Yesterday evening I had some time to slack and I decided to implement Vorbis and Theora into the Anarchy Media Player. This is a fairly wellknown WordPress plugi for displaying media files, but it can also be used without WordPress. I used the Cortado applet made available by the Fluendo people which should allow direct playback in the browser (at least if the person accessing the content has Java installed) otherwise you should see a download link. So it degrades pretty nice.

If everything went ok you should either see a movie with a cable train, just like this screenshot below.

or if the Mediaplayer failed you should see its filename. Keep in mind though that for Cortado to work your visitors need to have Java installed on their machine. Without Java Cortado will not work.

Testing theora support with the movie Cablecar_7_turntable.ogg‎ Author: Jim Addams licensed under the GFDL

The testing movie is from Wikimedia and made by Jim Adams licensed under the GNU Free Documentation license. The original file can be found here along with a lot more Theora movies: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video

I’ve already sent my changes back to the author of Anarchy Media Player, so I hope to see it included with the new release. Would be great if more people would start to use open media formats. For those interested in more about open media formats check out our recently started initiative called Spread Open Media.