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Can someone explain the phrase "the obsolete Ogg Theora" thrown in at the end? Throw-away trollbait or valid argument?

by shib71 17y ago

DarkShikari 17y ago
See this thread so that the same tired arguments don't get repeated again: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=692448 http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=692448 In addition to any technical argument, Theora is basically a renamed On2 VP3 (very little was modified from the original specification); if one goes by the fact that VP3 was originally meant to compete with MPEG-2 back in the mid-1990s, it is "obsolete" in a temporal sense. On2 has since superseded VP3 with VP6 and now VP7 (and soon, supposedly, VP8), so in that sense it is "obsolete" as well.
blasdel 17y ago
Up until a year ago, Theora was total dogshit, dramatically worse than H.263 (RealVideo, Flash 7, etc.) -- Xiph had made basically no effort at all to improve the codec itself, they just made a lot of fuss about integrating it with their custom container format, and froze the format in 2004 (Not that it really mattered -- there have never been other implementations). A year ago, the 'Thusnelda' development fork of the encoder was started, and made dramatic quality improvements -- the bleeding-edge library now achieves about the same level of mediocrity as H.263 -- welcome to the early 90s!
- doublec 17y ago
  I believe the "there have never been other implementations" to be incorrect. The Cortado Java Applet is a a second implementation of the Theora code for example.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    That's just a decoder, and it's a directly derived work of libtheora, not independently written or divergent.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Well just like Linux, Apache, MySQL and Mozilla it's based on technology going back years (decades in some cases). You can easily confuse people by saying something is a "70s era", or "mid-90s" technology because they'll infer that whatever you are pushing is current, even if it too is built on top of technology of the same era. See my quote of his opinions on non-Apple browsers if you're still wondering whether this author is trollish or not: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692354

Can someone explain the phrase "the obsolete Ogg Theora" thrown in at the end? Throw-away trollbait or valid argument?

by shib71 17y ago

Can someone explain the phrase "the obsolete Ogg Theora" thrown in at the end? Throw-away trollbait or valid argument?

See this thread so that the same tired arguments don't get repeated again: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=692448 http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=692448 In addition to any technical argument, Theora is basically a renamed On2 VP3 (very little was modified from the original specification); if one goes by the fact that VP3 was originally meant to compete with MPEG-2 back in the mid-1990s, it is "obsolete" in a temporal sense. On2 has since superseded VP3 with VP6 and now VP7 (and soon, supposedly, VP8), so in that sense it is "obsolete" as well.

blasdel 17y ago

Up until a year ago, Theora was total dogshit, dramatically worse than H.263 (RealVideo, Flash 7, etc.) -- Xiph had made basically no effort at all to improve the codec itself, they just made a lot of fuss about integrating it with their custom container format, and froze the format in 2004 (Not that it really mattered -- there have never been other implementations). A year ago, the 'Thusnelda' development fork of the encoder was started, and made dramatic quality improvements -- the bleeding-edge library now achieves about the same level of mediocrity as H.263 -- welcome to the early 90s!

doublec 17y ago
I believe the "there have never been other implementations" to be incorrect. The Cortado Java Applet is a a second implementation of the Theora code for example.
- blasdel 17y ago
  That's just a decoder, and it's a directly derived work of libtheora, not independently written or divergent.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

Well just like Linux, Apache, MySQL and Mozilla it's based on technology going back years (decades in some cases). You can easily confuse people by saying something is a "70s era", or "mid-90s" technology because they'll infer that whatever you are pushing is current, even if it too is built on top of technology of the same era. See my quote of his opinions on non-Apple browsers if you're still wondering whether this author is trollish or not: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692354