one of the biggest argument is, that ogv is patent-free ;)

There is some discussion going on since some time on gnome-multimedia about a shared library/widget set to select "encoding presets".
When this will be implemented you will have a dialog with several presets like "Ipod video" "PSP video" "Theora video" etc.

We'll probably implement support for other formats if and when that work will be completed.

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-multimedia/2009-May/msg00000.html

Patents sucks yeah. But as the ogv video produced by cheese contains lots of encoding errors it is impossible to transcode it to a more portable format. Both ffmpeg and mencoder failed at it for me. mplayer totally refuses to play the recorded video and totem is barely able to do it, although with interruptions, unsynced audio and lots of complaining. 

Are you sure you're not using an outdated cheese version?
We had video issues like these some time ago (< 2.24?) but they are fixed since some time now.

I've just installed mplayer and it plays our videos pretty fine as totem does.

I'm using Cheese 2.24.2-0ubuntu0+intrepid1. If you want I can upload some of the broken videos. Maybe I should open a new bug report for that?

could you try to upgrade to cheese 2.26.x?

The svn version wont even start, it says: "One or more required gstreamer-attributes missing: theoraenc." and terminates. So I can't test with a new cheese version.

you have to install the dependencies, otherways you wont be able to use it. in this case you are missing the gstreamer theora/ogg element

Any news? A recent distribution livecd is usually the easiest way to test new cheese versions.

Sorry, I will try to build it again. I built it using jhbuild which compiles the gstreamer plugins before cheese so I'm not sure why it complains about the dependencies.

(In reply to comment #11)
> Sorry, I will try to build it again. I built it using jhbuild which compiles
> the gstreamer plugins before cheese so I'm not sure why it complains about the
> dependencies.

I've never used jhbuild so cannot help you here, but it sounds either like a PATH problem (jhbuild doesn't set correct registry path for its gstreamer installation) or it doesn't build theoraenc because of missing dependencies (gstreamer just doesn't build plugins if it can't so it's totally possible that it couldn't build theoraenc but didn't complain).

*** Bug 588709 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Is it possible to control the video bitrate of ogv?

Just wanted to report that with Cheese 2.26.0 records .ogv video just fine. :) And there is no problem converting the .ogv file to other formats such as .mpg and .avi.

So I'm closing as OBSOLETE then :)