Google finally comes as a saviour for Open-video, funds TheorARM codec

The fight between Theora and H.264 to be "The One" is reginited with the decision of Google to fund TheorARM, an ARM-optimized version of Ogg Theora codec. ARM processors are used for small devices - mobiles, smartphones, PDAs etc. and this move by Google is a boost for this opensource codec in the world of hand-held devices.

Although HTML5 introduced the concept of open standards for web videos, waving bye to Flash, but things were still not as simple as they appeared. Some of the major players of Internet made their decisions - Firefox, Microsoft (for IE9), Google(Chrome and Youtube), Wikipedia, about the choice of codecs but still it all resulted in a more or less tie.

H.264, the proprietary codec, is considered to be superior than Ogg Theora, developed and open-sourced by On2 Technology. And that's the reason why Google went for H.264 in the HTML5 version of Youtube. But its recent commitment to the development of Ogg Theora codec is an indication of its support for open-video standards.

Theora lacks support for Mobile devices, a field which is developing at a very fast pace and video playback on such devices is probably the most prominent area. Inspite of Theora getting accpetance as a good codec for Desktop systems, there is still a lot to be done to provide acceptable Theora playback on ARM-based devices. Developer Robin Watts, of Pink Noise Productions, has taken the task to optimize Theora for ARM-based devices. 

This optimized codec is called TheorARM, built from Theora and Tremolo, a variant of Watts' Tremor library (integer only Vorbis). Watts is trying to improve the codec's performance and efficiency on ARM devices. He has addressed some of the difficulties with Theora in TheorARM's documentation.

The standard Theora decoder as supplied, currently contains no ARM code whatsoever. Furthermore, it relies on various support libraries including libogg and libvorbis (available from the same source) to do ogg bitstream handling and vorbis decoding. Unfortunately libvorbis relies on floating point operation, which makes it a non-starter on the ARM platform.

In some cases this involves tweaks to the C - in other cases, this means rewriting speed critical sections entirely in ARM code.

Google funding for the development of TheorARM is a great contribution to open-video. But this was not predicted after Google acquired On2 Technologies. On2 recent codec VP8 are better than Theora and a competitive with H.264. So, it was anticipated that Google will soon opensource VP8 but rather it seems to be more interested in the development of Theora.