Make Ogg Theora THE STANDARD above H.264 !

[newbie2]

What’s the deal with H.264?

The conundrum comes in with the patenting. See H.264 is patented technology and in the US any product that contains an encoder or decoder must use a GPL license and so the software, in this case IE9, would have to allow for all rights for users which the GPL for H.264 allows.
......................
MPEG LA announced that it will extend its royalty-free license of the video codec for an additional five years. After those 5 years? Well then browsers would have to pay to use the codec presumably. That certainly sounds like additional submarine patent risk for large companies, does it not?

Well I guess it’s not really submarining since it was openly stated.
http://www.reelseo.com/theora-html5264-support/
:rolleyes:

The Open Video Alliance has allready taken steps in the right direction :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1432908

Edit : here is a comparison Youtube/Ogg Theora : http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

[Psumi]

Browsers paying for the usage? Ha! That'll be the day.

it's actually...

We pay the browsers so that the browsers can pay the people who made the patent, and then they can pay the government for having the patent. ;)

[LowSky]

Um... five years ago no on knew what H.264 was and in 5 years from now H.264 will be old and barely used and replaced by something we never heard of today

[newbie2]

Google has THE opportunity to 'change things' : http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/google-free-on2-vp8-for-youtube
:rolleyes:

[zekopeko]

This again? Look Theora isn't going to be a standard because it lacks key feature that people who would want to put it in their products need.

VP8 might not be released at all. Google could simply make it the standard platform for Youtube so that they don't have to pay royalties on H.264 and make a deal with Adobe to support it in newer flash version. So it doesn't mean they will release it at all.

[DoktorSeven]

This again? Look Theora isn't going to be a standard because it lacks key feature that people who would want to put it in their products need.

Which feature? The ability to lock out other browsers that aren't able or willing to pay for a proprietary standard?

Pretty nice feature for them...

[ssam]

dirac is coming along nicely. the old complaints were that it took to much CPU to decode. this seems to be less of an issue.

in version 1.0.0
"This release was able to decode HD720/25p in real-time on a Core Duo laptop." [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_%28codec%29 ]

a few days ago they released 1.0.9, which is 4 times faster
http://www.schleef.org/blog/2010/03/04/dirac-update-2/

[gsmanners]

To be fair, the comparison on that page (http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html) is between YouTube and the latest version of Theora. You may as well be comparing DivX 4.0 to the latest x264. YouTube of course has lower quality because they cater to a wide range of users (people with P3s or lower). If they were to adopt Theora with features appropriate to that same range of decoding power, experience tells me their results would look worse than old Quicktime movies.

[Frak]

Theora is a terrible format. Yes, it can surpass H.264 in quality, but the file sizes are usually double that of H.264.

Also, H.264 is a royalty free technology. There's no reason you shouldn't use it. I'll happily use H.264 over Ogg Theora, because I care about file sizes and video quality.

[Judo]

Also, H.264 is a royalty free technology. There's no reason you shouldn't use it. I'll happily use H.264 over Ogg Theora, because I care about file sizes and video quality.
It's not the royalties that matter. The web is a free standard. No one controls it as a whole or in any part. Whatever video format is chosen must also conform to that.

That said, Theora is horrible. Its design does not allow it to surpass h.264 or lesser standards like ASP. Dirac has more potential but DWT has never been my choice due to its unique way of artifacting. We don't know much about VP8. There's also Sun's OMS but there's been no word from that project in a long time.

All in all, it seems hopeless unless we can find a middle ground in VP8, but even that would be miraculous.

[Frak]

It's not the royalties that matter. The web is a free standard. No one controls it as a whole or in any part. Whatever video format is chosen must also conform to that.

That said, Theora is horrible. Its design does not allow it to surpass h.264 or lesser standards like ASP. Dirac has more potential but DWT has never been my choice due to its unique way of artifacting. We don't know much about VP8. There's also Sun's OMS but there's been no word from that project in a long time.

All in all, it seems hopeless unless we can find a middle ground in VP8, but even that would be miraculous.
I see where you're coming from, I do. It's just that it's entering into a field where open standards aren't likely to exist in an acceptable form. At the end of the day, would you rather use Theora, which produces lesser quality than H.264 which is royalty free for another 6 years. At the same time, we can wait for Google to come up with a decision for VP8 (which looks really nice) and maybe somebody will come up with a good format.

Go for a good temporary solution and not take a bad solution and consider it permanent.

[irrdev]

While I generally consider myself a fair open source purist, this is one case where Theora is the wrong choice, regardless of the competition. I personally don't believe that H.264 is necessarily the right choice either, but it's currently the most viable option available IMO. Quite frankly, I don't think that HTML5 Video will enjoy any significant success for at least another five years; IE9 will be the first browser from Microsoft to include HTML5 H.264 video, and as IE9 won't support Windows XP, I expect adoption rates will be far too slow to make HTML5 video a worthy alternative to flash anytime soon.
It's a novel idea, and definitely feasible with current technology, but internet video is too important a medium to suffer from browser and platform inconsistencies, unfortunately.

[zekopeko]

Which feature? The ability to lock out other browsers that aren't able or willing to pay for a proprietary standard?

Pretty nice feature for them...

How about quality/filesize ratio? How about hardware decoders for phones and hundred other devices? Theora has non of that. It sucks as a technology at higher bitrates and for mobile devices.