theora - Oct 2009 - New release of the Cortado java player

Earlier this year, Xiph.org took over maintenance of the Cortado java
applet, primarily used as a player for Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora files
on systems which don't have native support. Originally developed by
Fluendo SA and more recently the Wikimedia Foundation, it was hoped
and agreed that moving the 'official' hosting for this open source
project under the Xiph.org Foundation's umbrella would help
concentrate interest and expertise on this important component of the
free media codec infrastructure.

Now, after extensive work from all our contributors to bring it up to
date with the final Theora spec, I'm pleased to be able to announce
our first release, and the first cortado release of any sort in three
years. The new version is tagged 0.5.0 to indicate both the change in
hosting and the significant new support for files from the new
libtheora encoder implementation and Kate embedded subtitles.

In particular, 0.5.0 has:

      * Support for files encoded with Theora 1.1
      * Faster YUV to RGB conversion with better results
      * Basic support for embedded Ogg Kate streams
      * Seeking fixed for files with an Ogg Skeleton track
      * Maintained compatibility with the Microsoft VM

We strongly recommend upgrading to all users, this release really does
work much better than any of the earlier builds which are available,
and is essential for playback of the new, higher quality theora files
becoming available since the libtheora 1.1 release.

Source and sample builds are available from the Xiph.org download site:

  http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/cortado/cortado-0.5.0.tar.gz
  http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/cortado/cortado-ov-debug-0.5.0.jar
  http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/cortado/cortado-ovt-debug-0.5.0.jar
  http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/cortado/cortado-ov-stripped-0.5.0.jar
  http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/cortado/cortado-ovt-stripped-0.5.0.jar

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

 -r

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 6:24 PM, Ralph Giles <giles at xiph.org>
wrote:
> ? ? ?* Support for files encoded with Theora 1.1
It's important to be clear that the Theora format did not change with
the release of libtheora 1.1.   Cortado was never a fully spec
compliant decoder. However, older versions of the libtheora encoder
did not use all of the available features so these shortcomings were
not as obvious.

Cortado is still not fully spec compliant: the lack of 4:2:2 and 4:4:4
colorspace is the remaining obvious omission, but the compatibility is
now good.

One other very important enhancement compared to 0.2.2 or development
versions prior to 2009-07-17 is that the 0.5.0 cortado will display
video with much higher quality.   The inverse DCT function in cortado
had a long-standing bug which could cause blocky, blurry, or streaking
artefacts in the displayed video.

On 27/10/09 22:24, Ralph Giles wrote:
> Now, after extensive work from all our contributors to bring it up to
> date with the final Theora spec, I'm pleased to be able to announce
> our first release, and the first cortado release of any sort in three
> years. The new version is tagged 0.5.0 to indicate both the change in
> hosting and the significant new support for files from the new
> libtheora encoder implementation and Kate embedded subtitles.
Hi Ralph,

Any chance someone could review my patch [1] for inclusion before the 
next release? It's a pretty annoying bug - although I seem to be the 
only person who's encountered it so far?

-Phil

[1] https://trac.xiph.org/ticket/1565