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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
bysuso ( 153703 ) * writes:
See, this is something that open source accomplishes that stupid fucking arrogant businesses will never get. When something is obsolete or no longer needed, it gets ditched or replaced by something better. Don't keep it around because someone thinks that they have the right to continue being in business even though their shit is a decade out of date. Its a hard and cold life for the developer whose project gets ditched (And sometimes I feel bad for them), but in the end, the user wins big and things evolve
byionix5891 ( 1228718 ) writes:
Since when is Java a company... Oracle (previously Sun) are behind java
and why no mention of Apple? they are the ones refusing to support ogg
bysamkass ( 174571 ) writes:
To be fair, Google is also refusing to switch YouTube to Ogg because of its lower quality per bitrate than h.264.
As was argued by the original author, you're left in a situation where if Ogg were specified in the standard, you'd have folks who followed the standard at a disadvantage in quality and/or bitrate.
Besides, W3C doesn't say which image file formats are allowable, why should it specify a codec?
byCSMatt ( 1175471 ) writes:
Are you serious? YouTube rejecting Theora for quality issues? Have you been to YouTube recently? YouTube doesn't seem to give the slightest care about video quality.
Ignoring the tremendous improvements in the Thusnelda branch, if YouTube suddenly switched from severe H.26whatever overcompression to stock Theora with optimal settings (and everyone had libtheora and HTML 5 browsers), no one would notice the difference.
bybenwaggoner ( 513209 ) writes:
Ignoring the tremendous improvements in the Thusnelda branch, if YouTube suddenly switched from severe H.26whatever overcompression to stock Theora with optimal settings (and everyone had libtheora and HTML 5 browsers), no one would notice the difference.
Untrue. Xiph has made heroic progress with Theora, but it's still a decade-old codec design and bitstream, and it's hard to imagine it catching up with xvid, let alone a good H.264 implementation.
YouTube certainly has quality issues, but things can be bad in more than one way at a time. There's nothing that less efficient codec would help them with. Note their top bitrate is 1280x720p30 at 2 Mbps.
Some samples compared Xiph's latest demo clips, with the same source encoded with VC-1 and x264 are here:
http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare [live.com]
x264 can do 640x352 with higher per pixel-quality than Theora can do at 400x224 at the same bitrate.
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byBikeHelmet ( 1437881 ) writes:
What's really funny is, Youtube has pretty poor H.264 quality.
By tweaking x264 settings(B-frames and motion detection in particular), I've encoded videos to the same quality as Youtube at 1mbit.
(Mostly FRAPS vids of me playing games)
bybenwaggoner ( 513209 ) writes:
Well, it's not like YouTube sells more ads with better looking video, and I doubt 90% of the uploads get watched more than a dozen times. They probably have some pretty deep metrics about the watts/cents per minute of video encoding and tune for that.
YouTube is also really only a good example of YouTube, since they're a massively money-losing operation funded by a very rich company. No one else does it like YouTube, and ever other video site is going to average a lot higher views/clip, so they can afford
byaccount_deleted ( 4530225 ) writes:
Comment removed based on user account deletion
bybenwaggoner ( 513209 ) writes:
Does Ogg even have hardware acceleration at this point?
Nope. I don't know if anyone's even scoped a hardware implementation of VP3. There have been some VP6/7 DSP implementations, but no ASIC ones (ASIC have better power consumption).
Now, Theora is a pretty simple codec, so doing it in hardware would be a lot simpler than H.264 and probably simpler than VC-1. But it can take quite a few engineering years to refine a decoder for performant playback.
Of couree, performance isn't just the video decoder. It's the video and the audio decoder, and the whole pipeline t
byCSMatt ( 1175471 ) writes:
Interesting, considering that I don't remember ever hearing about ASP or AVC hardware decoders until after those formats became popular. It would seem that the popularity of the codec defines whether a hardware decoder exists, not the other way around.
byKjella ( 173770 ) writes:
True enough, but there's huge network effects in play here and H.264 is settling in as the format of choice. There's a ton of graphics cards, standalones, portable video players, media center devices and whatnot shipping right now that has hardware H.264 acceleration and not Theora acceleration. So when content producers ask "Hmm, what format can the most people play?" the answer ends up being H.264 and not Theora, and the circle continues. If it ends up the way that you must support H.264, that shipping wi
byCarpetShark ( 865376 ) writes:
Fair point, but I think that's a little backwards, since video decoding is down in general purpose GPU instructions now. Implementing the hardware decoding would be relatively straightforward, if it was supported.
That said, I agree with the general gist of the discussion here: VP3 was never a format worth getting behind in its own right. What we need to do is get all the interested companies and organisations together to purchase and open H264 or something like that, in much the same way that Blender was
● current threshold.
byCSMatt ( 1175471 ) writes:
The comparison I made was not supposed to be between the best settings for both codecs. Yes, x264 can produce better quality videos than even Thusnelda. I was never saying that it couldn't.
Rather, my point was that the settings that YouTube is using right now on the majority of their videos is quite terrible, and if they really want to argue on the merits of quality then they perhaps should tweak the settings to their own site first so that they can actually demonstrate the qualities of the codec they are
bybenwaggoner ( 513209 ) writes:
Well, YouTube has three sets of settings:
Low bitrate H.263 + MP3
HQ bitrate H.264 + AAC-LC
HD bitrate H.264 + AAC-LC
The low bitrate, for whatever reason is keeping to the specs they've been using since launch, which are using the xvid implementation of old Sorenson Spark H.263 v1/MPEG-4 Part 2 Short Header. Maybe for device compatibility? Anyway, That's a codec about as old as the Theora bitstream, so we wouldn't expect it to be much better.
But I don't know that YouTube thinks it's "good enough" - they're offering higher quality modes, and that's what you get by default on the iPhone and other platforms. For whatever reason they're keeping around a legacy version, likely backwards comaptibility with some clients that don't do H.264 for whatever reason.
For the their high quality streams, Theora isn't competitive in quality. And for the highly compatible streams, Theora isn't competitive in compatibility.
So YouTube saying that Theora doesn't make sense for them makes sense to me. Therora doesn't an advantage in quality or compatibility for the streams they're doing.
Also, Big Buck Bunny isn't the best clip to extrapolate from, as it's really high quality lossless animation. To really see what YouTube needs to handle, try some lousy webcam, DV, and VOB rips. That's where H.264's in-loop deblocking filter give it a big advantage over other codecs, because it just gets smoother intead of blocky as the content gets more challenging.
Not to dismiss the excellent development work Xiph has done on Theora. The posts have been a fascinating read. But it's not plausible to me that anyone can make a business case for Theora over H.264, VC-1, or ASP licensing is available; the reduced bandwidth costs would be bigger than the actual real-world licensing fees for the real world examples I've thought of.
Theora's sweet spot would be in cases where MPEG-LA codec licenses simply aren't available for whatever reason. I imagine a fully refined Theora decoder would need fewer MIPS/pixel than H.264 High Profile, and perhaps even Baseline. But even in those cases, VC-1 Main Profile will probably offer similar performance with significantly better efficiency.
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byDaniel Phillips ( 238627 ) writes:
You sure do put a lot of energy into slagging Ogg, and you consistently neglect mention the advantage Ogg has over H.264: it is unencumbered by patents and therefore free for anybody to encode and/or play, on any hardware they wish.
I for one, am perfectly happy to burn a little extra bandwidth for that, and anyway I not buy your assertion that Ogg cannot close the bandwidth gap over time. After all, you are a Microsoftie with a vested interest in keeping video proprietary.
bybenwaggoner ( 513209 ) writes:
You sure do put a lot of energy into slagging Ogg, and you consistently neglect mention the advantage Ogg has over H.264: it is unencumbered by patents and therefore free for anybody to encode and/or play, on any hardware they wish.
Oh, I don't have anything against Theora per se, nor Ogg in general. It's just people keep having highly unrealistic hopes for what it can do in terms of compression efficiency and ecossytem.
Codecs are hard, and it does no one any benefit to assume they're capable of things they simply aren't.
The Xiph blog posts on their optimization process for Theora have been excellent reading, and they've done really good work. But the bitstream itself simply isn't capable of what modern codecs are capable of already. I
byDaniel Phillips ( 238627 ) writes:
I don't think anyone is talking about propritary codecs here, except for perhaps VP6. VC-1 and H.264 are both international standards, with licensing handled by MPEG-LA. They are patent encumbered, but are not propritary any more than MP3 or ASP are.
As is well know, and as you know, MP3 is proprietary. Surely you know the name Frauenhofer.
You are being disingenuous, but why should I expect anything different from an Microsoft employee? Patented means proprietary, please to not try to make words mean things that they do not.
I repeat my observation that you spend a very large amount of time posting FUD about Ogg Theora on slashdot. Who knows where else you spend time promulgating FUD about Ogg Theora?
Since you are a Microsoftie, I know that you will n
bybenwaggoner ( 513209 ) writes:
Patented means proprietary, please to not try to make words mean things that they do not.
No, patent means patented. There's a qualitative difference between a format for which there are public and publshed interoperable standard, and one where the implementation details are private or only avialable under a specific license. You may not care for either model, but it's certainly a meaningful distinction, and a longstanding one in the digital media world. When people in the vieo industry speak of an "open standard" they mean publically available specifications and patent licenses available unde
bychammy ( 1096007 ) writes:
There are more factors here than bitrate. For instance, on all my mobile devices h264 runs like crap. Theora on the other hand is a lot lighter on the CPU. This is streaming video we're talking about here, not a DVD or something -- I'll take a little less quality over hogging cycles anyday.
bybenwaggoner ( 513209 ) writes:
What are your mobile devices, and what's your media player? All the current ones that are meant for media playback include H.264 ASICs. And those are getting crazy good; the Zune HD's going to support 720p HD playback using the NVidia Tegra.
Lacking an ASIC, any Theora on devices would need to be done in sofware, and even a simple codec can be extremely taxing on a 400-600 MHz ARM. Even if it's playable it's going to eat battery like no tomorrow. I can imagine a really good implementation being able to mayb
bychammy ( 1096007 ) writes:
Since I said CPU, I thought I was clear that I meant decoding in software.
Using mplayer, h264 will eat almost exactly twice the CPU time that theora uses with similarly encoded files.
Also, about the battery life -- I can get about 5-6 hours of playback time decoding purely on the CPU with an Atom N280. That's certainly not "eating up battery like no tomorrow."
bybenwaggoner ( 513209 ) writes:
Since I said CPU, I thought I was clear that I meant decoding in software.
Sure. But no device meant for media playback is going to use software decoding. It'll already have a decoder ASIC, typically with at least H.264 Baseline and VC-1 Main Profile. Either will offer better quality and much longer battery life in an ASIC implementation compared to a software Theora decoder.
Also, about the battery life -- I can get about 5-6 hours of playback time decoding purely on the CPU with an Atom N280.
IS that with a GMA500? That's capable of hardware accelerated MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264 decoding.
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