

HTML5 Theora Video Codec for Silverlight - ZeroGravitas
http://www.atoker.com/blog/2010/02/04/html5-theora-video-codec-for-silverlight/

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jmillikin
Looks like Theora wins -- this means that about 94%* of web browsers either
support it natively, or can watch it via a pre-installed plugin.

* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers>

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mdasen
Not to burst any bubbles, but Silverlight isn't a plugin that everyone has in
the way that Flash is. Silverlight seems to be at slightly less than half of
all users (<http://www.riastats.com/>). So, that would mean anyone with
Firefox, Chrome, or Silverlight could watch it and that would be pretty
awesome since I think Microsoft will push for greater adoption. But right now,
Silverlight isn't so well adopted. Better than the situation was before the
announcement, but still not up to Flash's penetration (and well under 94% of
traffic).

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jmillikin
Thanks for the link -- it looks like I was drastically overestimating
Silverlight's market penetration.

However, the graphs on that site appear unreliable -- for example, they show
Silverlight's market share dropping by 14% between January 22 and 26. Do you
know if the raw data is available?

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jdowdell
Travis keeps the sites confidential, for obvious reasons. It's plausible that
there was another shift in sites sampled recently, similar to the doubling
that it reported for Silverlight starting one week in November:
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdowdell/4180222368/>

I saw Alp's post last night... plausible, a good engineering challenge. Not
sure how it will play out in the world though. But it sure added some spice to
this morning's Theora-vs-H.264 wars.... ;-)

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tensafefrogs
How's the performance?

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eli
Far fewer features than H.264 and supposedly not easily implemented in
hardware.

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andreyf
So Microsoft technology will support an open video format, while Google's
Chrome only supports proprietary ones? Clearly, this is a confusion/FUD move
by Microsoft.

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zosi
Erm, Chrome supports Theora in HTML5 video. I just played a few of the
examples from <http://double.co.nz/video_test/> as well as the Opera page
linked from there to test, and they worked fine.

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davydka
Huh, so chrome supports theora AND h264?

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blasdel
And if you swap out its copies of the ffmpeg libraries with unmolested ones,
it supports every codec and container format under the sun!

