Yesterday Sébastien Adgnot sent me a lovely message about Dailymotion’s drive to make Theora encodings available for all of their videos. Blizzard sums up the implications nicely:

Today Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video sites, announced support for open video. They’ve put out a press release, a blog post on the new openvideo site as well as a demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5.  They are automatically transcoding all of the content that their Motion Makers and Official Users create and expect to have around 300,000 videos transcoded into the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats.  You can view the site they have up at openvideo.dailymotion.com.

This is fantastic news; it is a continuation of work DM started with a theora portal for a certain mean green machine, and means another 300,000 videos that will play natively on XOs out of the box.

PSNR comparisons of x264 v theora

More importantly, this is only the start of a wave of free codec adoption.  Theora has been making great technical strides at lower bitrates, with steady support from RedHat, Mozilla, and Wikimedia.  Expect similar updates to come over the summer, perhaps as early as June’s Open Video Conference in New York.

Congratulations to everyone at Dailymotion who helped make this milestone happen!