Theora: Свободный видеокодек с открытым исходным кодом

Free lossy video compression format
the genus of clams

Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It was developed by the Xiph. Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container. The libtheora video codec is the reference implementation of the Theora video compression format developed by the Xiph. Org Foundation. Theora was derived from the formerly proprietary VP3 codec, released into the public domain by On2 Technologies. It is broadly comparable in design and bitrate efficiency to MPEG 4 Part 2, early versions of Windows Media Video, and RealVideo while it lacked some of the features present in some of these other codecs. It is comparable in open standards philosophy to the BBC's Dirac codec. Theora was named after Theora Jones, Edison Carter's Controller on the Max Headroom television program.

Theora is a variable bitrate, DCT based video compression scheme. Like most common video codecs, Theora used chroma subsampling, block based motion compensation and an 8 by 8 DCT block. Pixels are grouped into various structures, namely blocks, super blocks, and macroblocks. Theora supports intra coded frames ("keyframes") and forward predictive frames, but not bi predictive frames which are found in H.264 and VC 1. Theora also does not support interlacing, or bit depths larger than 8 bits per component. The Theora video compression format is compatible with the VP3 video compression format, which consisted of a backward compatible superset. Theora is a superset of VP3, and VP3 streams (with some minor syntactic modifications) can be converted into Theora streams without recompression (but not vice versa). and followed three months later by the VP3.2 release, which was the basis for Theora.

In August 2001, On2 Technologies announced that they would release an open source version of their VP3.2 video compression algorithm. In September 2001, On2 Technologies published the source code of the VP3.2 codec under the VP3.2 Public License 0.1, a custom open source license. The license only granted the right to modify the source code if the resultant larger work continued to support playback of VP3.2 data. In March 2002, On2 responded to the public's reception by relicensing the VP3 codec under the GNU Lesser General Public License. In June 2002, On2 donated VP3 to the Xiph. Org Foundation and offered it under the Ogg Vorbis BSD style license. On2 also made an irrevocable, royalty free license grant for any patent claims it might have over the software and any derivatives, In August 2002, On2 entered into an agreement with the Xiph. Org Foundation to make VP3 the basis of a new, free video codec, called Theora. On2 declared Theora to be VP3's successor. On 3 October 2002, On2 and Xiph announced the completion and availability of the initial alpha code release of libtheora, Theora's reference implementation. There is no formal specification for VP3's bitstream format beyond the VP3 source code published by On2 Technologies. In 2003, Mike Melanson created an incomplete description of the VP3 bitstream format and decoding process at a higher level than source code, with some help from On2 and Xiph. Org Foundation. The Theora specification adopted some portions of this VP3 description. A successor to Theora, Daala, was later merged into AV1.

The Theora I bitstream format was frozen in June 2004 after the libtheora 1.0alpha3 release. This is also true for videos encoded with any implementation of the Theora I specification since the format freeze. The Theora I Specification was completely published in 2004. Any later changes in the specification are minor updates. The Theora reference implementation libtheora spent several years in alpha and beta status. The first stable release of libtheora was made in November 2008. Work then focused on improving the codec's performance in the "Thusnelda" branch, which was released as version 1.1 in September 2009 as the second stable libtheora release. This release brought some technical improvements and new features, such as the new rate control module and the two pass rate control. The codename for the next version of libtheora was Ptalarbvorm. Theora was well established as a video format in open source applications, and became the format used for Wikipedia's video content before replaced by VP9. However, the proposed adoption of Theora as part of the baseline video support in HTML5 resulted in controversy.

In October 2023, Google announced intent to remove Theora support from Chromium (finalizing removal by Google Chrome 123), with Firefox following suit. Google developers claimed that despite lack of adoption, Theora made a case for open and royalty free codecs like AV1.

There was an open source VHDL code base for a hardware Theora decoder in development. It began as a 2006 Google Summer of Code project, and it has been developed on both the Nios II and LEON processors. However, there are currently no Theora decoder chips in production, and portable media players, smartphones and similar devices with limited computing power rely on such chips to provide efficient playback.

Name Description Operating Systems Supported Unix like OS X Windows LiVES Video editing software for Linux. Can edit, encode and stream theora. ? Kdenlive The KDE video editor. ? ? OpenShot ? ? Pitivi The GNOME video editor. ? ? Cinelerra CVS versions of the Cinelerra non linear video editing system support Theora, as of August 2005. ? oggz tools by Xiph. org Command line programs to examine and edit Ogg files. ? Ogg Video Tools by yornstreamnik Tools to resize, cut, split, join, and others AVS Video Editor ? ?

Elphel is the main maker of cameras that record in theora.