problem anytime soon. I'd suggest using WebM video, but I'd wait for those tools to mature.

We all want to be rid of Flash, and to enjoy royalty-free video, but personally, I think you're better off avoiding Theora all together... In any event, good luck.
Click to expand...

So instead of having a Theora > h.264 > Flash fallback with my <video> tags I can skip Theora all together and Firefox will just default to Flash if it is h.264 > Flash?

I'm still trying to get my head around the best way to implement this. I want to call up a Lightbox type of window (using iFrames in Colorbox is what I am planning on) that will play my videos on Mozilla, Safari, iDevices, etc seamlessly for the end user.

With the understanding that basic HTML/CSS is pretty much the extent of my knowledge right now. I can deal with implementing pre-packaged java items like lightbox/videobox etc.

And using the tools from the above post I am getting pretty comparable (well, good enough) file size/quality videos from both Theora and H.264.

Any input is appreciated!

Edit: Also, isn't WebM not supported in anything out that isn't beta right now? I don't what the release version of Opera is, but IE 9 and Firefox 4 are still Beta
 
William_Robinette said:
Not at all! I'm currently trying to find the best solution for playback on the widest device/browser base possible.



So instead of having a Theora > h.264 > Flash fallback with my <video> tags I can skip Theora all together and Firefox will just default to Flash if it is h.264 > Flash?

I'm still trying to get my head around the best way to implement this. I want to call up a Lightbox type of window (using iFrames in Colorbox is what I am planning on) that will play my videos on Mozilla, Safari, iDevices, etc seamlessly for the end user.

With the understanding that basic HTML/CSS is pretty much the extent of my knowledge right now. I can deal with implementing pre-packaged java items like lightbox/videobox etc.

And using the tools from the above post I am getting pretty comparable (well, good enough) file size/quality videos from both Theora and H.264.

Any input is appreciated!

Edit: Also, isn't WebM not supported in anything out that isn't beta right now? I don't what the release version of Opera is, but IE 9 and Firefox 4 are still Beta
Click to expand...

http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/jw-player-for-html5 has an easy to configure option that you can just paste into your code. It does rely on a bit of javascript to perform the fallback operation, but this isn't a huge deal. It can utilize a single MP4 video for both HTML5 and Flash.

Alternatively, you can try http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody, but this still requires you to have a second Theora video (in addition to MP4) as a fallback for Firefox (it only lets IE fall back to Flash).

And yes, technically WebM is not supported in any non-beta browsers.
 
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