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Here's something the average developer may not realize: Theora just looks starkly bad compared to H.264 at web bitrates. I didn't use to think this, when all I

Here's something the average developer may not realize: Theora just looks starkly bad compared to H.264 at web bitrates. I didn't use to think this, when all I had seen was some comparison articles with objective measures and still images but then I actually tried encoding them myself and playing them simultaneously. For those genuinely curious for discovery (rather than making rhetoric) try this html in Chrome or a browser that supports both H.264 and Theora. It's an example where someone has encoded a video in both formats at the same bitrate. (I'm not going to link or host it because I don't want to kill the site the video is hosted on.) <html><head></head><body> <video controls="" autoplay="" type="video/ogg" src="http://www.doceo.com/SD1_1.ogv"></video> <video controls="" autoplay="" type="video/mp4" src="http://www.doceo.com/SD.mp4"></video> </body> So try that, and then after watching that try to tell me that the difference in visual quality is slight. After doing this myself (those videos are not mine but my results were similar) I can only conclude that supporters of Theora as a pragmatic choice (as opposed to an idealistic or emotional one) for delivering professional video content have never done such a test.

silvestrov 16y ago
What encoding parameters did you use?
smokinn 16y ago
I tried very hard to use ogg for encoding a video about 1.5 years ago as well (it was a requirement) and it was so painful. The tools are awful and it took me 5 tries just to get something that wouldn't crash most players if you tried seeking. After I finally got something valid, I ended up settling with a file 1.6x the size of the h264 file I would've created that looked only a little worse. For amateurs like me ogg is hard. h264 is easy.
- aw3c2 16y ago
  ffmpeg2theora is easy. http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/ http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/
  - ugh 16y ago
    Ok, command line interfaces are certainly no problem for anyone reading HN but calling them easy seems slightly, uhm, naive. Also, manpages are awful if all you want to do is encode easily (they also aren’t such a nice read) and their only other documentation – the examples pages – is chuck full with broken links.
    - aw3c2 16y ago
      The post I replied to sounded like a programmer's task, so cli is no problem there. There are not many important things on the manpage. Usually you would set video quality (-v) and maybe audio (-a) and that's it. Theora does not offer a gazillion switches, it is an easy codec.
      - smokinn 16y ago
        I am indeed a programmer and command line doesn't faze me. I use both ffmpeg and mencoder pretty often and I think ffmpeg2theora might've been the one that actually produced something that wasn't crashing players like mad. But even for me it took many tries to get something usable. My younger brother who's web savvy but not a programmer would not have been able to do it without coaching. My mom would've been a hopeless case. Saying that ffmpeg2theora is easy ignores the huge portion of the population who create their movie in Adobe Premiere or iMovie or whatever and click export and choose "TV" or "Youtube" or whatever format with automatic defaults and it looks good and it works. Until you get a GUI on Windows that's even better than Super (which I really like but is really scary to people who don't do much video encoding) it won't get anywhere. Handbrake is the only program I recommend to non-coders. (And my brother uses it fine.)
        ZeroGravitas 16y ago
        Handbrake has a horrendous UI. It just about copes if you need to rip a DVD to the best possible quality, but if you stray from that happy path it's murder. Have you tried the Miro Video Converter? It's supposed to be easy and does H.264 for iPod, Nexus 1 etc. as well as Theora at web rates: http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/ http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/
aw3c2 16y ago
What version of Theora did you use? What encoder? What did you use for the H264 one. Can you please provide the source video file? There are http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/youtube/ http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/youtube/ and http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html , did you see them? edit: Above is evil. Very evil. Or stupid. I encoded the audio from the MP4 to Vorbis to a size of ~800 Kilobytes and it sounds good. Also the Theora video is so bad and damaged, it does not remotely look like a normal encode. I would like to know what went wrong there. Anyways, disgard parent post and the links inside. It's nothing but FUD in my eyes (and ears). edit2: I also get far better visuals than in the linked Theora by even transcoding linked H264 with "-K 170 -V 465" in ffmpeg2theora...
- sp332 16y ago
  I also got better visuals by transcoding from the MP4 again, so something is very messed up with Doceo's Theora encode. One-pass with 450 kbps video, for about the same size file. (I didn't test the audio).
- hackermom 16y ago
  The tests performed on Xiph.org (and all other locations bringing up the same topic) are, in plain words, downright shitty. They are not using any advanced or even intermediate features for the H.264 encoder in question, and I believe they are not even using x264 (which happens to be the best H.264 encoder available), but instead one of the other "underperformers" available, and indirectly (or perhaps even deliberately) spreading the misnomer that video always looks the same at N kbps bitrate, while the truth is that the result can be higly, highly different depending on the feature set used in the video stream, as well as the feature set used to analyze frame by frame. In a test like this, it's anything but fair to use the first, simplest h.264 encoder at hand, with the weakest settings possible, and then claim that "this is what h.264 looks like", when the most substantial component in video quality is not the data format itself, but the frame analyzer software and the stream programmer (read: the encoder itself). I've dealt in video ripping and encoding since the late 90s, having experience in pretty much every mpeg-1, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 asp and mpeg-4/avc encoder available, and Theora JUST DOES NOT COME CLOSE to what x264 can create for the h.264 format. In fact, it barely beats what Xvid can produce for the older mpeg-4 asp format. So far I have not come across a single, proper, honorable comparison of h.264's capabilites compared to Theora. One of these damned days I hope I myself will be bothered enough to get my thumbs out of my ass and put the definite facts out there for people to see. add.: if anyone wonders, i have ripped and encoded video (and audio) for illegal distribution in the so-called "audio/video scene" for almost 13 years now
ZeroGravitas 16y ago
Here's a comment about that comparison from an x264 dev: "We talked about that on IRC, both with x264 and Theora people: all considered it one of the worst articles they had ever seen. They screwed up aspect ratio, luma levels, BT.601 vs BT.709, and so many other things in their comparison that you might as well throw the entire thing out. Plus they used an incredibly bad H.264 encoder. It’s practically a checklist of how to be completely incompetent idiots." http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292#comment-2768 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292#comment-2768 You couldn't have picked a worse test, out of the many that have been done over the last year or so. The fundamental mistake he's made (though there's a whole catalog of them) is that the bitrate for Theora is constant, while the H.264 is variable so H.264 saves up bits from the easy parts for the hard parts while Theora is set up as if it was live streaming and so it just uses the same bandwidth for both the easy and hard bits. The original article that the two clips are from is here, you can see responses from Xiph and others pointing out what he's doing wrong, though it reads strangely as he had to rewrite it twice due to feedback before he gave up: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/ogg-vs-h264---round-one.html http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/ogg-vs-h264-...

silvestrov 16y ago

What encoding parameters did you use?

smokinn 16y ago

I tried very hard to use ogg for encoding a video about 1.5 years ago as well (it was a requirement) and it was so painful. The tools are awful and it took me 5 tries just to get something that wouldn't crash most players if you tried seeking. After I finally got something valid, I ended up settling with a file 1.6x the size of the h264 file I would've created that looked only a little worse. For amateurs like me ogg is hard. h264 is easy.

aw3c2 16y ago
ffmpeg2theora is easy. http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/ http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/
- ugh 16y ago
  Ok, command line interfaces are certainly no problem for anyone reading HN but calling them easy seems slightly, uhm, naive. Also, manpages are awful if all you want to do is encode easily (they also aren’t such a nice read) and their only other documentation – the examples pages – is chuck full with broken links.
  - aw3c2 16y ago
    The post I replied to sounded like a programmer's task, so cli is no problem there. There are not many important things on the manpage. Usually you would set video quality (-v) and maybe audio (-a) and that's it. Theora does not offer a gazillion switches, it is an easy codec.
    - smokinn 16y ago
      I am indeed a programmer and command line doesn't faze me. I use both ffmpeg and mencoder pretty often and I think ffmpeg2theora might've been the one that actually produced something that wasn't crashing players like mad. But even for me it took many tries to get something usable. My younger brother who's web savvy but not a programmer would not have been able to do it without coaching. My mom would've been a hopeless case. Saying that ffmpeg2theora is easy ignores the huge portion of the population who create their movie in Adobe Premiere or iMovie or whatever and click export and choose "TV" or "Youtube" or whatever format with automatic defaults and it looks good and it works. Until you get a GUI on Windows that's even better than Super (which I really like but is really scary to people who don't do much video encoding) it won't get anywhere. Handbrake is the only program I recommend to non-coders. (And my brother uses it fine.)
      - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
        Handbrake has a horrendous UI. It just about copes if you need to rip a DVD to the best possible quality, but if you stray from that happy path it's murder. Have you tried the Miro Video Converter? It's supposed to be easy and does H.264 for iPod, Nexus 1 etc. as well as Theora at web rates: http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/ http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/

aw3c2 16y ago

What version of Theora did you use? What encoder? What did you use for the H264 one. Can you please provide the source video file? There are http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/youtube/ http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/youtube/ and http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html , did you see them? edit: Above is evil. Very evil. Or stupid. I encoded the audio from the MP4 to Vorbis to a size of ~800 Kilobytes and it sounds good. Also the Theora video is so bad and damaged, it does not remotely look like a normal encode. I would like to know what went wrong there. Anyways, disgard parent post and the links inside. It's nothing but FUD in my eyes (and ears). edit2: I also get far better visuals than in the linked Theora by even transcoding linked H264 with "-K 170 -V 465" in ffmpeg2theora...

sp332 16y ago
I also got better visuals by transcoding from the MP4 again, so something is very messed up with Doceo's Theora encode. One-pass with 450 kbps video, for about the same size file. (I didn't test the audio).
hackermom 16y ago
The tests performed on Xiph.org (and all other locations bringing up the same topic) are, in plain words, downright shitty. They are not using any advanced or even intermediate features for the H.264 encoder in question, and I believe they are not even using x264 (which happens to be the best H.264 encoder available), but instead one of the other "underperformers" available, and indirectly (or perhaps even deliberately) spreading the misnomer that video always looks the same at N kbps bitrate, while the truth is that the result can be higly, highly different depending on the feature set used in the video stream, as well as the feature set used to analyze frame by frame. In a test like this, it's anything but fair to use the first, simplest h.264 encoder at hand, with the weakest settings possible, and then claim that "this is what h.264 looks like", when the most substantial component in video quality is not the data format itself, but the frame analyzer software and the stream programmer (read: the encoder itself). I've dealt in video ripping and encoding since the late 90s, having experience in pretty much every mpeg-1, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 asp and mpeg-4/avc encoder available, and Theora JUST DOES NOT COME CLOSE to what x264 can create for the h.264 format. In fact, it barely beats what Xvid can produce for the older mpeg-4 asp format. So far I have not come across a single, proper, honorable comparison of h.264's capabilites compared to Theora. One of these damned days I hope I myself will be bothered enough to get my thumbs out of my ass and put the definite facts out there for people to see. add.: if anyone wonders, i have ripped and encoded video (and audio) for illegal distribution in the so-called "audio/video scene" for almost 13 years now

ZeroGravitas 16y ago

Here's a comment about that comparison from an x264 dev: "We talked about that on IRC, both with x264 and Theora people: all considered it one of the worst articles they had ever seen. They screwed up aspect ratio, luma levels, BT.601 vs BT.709, and so many other things in their comparison that you might as well throw the entire thing out. Plus they used an incredibly bad H.264 encoder. It’s practically a checklist of how to be completely incompetent idiots." http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292#comment-2768 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292#comment-2768 You couldn't have picked a worse test, out of the many that have been done over the last year or so. The fundamental mistake he's made (though there's a whole catalog of them) is that the bitrate for Theora is constant, while the H.264 is variable so H.264 saves up bits from the easy parts for the hard parts while Theora is set up as if it was live streaming and so it just uses the same bandwidth for both the easy and hard bits. The original article that the two clips are from is here, you can see responses from Xiph and others pointing out what he's doing wrong, though it reads strangely as he had to rewrite it twice due to feedback before he gave up: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/ogg-vs-h264---round-one.html http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/ogg-vs-h264-...