Mozilla is providing funds to improve open video codec Theora

10th February 2009

Mozilla announced a special grant of $100'000 U.S. to the community Wikimedia Foundation. This money is to be spent on improving and completing the industry's first open standard for publishing and distributing video content via the Internet.
Currently, the majority of materials for creation of modern web sites are distributed free of charge, including the basis of the World Wide Web: HTML. But the matter is different with the technologies of encoding video. Key video standards are controlled by private firms (Real Networks, Microsoft and Adobe) and developers have to pay for the right to use them in their projects. Mozilla`s main goal is to promote at the market the open video format of Theora, published by the open source community of Xiph.Org Foundation.
Thorough tests showed that the codec Theora is still unable to provide the same picture quality its main competitor, H.264.
Many experts do not believe in this project, as they consider the amount of money just insufficient to turn Theora into a competitive product. But the huge experience of Mozilla shows, that they can cope with any task, impossible as it may seem.