After a one year beta phase, the Xiph Foundation's free Ogg Theora video codec has been released in its final, "mainline", version 1.0.

The Xiph.org Foundation's open source developers have released version 1.1 ("Thusnelda") of their reference implementation of the libtheora encoder library. Thusnelda is said to offer considerable quality and performance improvements over version 1.0.

"After several years of development, the first beta release for Ogg Theora 1.0 - a free video codec - is now available. Now all we have to do is to get some content in the Theora format."

"After over a month of public testing, we're pleased to declare our 1.1 rewrite of libtheora stable. This is the reference implementation for the Theora video codec. Source code for libtheora 1.1.0 is available now, and will be incorporated in major Theora-supporting applications soon..." via hacks.mozilla.org

As Web browser vendors line up behind Google's new open source video codec, what does that mean for the codec from Mozilla?

In a move that will boost support for open video on the mobile Web, Google has provided funding to TheorARM—a project that produces an ARM-optimized implementation of the Ogg Theora video codec.

It took long, but the Xiph.Org Foundation has finally released the mature, stable, rock-solid version of the Theora codec. Read the announcement for more information. After last year's attempted patent FUD that went nowhere and Mozilla's adoption of the format for the web, this announcement is another victory for the Open Media cause.

Sun Microsystems is setting out to create an open source, royalty-free video codec. Given the considerable head start of well-known, royalty-free video codecs like Dirac and Theora, you might ask why the world needs another. The answer, according to Sun, is the process the company will use to develop it -- starting with a full-on, careful examination of the patent situation.

Google has added an experimental branch to the VP8 code tree, encouraging developers to begin work on the next incarnation of its newly open sourced video codec.