We’re happy to announce that we’ve installed the latest libtheora and ffmpeg2theora for transcoding to ogg videos. We really have to give a big thank you to Jan @ v2v.cc. His open source project – ffmpeg2theora has been a big gift to the adoption of ogg videos and HTML5.

Some of you may not be familiar of theora. Theora is a royalty-free, open standard, lossy video compression technology being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation alongside their other open media efforts, most notably the Vorbis audio codec and the Ogg container.

libtheora is a reference implementation of the Theora video compression format being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. Now 1.1.0 release is a big milestone, it is much improved in quality that is comparable with h.264 in many aspects. The file size has also reduced at the same quality.

For more information you can find out at http://www.theora.org/news/

What is so good about theora? It is free to use and you don’t need a Flash plugin to play the video. By default in HTML 5, these browsers support Theora when embedded by the video element:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.5
• Google Chrome
• SeaMonkey
• Opera

For how to embed the video on your site, here’s some tips.

• Video for everybody by Camen
• HTML5 and video in email