

YouTube / Ogg/Theora comparison - lamnk
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

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jdowdell
The post reacted against the Google employee's phrasing, and compared current
YouTube auto-compression to custom Theora compression.

But it has since been misread by many as comparing the codecs and their
capabilities.

Chris Di Bona was essentially correct when implying that the pre-2001 type of
innovation in Theora/VP3 would not be technically persuasive to modern content
sites.

jd/adobe

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zokier
I don't believe that the comparison to YouTube is fair. YT allows far higher
resolution video("HD"), and even the default player window is 640x360. Of
course YT player could be upscaling all videos from 480x270, but that would be
a bit silly. I think more research is needed before drawing conclusions.

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TweedHeads
The new <video> tag has to be one of those life changing experiences for the
web.

Theora rocks!

(and the big buck bunny video rocks too)

~~~
blasdel
No, Theora doesn't rock, or more correctly _it hasn't rocked_

Until a few months ago when they made a breakthrough in the development
version of their encoder, Theora was the _WORST_ mpeg4-like codec in active
development, _much_ worse than h263 (which is itself awful). Double the
bitrate / encode times and half the quality -- it hadn't really improved at
all since it was open sourced.

Now it's no longer the very worst modern codec (beating h263, but still
mediocre), but it's at least 4 years too late.

Vorbis audio is widely used in commercial game development because it's very
free and very good at low bitrates. Theora has _only_ been used by agenda-
driven freetards, basically just Wikipedia. Mozilla will likely be the only
browser vendor shipping Theora and not h264. Apple and MS will _never_ ship
Theora, and Google is currently only shipping h264.

I wouldn't have a problem with people advocating its sole use for ideological
reasons if it wasn't dogshit for so long (and mediocre now).

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ZeroGravitas
Couple of basic factual errors:

Google Chrome _is_ shipping Theora/Vorbis. They ship it as well as H.264 in
Chrome, but without H.264 in Chromium (as they can't licence the patents).

Opera has had Theora/Vorbis supporting builds for a while. It seems very
likely they will go with Theora when they launch full support.

Note also that Xiph Qicktime codecs allow Safari to use Theora as well. These
codecs should just intsall from the net when you encounter such a file, but
while we wait for Apple to get around to that they could easily be piggy
backed onto one of the many pieces you need to install to get all video
working well on Mac OS X (Perian, VLC, mplayer, or even Mozilla Firefox)

It may only be mediocre or "good enough", but it is "free". If you don't
understand the importance of that to the web then congratulations on your lack
of "ideology".

Or maybe letting some random corporations place a tax a vital part of our
technical infrastructure in return for marginal technical benefits _is_ an
ideology, just not a very good one?

