Seeking in Ogg files served over the internet has historically been slow. This is because traditional Ogg files do not contain a keyframe index, so you've got no idea where in the media you need to begin decoding from in order to playback from any given time, particularly in variable bitrate media. Seeking typically has to be implemented as a bisection search over the media, which can be slow when performed over a high-latency network such as the internet.
I've been working with the people at the Xiph foundation to develop a keyframe index for Ogg files to alleviate this problem, and I'm delighted to announce that today I finally landed support for indexed Ogg files in Firefox trunk. The keyframe index format I developed has been included in the newly minted Ogg Skeleton 4.0 metadata track.
How much of an impact does seeking with an index make? Download a current Firefox 4 nightly build, and point it at my keyframe indexed Ogg seek demo, and see for yourself. It speeds up seeking dramatically.
If you're using ffmpeg2theora version 0.27 or later to encode your Ogg media, you'll automatically get a Skeleton 4.0 track with keyframe indexes when you encode your media. If you have existing Ogg media which you want add keyframe indexes to, you can use my OggIndex command line tool to add indexes to your Ogg media. The author of ffmpeg2theora, J^, is kindly building and hosting nightly builds of OggIndex, and the OggIndex source code is also available via git under a BSD license.
Indexed Oggs are also supported in GStreamer trunk thanks to the work of Sebastian Dröge.
I've been working on this sporadically for almost a year now, so it's great to finally get this landed!
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