YouTube, HTML5, and Comparing H.264 With Theora 361
David Gerard writes "Google Chrome includes Ogg support for the <video> element. It also includes support for the hideously encumbered H.264 format. Nice as an extra, but ... they're also testing HTML5 YouTube only for H.264 — meaning the largest video provider on the Net will make H.264 the primary codec and relegate the equally good open format Ogg/Theora firmly to the sidelines. Mike Shaver from Mozilla has fairly unambiguously asked Chris DiBona from Google what the heck Google thinks it's doing."
DiBona responded with concerns that switching to Theora while maintaining quality would take up an incredible amount of bandwidth for a site like YouTube, though he made clear his support for the continued improvement of the project. Greg Maxwell jumped into the debate by comparing the quality of Ogg/Theora+Vorbis with the current YouTube implementations using H.263+MP3 and H.264+AAC. At the lower bitrate, Theora seems to have the clear edge, while the higher bitrate may slightly favor H.264. He concludes that YouTube's adoption of "an open unencumbered format in addition to or instead of their current offerings would not cause problems on the basis of quality or bitrate."
Theora FAIL (Score:5, Interesting)
Understanding TFA linked from [mit.edu] your "equally good" link [slashdot.org] to a slashdot story? YOU FAIL IT!!! From TFA:
So just to recap, you have suggested that Ogg Theora video provides quality comparable to H.264 based on a study using a specific development-version Ogg Theora video codec and a specific H.264 encoder (x264) which is NOT the best encoder around, when it in fact has inferior SnR (the only thing the study was meant to test) as compared to x264, which has inferior SnR as compared to other H.264 encoders?
I don't know who failed bigger, you, Soulskill, or the peoples of slashdot who actually use the firehose... but you have all failed miserably.
With all that said; is there any reason they can't add Theora support later?
Decoding Chips (Score:4, Interesting)
Superior in objective PSNR Quality. OK.
How about CPU utilization? Are there any ultra-low-power decoding chips that play Theora?
H.264 already has a large install base of devices that play it. Is there enough of an advantage to Theora to warrant dumping all of those for new ones?
repeat of ogg? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember when ogg first came out. I read slashdot regularly, saw all the information about how great it was, how since it was free it would be easily adopted by hardware makers who didn't need to pay for the privilege. I bought into the hype. I ripped my cd's to ogg files, paid extra money for a neuros player because it was one of the few players that handled ogg files.
Now, 5 years later I have a large collection of ogg files that are essentially useless. No one in the mainstream uses ogg, despite the superiority and price. Whenever I get a new player, I have to carefully read the specs to see if it will play my oggs. Few do. Luckily I have the cds and I can simply re-rip them to mp3s as I find the time/care too.
My guess is that the same thing will happen with theora. It may be superior. It may be cheaper. But I just don't think it will catch on. It's another example of the slashdot echo chamber.
Re:Theora FAIL (Score:5, Interesting)
With all that said; is there any reason they can't add Theora support later?
The codec Youtube uses will severely affect everything else on the net, if they come out first. You can't deny that.
How long will it take for IE to have support for another codec? They will have Youtube support in no time, I guarantee you that.
Re:repeat of ogg? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ogg players are still quite common. I got an MP3 player a while ago, and was surprised to find it played ogg. I got it because it advertised FLAC support.
I would take ogg over mp3, and aac over both of those.
Re:Theora FAIL (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows 7 is apparently coming with a H.264 codec as part of windows media. Question is how long it will take them to implement HTML5 video.
Re:Theora FAIL (Score:5, Interesting)
IE will probably render any video tag through Silverlight, forcing you to install it. That's how you make market share for your products in Microsoft land.
On the good side, Silverlight 3 has support for both WMV and h264 and can decode them in hardware using the video card.
VHS was better (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone has made a mythology about VHS somehow losing to Sony Beta despite being inferior. If you lived in that day, and walked into a store, there was really no significant difference between picture quality between VHS and Beta on the average TV of the day. There just wasn't. And, everyone forgets that the superiority of Beta was achieved by making the tapes only an hour long. VHS vs Beta was a silly argument. Beta claimed superior picture quality on TV's nobody had, but, VHS could store entire movies. To most people, Beta's claims sounded a lot like BS, while VHS was clearly better.
Re:Somebody explain to me why HTML5 != evil (Score:3, Interesting)
html was never really designed to do much more than have a single "document" that can link to other "documents" on the internet. over time dynamic ideas were tacked on such as javascript but it still has never been designed in such a way that 'app-y' ideas can be created without hacking up the 'document' model.
Thus html 5 attempts to correct this by modifying the original 'document' model so that it now supports 'documents' and 'app-y' ideas. its not evil, its progress.
Re:Theora FAIL (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see a problem with this approach. One of the silly things about HTML5 is that it looks like browser vendors are all going to run off and implement their own media stacks. Which just increases bloat and potential security issues. Why not just use WM, QT, or whatever comes with the OS?
Not to mention that if I'm RTFAing correctly, Firefox's <video> tag is already incompatible with Chrome's.
Re:Theora FAIL (Score:5, Interesting)
YouTube may have some effect on the de-facto internet codecs, but Theora has been losing this battle for awhile now so this isn't an out-of-the-blue decision. Many desktop and embedded video chips can decode h.264 in hardware, it's the primary Blu-Ray codec, it's used in several video chat applications, and many cable and satellite providers are going from MPEG2 to h.264. In addition, YouTube has been using h.264/AAC for over a year for "high quality" videos and videos delivered to iPhones, so they already have an h.264 infrastructure.
And for consumers, it actually seems to work really well. The "encumbered" nature of the codec may affect some tiny number of people, but for most it appears to be a huge win.
Re:VHS was better (Score:3, Interesting)
We bought our first VCR in the mid-eighties, which was a Betamax unit. At that time, the shortest tape you could get for VHS/BETA was T120 (2 hours). The real difference was you couldn't record more then 6 hours on a betamax system where as the VHS units where already offering 8 hours of recording time but the main thing that killed the Beta format was Sony's refusal to license the tech to the Porn industry. Simply put, Porn sold a hell of a lot of VHS tapes and built the market for it.
Re:Theora FAIL (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)