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Even if Google doesn't free VP8, Theora already exists and is used by another of the world's most popular websites: Wikipedia. As more video gets added to Wikip

by troymc 17y ago

Even if Google doesn't free VP8, Theora already exists and is used by another of the world's most popular websites: Wikipedia. As more video gets added to Wikipedia, developers of web browsers will have more incentive to support Theora natively. (Note: According to an earlier comment by halo, about 32% of web browsers support Ogg Theora already.)

MikeCapone 17y ago
Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support? I'm all for Theora, but the (admittedly limited) anecdotal evidence that I have is that it isn't quite competitive with h.264 (with a good encoder like x264) at higher rez 720p and 1080p). I might be mistaken on that, though.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support? The encoder still has a good bit of room to improve; it still lacks proper pixel-domain RD optimization and could use some psychovisual improvements as well. It is primarily crippled by the ancient VP3 specification though. In theory it may eventually be able to eke ahead of Xvid, as while Xvid was a very good MPEG-4 ASP encoder, it never had any significant psy optimizations, so even though Theora as a video format is probably slightly worse, the encoder should be able to surpass Xvid with psy optimizations in some cases. The primary problem for adoption (not for quality) is its lack of features. For many many use-cases, one needs fine-grained control over various parameters, such as the buffer size, the maximum bitrate, the latency, and so forth. The encoder is currently very inflexible, and with no alternative encoding libraries, this leaves very little choice for many applications. For practical purposes, it only has one speed mode: "slow as hell", which makes it basically impossible to stream anything above SD.
  - MikeCapone 17y ago
    So if I'm reading this correctly, Theora could compete with Xvid, but h.264 is out of reach?
loup-vaillant 17y ago
Wikipedia is not video centric. Not being capable of viewing a video in Wikipedia rarely is a big deal. This is a big deal on YouTube, however. The effect is way bigger.

by troymc 17y ago

MikeCapone 17y ago

Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support? I'm all for Theora, but the (admittedly limited) anecdotal evidence that I have is that it isn't quite competitive with h.264 (with a good encoder like x264) at higher rez 720p and 1080p). I might be mistaken on that, though.

DarkShikari 17y ago
Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support? The encoder still has a good bit of room to improve; it still lacks proper pixel-domain RD optimization and could use some psychovisual improvements as well. It is primarily crippled by the ancient VP3 specification though. In theory it may eventually be able to eke ahead of Xvid, as while Xvid was a very good MPEG-4 ASP encoder, it never had any significant psy optimizations, so even though Theora as a video format is probably slightly worse, the encoder should be able to surpass Xvid with psy optimizations in some cases. The primary problem for adoption (not for quality) is its lack of features. For many many use-cases, one needs fine-grained control over various parameters, such as the buffer size, the maximum bitrate, the latency, and so forth. The encoder is currently very inflexible, and with no alternative encoding libraries, this leaves very little choice for many applications. For practical purposes, it only has one speed mode: "slow as hell", which makes it basically impossible to stream anything above SD.
- MikeCapone 17y ago
  So if I'm reading this correctly, Theora could compete with Xvid, but h.264 is out of reach?

loup-vaillant 17y ago

Wikipedia is not video centric. Not being capable of viewing a video in Wikipedia rarely is a big deal. This is a big deal on YouTube, however. The effect is way bigger.