Theora is Xiph.Org’s first released video codec designed for use with Ogg. Theora started out based on the VP3 codec. It’s been over 16 years since the release of the libtheora 1.0 reference software implementation and tagged this week was libtheora 1.2 beta.
It’s been years since there has been much to talk about with Theora besides in 2023 when Google Chrome dropped support and was followed by Firefox. Coming as a surprise this week is libtheora 1.2 beta.
The libtheora 1.2 beta is available for download from Xiph.Org’s GitLab. This follows a libtheora 1.2 alpha from 2018 that was never tagged. Following the 2008 release of Theora 1.0 with its libtheora release, Theora libtheora 1.1 released in 2009 and it’s been rather quiet since with alternatives like VP9 and AV1 coming about in later years.
The libtheora 1.2 beta is delivering improved ARM support, initial support for RISC OS, fixing the MinGW build, and various performance improvements as well as code quality enhancements. There are also a number of build system fixes and other alterations. The performance tuning as well as better ARM support is likely the most interesting changes of this long awaited libtheora 1.2 beta.
Hopefully it won’t be too many years before seeing the libtheora 1.2 stable release.
