Interesting enough, I'm probably one of the few people who still has some theora videos on the web in some very old blogposts of mine.<p>Some history for people who are not aware: Theora became somewhat popular in free software / open source circles, because at the time, it was the best codec which was believed to be either free of patents or the patents were explicitly opened up for free use. Therefore, if you were concerned about patents and their impact on free software, you'd use it. But Theora wasn't a great codec, which we always knew, it just was the best we had before google bought and opened up VP8.<p>It's an interesting tradeoff. Theora was never particularly popular, so you probably will have a low number of sites being impacted. But we kinda have a tradition that the web plattform rarely breaks things. You mostly can still use old html from 20-30 years ago, gif will probably stay supported in browsers forever, and I don't think there are many examples of media formats in browsers being deprecated. Even odd things like bmp are still supported.
Firefox as well: <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860492" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860492</a><p>It's a shame Theora never "made it". The peak of its popularity is long past.
Is there any good video codec that the library is as small or not much bigger as Theora and that has no patent/license issue?<p>I tried to use VP9 in the past but it's like 20-40MBs a dll. The lowest I could find was dav1d and it's still around 4MB for the library dll and encoding AV1 and getting good compression rate was not trivial.
I won’t miss Theora - but I am as part of my job helping a business migrate from some old open-source software which inexplicably re-encoded almost all audio uploads into Ogg Vorbis audio files.<p>I can just play those as they are, in any browser, except Safari. Painfully, macOS actually supports Vorbis, but only in a CAF (Core Audio Format) container instead of an Ogg container. Still hoping; because shipping an entire Ogg decoder in the browser with WASM works but is ugly.<p>Of course, I could also just re-encode them with a microservice but it’s just… bleh.
FTA:<p>"Chrome will deprecate and remove support for the Theora video codec in desktop Chrome due to emerging security risks. Theora's low (and now often incorrect) usage no longer justifies support for most users. "
I am asking the WMF to add support for MP4: <a href="https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T329258" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T329258</a>