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Is a h.264 license more expensive than the extra bandwidth that would be necessary for Theora?

• aw3c2 17y ago
  Since there is an infinite number of licensees, yes, definitely yes.
  • briansmith 17y ago
    How can there be an infinite number of licensees, when the number of people & corporations is finite, and licensing is only needed for a finite amount of time (until the patents expire)?
• jon_dahl 17y ago
  For businesses, this is a good question. H.264 licensing can be relatively inexpensive (free for moderate use, cheaper than MP3 or AAC for high-volume use). So most businesses are probably better off using H.264 than Theora. Firefox is another story; they aren't charging, and according to the article, would be responsible for the licensing costs for every one of their (hundreds of millions of?) users.
  • deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
• ajross 17y ago
  Using h.264 is a win for bandwidth only if you know what you're doing. Most encoders out there (see the x264 site for details) are run with poorly tuned settings and generally do a poor job. And yet ... no one care, they do it anyway. The idea that marginal 20% or so bandwidth costs are expensive is mostly a red herring. Frankly if Safari and IE were to suddenly support Theora (or Firefox and IE to suddently support h.264), this argument would be over. No one cares about the technical details. Any codec that works pervasively will win.