New video codec gets Firefox running videos at 30fps! - maemo.org

james174 | # 1 | 2010-04-19, 17:17 | Report

High performance Theora codec for Firefox on OMAP3 previewed

Matthew Gregan is employed by Mozilla and is currently working on improving video and audio support in Firefox.On his blog, Matthew Gregan reports that there has been some success in shifting the major part of the processing load caused by decoding Theora videos into the DSP (Digital Signal Processor) core of Texas Instruments' OMAP 3 processor.

Using Nokia's N900 Linux smartphone for the tests, Matthew Gregan was able to play full-screen videos at 800x480 pixels and a rate of more than 30 frames per second. The colour-space conversion and painting was offloaded to the OMAP 3's graphics core, and video decoding to the DSP, which left the CPU core as good as idle. The remaining processor load only amounted to 20%, with the PulseAudio driver for sound output alone causing a load of 10% to 15%.

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zimon | # 2 | 2010-04-19, 17:23 | Report

I hope that DSP accelerated codec is exported to gstreamer plugin also, so Theora+Vorbis would be the choice for local saved videos also.

tirtawn | # 3 | 2010-04-19, 19:14 | Report

Good story, and really hope that this could come in the next few months even if its buggy :P At least we can have a feel about the progress.

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eikido | # 4 | 2010-04-19, 19:22 | Report

What kind of movies, flash movies i guess?

Laughing Man | # 5 | 2010-04-19, 19:23 | Report

Originally Posted by eikido View Post

What kind of movies, flash movies i guess?

Nope, Theora Codec is for HTML5. It's one of the competing ones.

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james174 | # 6 | 2010-04-19, 20:48 | Report

How nice will that be though, running iplayer at a silky smooth 30fps, and being able to watch a higher resolution youtube.
Things are going to be VERY interesting when 4g is launched, with average download rate of 100mb! Just imagine the potentials, crystal clear video calls, running numerous wireless media apps with no slowdown. Be interesting to see what type of tarrif the mobile operators bring out.... Cant see o2 offering me the "unlimited" (500mb) download limit then... lol

ZogG | # 7 | 2010-04-19, 21:04 | Report

should merge with my post http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=50338

dmj726 | # 8 | 2010-04-19, 21:04 | Report

One clarification to the people on this thread: This is specifically for Ogg Theora videos using HTML5. Flash will not run faster and HTML5 videos using h.264 will not play at all. That said, nice to see theora videos working well in firefox mobile.

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james174 | # 9 | 2010-04-19, 21:07 | Report

Originally Posted by dmj726 View Post

One clarification to the people on this thread: This is specifically for Ogg Theora videos using HTML5. Flash will not run faster and HTML5 videos using h.264 will not play at all. That said, nice to see theora videos working well in firefox mobile.

Thanks for that info, I was unaware of the incompatabilities.

Thats why i love this site, you learn something new every day

bxbomber | # 10 | 2010-04-19, 21:16 | Report

good to see that theora is getting hardware support.
hopefully this means that theora can be the chosen format for html 5. this way we don't have to worry about flash slowing down our system