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A bit sad that he made the usual silly argument that somehow Theora is more susceptible to submarine patents than H.264. Sure there can be submarine patents in

by uriel 17y ago

A bit sad that he made the usual silly argument that somehow Theora is more susceptible to submarine patents than H.264. Sure there can be submarine patents in Theora, but they can exists for H.264 too, and then you have to deal with the patent trolls and the MPEG-LA. Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent licensing whims is not a very good business decision. And of course, he didn't touch at all on the whole open source issue, which was a big part of the problem with .gif, and which in my opinion are the main reason H.264 is not acceptable: it is not acceptable to basically bar open source from a huge part of the web. (And expecting all open source projects and users to just ignore the insane patent laws is not acceptable either.) Yes, Flash is even worse, but that is besides the point, flash is not part of the standard web ecosystem and never will be.

GHFigs 17y ago
Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent licensing whims is not a very good business decision. This is an hard pill to swallow for companies who have profited greatly from the interoperability that such licensing affords them. it is not acceptable to basically bar open source from a huge part of the web Who exactly is doing that? H.264 is not proposed to be part of the HTML5 spec. It's just what people use. flash is not part of the standard web ecosystem In the sense of de jure standards, neither is H.264. In the sense of de facto standards, it is even more of a standard than H.264.
- aw3c2 17y ago
  On the web, people use H.264 involuntarily because Flash supports it and most video sites use Flash. Theora is a good equivalent to the commonly used Baseline profile.
  - m_eiman 17y ago
    It appears that it's not equivalent in the quality/bit sense: http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356 http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      From eyeballing that chart, x264 Baseline (a very, very good implementation, that can beat some other H.264 encoders in High Profile) never beats Theora 1.1 by more than 20%. Actually he has figures in the table, but the figures are all given against the winning x264 profile, I've adapted them to compare x264 baseline and Theora 1.1: SSIM 0.95 0.96 0.97 0.98 x264_baseline 438 kbps 576 kbps 799 kbps 1322 kbps theora 576 kbps 713 kbps 943 kbps 1648 kbps increase 31% 24% 18% 25% Which is a very good showing for Theora, despite his misleading textual comment ("Ogg Theora, is a big disappointment: I never expected it to play in the same league as x264, but even I didn’t think that it would be worse than even Baseline Profile" -- remember x264 Baseline can beat Apple H.264 High Profile amongst others). Particularly with them claiming good improvements between 1.1 and the in-development 1.2 that already exceed the jump demonstrated in 1.1 over the initial 1.0 release. He tried to use the latest Theora code for this test but got the wrong branch unfortunately. He also, bizarrely, commiserated that Theora is in the same class as the "old" Xvid, which beats the (again very, very good) x264 Baseline at the higher bitrates. One of the better thought out codec tests I've seen, but his commentary is weirdly lacking in context. On that note I've just noticed that he, incorrectly, described Theora as an "MPEG-4 derivate" (like Xvid and DivX) in the intro when you could say that not deriving from patented MPEG technology is perhaps a fundamental feature of VP3 and perhaps the whole point of Theora.
      - m_eiman 17y ago
        Why compare with Baseline, though, and not Main or High? In e.g. the "desktop computer playing the video through Flash" scenario there's no client-side reason not to use the more advanced modes. The iPhone is limited to Baseline to be able to use accelerated decoding, but is that also the case for other embedded systems such as set-top boxes? In the case of YouTube et al there's the server-side performance/encoding time consideration, but they should be able to encode everything in a quicker format, e.g. Baseline, and re-encode popular content in High profile as needed.
        ZeroGravitas 17y ago

by uriel 17y ago

GHFigs 17y ago

Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent licensing whims is not a very good business decision. This is an hard pill to swallow for companies who have profited greatly from the interoperability that such licensing affords them. it is not acceptable to basically bar open source from a huge part of the web Who exactly is doing that? H.264 is not proposed to be part of the HTML5 spec. It's just what people use. flash is not part of the standard web ecosystem In the sense of de jure standards, neither is H.264. In the sense of de facto standards, it is even more of a standard than H.264.

aw3c2 17y ago
On the web, people use H.264 involuntarily because Flash supports it and most video sites use Flash. Theora is a good equivalent to the commonly used Baseline profile.
- m_eiman 17y ago
  It appears that it's not equivalent in the quality/bit sense: http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356 http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    From eyeballing that chart, x264 Baseline (a very, very good implementation, that can beat some other H.264 encoders in High Profile) never beats Theora 1.1 by more than 20%. Actually he has figures in the table, but the figures are all given against the winning x264 profile, I've adapted them to compare x264 baseline and Theora 1.1: SSIM 0.95 0.96 0.97 0.98 x264_baseline 438 kbps 576 kbps 799 kbps 1322 kbps theora 576 kbps 713 kbps 943 kbps 1648 kbps increase 31% 24% 18% 25% Which is a very good showing for Theora, despite his misleading textual comment ("Ogg Theora, is a big disappointment: I never expected it to play in the same league as x264, but even I didn’t think that it would be worse than even Baseline Profile" -- remember x264 Baseline can beat Apple H.264 High Profile amongst others). Particularly with them claiming good improvements between 1.1 and the in-development 1.2 that already exceed the jump demonstrated in 1.1 over the initial 1.0 release. He tried to use the latest Theora code for this test but got the wrong branch unfortunately. He also, bizarrely, commiserated that Theora is in the same class as the "old" Xvid, which beats the (again very, very good) x264 Baseline at the higher bitrates. One of the better thought out codec tests I've seen, but his commentary is weirdly lacking in context. On that note I've just noticed that he, incorrectly, described Theora as an "MPEG-4 derivate" (like Xvid and DivX) in the intro when you could say that not deriving from patented MPEG technology is perhaps a fundamental feature of VP3 and perhaps the whole point of Theora.
    - m_eiman 17y ago
      Why compare with Baseline, though, and not Main or High? In e.g. the "desktop computer playing the video through Flash" scenario there's no client-side reason not to use the more advanced modes. The iPhone is limited to Baseline to be able to use accelerated decoding, but is that also the case for other embedded systems such as set-top boxes? In the case of YouTube et al there's the server-side performance/encoding time consideration, but they should be able to encode everything in a quicker format, e.g. Baseline, and re-encode popular content in High profile as needed.
      - ZeroGravitas 17y ago