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Revision as of 21:00, 2 June 2009 by Ajax (talk | contribs)

Thusnelda

Summary

Update libtheora to the 1.1 release.

Owner

  • Name: Christopher Montgomery (xiphmont), AdamJackson
  • Email: cmontgom@redhat.com, ajax@redhat.com

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 12
  • Last updated: 2009-06-02
  • Percentage of completion: 10%

Timeline

Built 1.1alpha1 into F12 on June 2.

Detailed Description

libtheora 1.1 incorporates a substantially improved encoder, codenamed 'Thusnelda'. Compared to libtheora 1.0, the new encoder can produce comparable quality encodings at a lower bitrate, or better quality at the same bitrate.

Over the last year, Monty has produced a series of detailed reports describing the Thusnelda improvements as they have been developed:

The development of Thusnelda was supported by Red Hat, Wikimedia and Mozilla.

Benefit to Fedora

A lot of positive momentum has been building around open video on the web. With this feature, Fedora becomes more attractive as a platform for producing video content in open formats.

Scope

libtheora needs to be updated. All video-encoding applications that support theora will transparently benefit from the improvements in Thusnelda, including all applications that use gstreamer to encode video. Good examples in this category are GUI transcoding apps like transmageddon and arista (see http://lwn.net/Articles/333904/).

Applications that use mplayer or ffmpeg for video encoding will not benefit, since these frameworks come with their own implementations of the Theora format.

How To Test

Use a video-encoding application to produce theora-encoded content. Compare the quality with content produced with libtheora 1.0 and notice the improved quality.

User Experience

Dependencies

None.

Contingency Plan

Revert to libtheora 1.0.

Documentation

No specific documentation should be needed, libtheora 1.1 is a transparent replacement for libtheora 1.0.

Release Notes

Fedora 11 comes with libtheora 1.1, including the new 'thusnelda' encoder.

Comments and Discussion