So, now with this alpha of Theora, and the imminent opening of the Blender sources, I’m thinking what a brilliant opportunity - we could integrate Theora into Blender, and have a high quality video output codec. It would be open, have a range of players, and not be tied up with patents or proprietary platforms/formats (like WMV etc).
What do people think? Is there someplace to add wishlist items to the next Blender release?
I don’t think building more specific codecs into Blender is a good idea. It’s just more code to maintain and update with newer versions of the codec. I’d opt to make Blender more modular where you could select any codecs installed onto your system (including, but certainly not limited to the Theora codec). Theora.org mentions that the final first version of the codec won’t be released until June of 2003 anyway.
I take your point, but it already has several codecs built in. At least Theora would be an open standard, and would avoid many of the problems associated with relying on somebody else’s DLLs or .so’s.
Indeed - that would be the better solution in the long run.
True, but that is the first 1.0 release. It is based on an existing codec (VP3) and thus IIRC already works, so we could start testing with it now.
Anyway, obviously having a plugin API for codecs to support lots of them would be the best option. I wonder if GStreamer might be useful in this regard…?