capheind
10-14-2006, 06:47 PM
When I try to play any of the Theora formatted shows on Mplayer the sound is out of sync and I get an error "could not find codec" then after a few seconds of playback it cuts out. Under totem (the Xine version) it just skips around and dies without any warning. I'm runing Fedora Core 5. Is there something I need to upgrade/configure/install that I am unaware of?
Make sure you have libtheora installed, or any other dependencies that xine-lib might need to decode theora.
Personally, I think Theora is crap. I've tried it in mplayer, vlc, xine, and I have the right dependencies and codecs installed--most of the time it never works. Whenever it actually does work, playback is so buggy and resource-intensive that it really isn't worthwhile.
I support Ogg being free and what not, which is why you would probably want to use theora, but really theora isn't that great comparitively to something like h.264, a free implementation of which is available as x264. Theora is actually based on VP3, which is obsolete anyway (only reason people still use VP3 is because it isn't proprietary, as opposed to its successor, VP6).
Bottom line: Vorbis is great, but Theora still has a long way to go.