icknay writes "With the upcoming Firefox 3.5 and HTML5 video, there's natural interest in Theora vs. Mpeg-4, but without much evidence either way. Here's clips encoded at various rates to provide concrete comparison between Theora and Mpeg-4. Theora performs decently, but requires more bandwidth than Mpeg-4 (although this is a 1.1alpha release of Theora and Theora has a much better license than Mpeg-4). The quality comparisons are very subjective, but you can try the clips yourself and see how it breaks down. There was an earlier discussion about this, but it lacked much concrete evidence. (Disclosure: it's my page.)"
Seeing as they are the only people that actually make real money on the web, we can count on them to pick the most cost effective and highest quality video technology.
There are three things that this test doesn't consider:
for the same bitrate (1000 kbit/s) the Mpeg-4 file is 5.2% bigger than the Ogg one;
nobody uses video alone like in this test, there's always audio and the audio codec associated with Theora (Vorbis) rocks: same quality as MP3 for half the bitrate. Bits saved on the sound can be used to improve the video; and, yes, it is apples-to-apples comparing the overall bitrate of Ogg/Theora+Vorbis against an all-Mpeg-4 solution.
but the most important detail is that they used a constant average bitrate encoding with Theora, which is known to give inferior results for the same bitrate to simply setting the quality to match the desired bitrate.
Ogg is definitely superior to those other audio codecs.
I've been playing with audio/video encoding a lot recently, at extremely low bitrates. I'm not quite ready to post my results, but here's the gist of it:
Using the Saga Frontier Intro [youtube.com] as a baseline, with lots of tingy sounds that you'd find in a PS1 game, these had the same subjective quality:
3GPP AAC+; 28kbit (But doesn't mux properly into mp4; only mkv) CT AAC+; 36kbit (But explosions are still a little off) FAAC; ~50kbit (But explosions are still a litt
nobody uses video alone like in this test, there's always audio and the audio codec associated with Theora (Vorbis) rocks: same quality as MP3 for half the bitrate. Bits saved on the sound can be used to improve the video; and, yes, it is apples-to-apples comparing the overall bitrate of Ogg/Theora+Vorbis against an all-Mpeg-4 solution.
Using mp3 suddenly makes it not an all-mpeg4 solution. What's the comparison between Vorbis and AAC?
He claimed OGG is twice as good as MP3 is, not even 0.3%... Nevermind that MP3 doesn't even enter the equation when comparing H.264 to Theora (both because H.264 is typically paired with AAC audio and the video quality is the important question here, given the comparatively small size of audio), but that's also a blatant lie. You won't get double the quality out of OGG or AAC when compared to MP3, no way.
I believe the issue is that, even though Ogg Theora has a better license, the codec was really bad compared to other, similar codecs. At least, that has been the going concern. Given a choice between a better user experience or a better license *most* users will choose experience.
The need to prove Ogg Theora is better is to attempt to counter this concern.
The thing you're missing is that users are irrelevant in this situation. The decision lies with the publishers.
If a publisher had to pay a lot of money to MPEG-LA, and suddenly they have another option, that is a big deal.
If you want to become a publisher and you don't have a lot of money or a large legacy of content, then this is an option where before you had none. That is an even bigger deal.
As far as user choice goes, the vast majority just watch what is there and have no clue what the difference is. Discussing their opinion is pointless.
Customers don't type in "mpeg-4". They don't type in "theora". They type in "britney spears nude". When they find something, they don't react with "ewh, yuck, theora... back button". Either their browser plays it, or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, they install something, or they don't. That's it. With Theora baked into major browsers, the browser plays it, and that's it.
Not to mention the one that comes with hardware acceleration. even my cheapo $50 HD4650 comes with H.264, DivX, and WMV hardware acceleration out of the box with stock drivers. Does Theora even have hardware acceleration yet? With the move to netbook/Nettop and green computing hardware video acceleration is the present and the future. If Theora doesn't want to be DOA they need to get hardware acceleration for the big three (ATI, Intel, Nvidia) working NOW and get the GPU manufacturers to pack it in.
Because even on may nice super fast AMD Dual core having 1080p decoded on the GPU instead of the CPU just makes for a nicer experience overall. Not to mention the fact that GPUs use less power and create less heat than modern CPUs and with it already 100f in the shade here in AR temp matters.
Not really. Bitrate is the video data itself, but there will still be overhead associated with the format. So even at the same bitrate if one format has more intrinsic overhead then the file can be larger.
I sort of knew Theora was a bit behind than Mpeg-4, but I didn't realize by how much. The Theora clip that has a 60% higher bitrate than the Mpeg-4 still looks fuzzier to my eyes (especially the moving grass).
I noticed in the last discussion that Theora does better when you take a single frame and look. It seems to have a lot more details. However, it's apparent in the clips that the detail comes at the expense of smoothness between frames. If you watch the background it's jumping around a lot, making it look fuzzy, presumably as Theora tries to preserve various details.
Theora is based on VP3, which is a generation older than MPEG-4. It's been improved a lot, but it's still old technology. Tarkin had a lot more potential, but a few years ago Theora was doing something and Tarkin was still mostly theoretical so the developers focussed on Theora. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake. Theora competes well with MPEG-2, but no one is using MPEG-2 for web distribution.
Longer term, Dirac looks more promising. It's comparable quality to H.264, is royalty-free, and has two open source implementations. Schroedinger, the newer one, is MIT licensed, and so can be use anywhere. Currently, the CPU load is too high for everyday use, however.
Still, the developers of Theora found several glaring mistakes in the reference implementation of VP3 which brought it immediately to the same quality and bit rate level as MPEG-2. Everything since then has been vast improvements on both the encoder and the decoder.
It's like the LAME MP3 encoder. The vast improvements made in the encoder reaped huge benefits without even changing the decoder. With Theora, Ogg (and by extension, we) control both the encoder AND the decoder.
Firefox is a slow, bloated piece of crap that fails in comparison to Chrome or Safari.
Chrome falls into the "proprietary or whatever" category because it's made by Google. Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
Blender is a joke compared to commercial software in that field.
"I've asked this every time this topic comes up. Can anyone name a SINGLE piece of open source software that does anything better than it's closest closed source (or otherwise "proprietary" via patents or whatever) counterpart?"
FF's closest counterpart is clearly IE, considering marketshare, and FF is certainly better than IE. In terms of memory usage, FF beats Chrome and Safari. In terms of page loading times, nothing beats FF + Adblock Plus. You dismissed Chrome, yourself, and the only things Safari do
Chrome falls into the "proprietary or whatever" category because it's made by Google. Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
The rendering engine used by Chrome and Safari (webkit) wasn't made by any company. In fact, its origins are KHTML. the rendering engine used by KDE.
Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
Huh? This is an utterly ignorant claim, almost not worth replying to.
But if you look at good open source projects, I doubt you can find even a significant minority (much less majority) that were initiated by a commercial vendor. Anything from things like Linux to most libraries should in no uncertain terms confirm the idea that no, it's not commercial entities that seed most good open source products or projects. It is useful to also have companies starting OS projects, and sometimes taking ownership. But it's not much of a requirement. Just icing on the cake.
What is much more useful is the opposite: good open source projects resulting in new companies. That is much more common than the reverse.
If you are seriously going to put Java against.NET and MySQL against SQL Server (which is dishonest, because Oracle is the kickass proprietary database at the top of the heap), you have clearly never used either of the latter. Shit, MySQL barely even counts as a database.
If you'd said PostgreSQL you'd have looked a little more credible (because PostgreSQL is actually a very good database!), but I'm going to put my money on "you're a fucking idiot."
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 22, @01:25PM (#28425991)
Subjective measures are really the best way to evaluate video quality. There are (objective) quantitative measures such as PSNR, but they don't really tell you what the impact of video compression does for the eye. Video quality evaluations mostly involve showing clips (like these) to a large amount of people and asking them which they liked better. There is a lot to consider in terms of how the video responds to packet loss, jitter, etc.
The important line from the article: "Theora uses 1600kbps, or about 60% more bandwidth than Mpeg-4 to reach about the same quality."
Also useful to get some scale: "The uncompressed clip is 349 megabytes, while the 1600kbps Theora clip is 2 megabytes -- Theora may lag Mpeg-4 at this time, but it still yields great compression."
and "Theora is significantly better than Mpeg-2. Mpeg-2 required about 2400 kbps to hit the subjective quality level above, 50% higher than Theora's bandwidth."
Some things I would have liked to have seen: 250kbps, 500kbps, 2mbps, 8mbps videos, with subjective quality difference (rather than same subjective quality at different bitrates). Theora is apparently very good at lower bitrates, and not everybody has an awesome broadband connection, so they may be forced to watch lower-bitrate streams. Does the HTML5 video tag support selecting streams based upon available bandwidth?
I had to use the direct links, but noticed that the ogg version was 10% taller but the same contents. A skewing like this could easily explain bad perceived quality, did anybody else notice this or it is just my Firefox 3.5 beta on linux that's messed up?
10% taller visually? I think that's because that both videos were encoded at 704x576. That gives us an 11:9 aspect ratio for both, however the H.264 version has a 4:3 display aspect ratio set, so that it looks correct. It would be better if they had used square pixels for their raw source, so we don't need to compare anamorphic displaying of the videos as well.
Theora is just not as good as H.264; you can get better quality with the same bits in H.264, or similar quality in fewer bits.
Theora is, however, good enough for general use for Internet video. It's at least as good as H.263, which actually has been used for years. (Breathless claims that Theora would need twice as many bits as H.264 are just silly.)
Since Theora is free in all ways, browsers can just build it in, and sites like Wikipedia are going to use it. Since H.264 is better, sites with money will pay the H.264 fees to save money on bandwidth. And, if I had a web business, I'd hesitate to paint myself into a corner with H.264; the patent owners have the power to jack up the royalties if they decide to.
In short, both Theora and H.264 will be found on the Internet in the near future. And we can all just get along.
(Now watch Theora fanboys and H.264 fanboys team up to mod this post down through the floor...:-)
P.S. Ogg Vorbis never toppled MP3 from the throne. However, the existence of Vorbis may have exerted some downward pressure on the licensing fees for the paid codecs. In a similar way, the existence of Theora may cause the patent holders for the other video formats to not try to charge quite as much.
and MP3 is such a totally alluring name? people don't care what it's called as long as it's what they're used to.
Acronyms like MP3 are used all the time - my laptop is a T500, the military has guns called M1 through M1000, cars have V6 engines, etc, etc, etc. Number-letter acronyms are commonly used in technology nomenclature; when people hear 'MP3' they expect something technological, and that's what they get.
Ogg, on the other hand, could be onomatopoeia - it sounds like a grunt. It's very off-putting. The only place I can imagine it fitting in well is as a name for a hardcore punk band.
He never claimed it made the licensing costs go down. He claimed it may have exerted downward pressure. In other words, he believes that if it hadn't been for Vorbis, MP3 licensing costs would have probably increased more. Since that's pure speculation, you're going to have a hard time refuting it.
Except that when a normal person uses the term "downward pressure" when referring to the cost of something it does mean that the price goes down
Really! "Downward pressure" cannot slow the rate of rise? "Downward pressure" only exists when something is actually going down? This is fascinating; I had no idea. (Because I'm not a "normal person", you see. How could I be expected to know?)
How do you find out these things? Is there a society that decides what terms a "normal person" can use? I'd like to jo
60% is bit of a price to pay, however IMHO the point of the video tag is tighter integration with your website than is easily achievable with flash. Hopefully theora will improve and compete with mpeg-4, but there are still many advantages to using it over flash for embedded video (for stand alone pages, it doesn't matter so much as most users have a plugin to handle mpeg-4) *Interacts with the rest of the page easily (TBF actionscript, et al can achieve this) *Much lower cpu usage. While flash is particularly bad, theora is particularly good *Cross architecture. As people browse the web on phones, pdas, etc, this does actually matter *Much less likely to be exploitable (TBF webhosts don't care, but users should) *Open standards.
I don't think theora should be seen as simply a tool to replace flash videos but it should be seen as an opportunity to better integrate video into sites and/or make video content available to more people annoy people with video backgrounds
Only one point I wanted to mention (since the article and comments have all been--- oddly balanced for Slashdot)
The article points out that current Thusnelda is not as high quality as the best available h264 encoder at high bitrate video and unlimited encoding time. No argument there, it's true. Thusnelda still has a ways to go, despite the distance it's come; the current alpha still has no Adaptive Quant whatsoever, which will go in before final release.
However, the vast majority of users are not using x264. If you look at the h264 YouTube encoder, which has been designed for speed rather than 'work as long as you like to optimize the output', suddenly Theora is exactly on-par. In short--- Theora is every bit as good as the way that the real world is going to end up using h264 for the forseeable future. And the users of that 'inferior' h264 encoder seem pretty happy with it.
Anyway, this isn't disagreeing with anything you've said, it's simply a practical way to look at the difference.
Does anyone remember it? The author screwed up and coded parts of it on university time so had to revoke the GPL license since they could not prove which parts were or were not university property.
I spent a month compressing a highly scaled video clip and was able to put about 20 seconds on a floppy. I could compress a complex jpeg with the static compressor into 4 - 20k.
Bandwidth wise it's marvelous, it's the number crunching to compress it that's the killer. I'm not a coder and his paper is marginally comprehensible but there is no way I could recreate the codec.
The license is the single most important thing. It determines whether or not you can use the software at all, or for your specific purpose, whatever that is.
When we're talking about establishing a standard for the Web, which everybody is expected to be a) able and b) allowed to use, there is nothing more important than the license.
The license matters a whole lot less than the potential patent encumbrance for the codec.
The developers of Theora state that the codec is not encumbered by patents, but to my knowledge, there's been no legal tests of that and no intensive review of the possible areas of infringement by a patent attorney. That's a serious issue for the uptake of the codec by vendors, since they're potentially on the hook if it later turns out that the codec infringes on people patents and the holders want to be dicks about
People providing decoders have to pay the license fee.
"Royalties to be paid by end product manufacturers for an encoder, a decoder or both (âoeunitâ) begin at US $0.20 per unit after the first 100,000 units each year. There are no royalties on the first 100,000 units each year. Above 5 million units per year, the royalty is US $0.10 per unit."
This causes issues for free software especially with the gpl because there is a clause which says you cannot restrict the distribution of the code but by having to pay a license fee this is a restriction.
The license means that every product that includes an encoder or decoder for MPEG-4 (including AVC / H.264) needs to pay the MPEG-LA a small free for every version they sell (or give away). This is incompatible with Free Software. Imagine that FireFox included an MPEG-4 implementation. The Mozilla Corporation makes enough money that they could afford to pay the maximum annual fee for this license, but what happens after you download it? If you give a copy of FireFox to someone else, then you need to pay the license fee (except you can't, because the MPEG-LA doesn't offer licenses except in large quantities). Maybe Moz. Corp. could pay that license too, but what happens in a few years time when they decide to stop? Suddenly, no one can redistribute any copies or derived works of FireFox. The root problem is that it is not possible to get a license for MPEG-4 that permits the kind of arbitrary redistribution that Free Software entails. Although the license fees are capped, they are capped annually, so each year you need to pay again or you no longer have a license to distribute code implementing the patents.
This is why Theora is better as a standard format. Anyone can implement it, at no cost and with no restrictions. H.264 is better quality, and so makes sense as an optional format for HTML 5 to support, but requiring it would mean that it would be impossible for the second-most-popular web browser to be HTML compliant. Of course, in an ideal world, the W3C, Mozilla Corporation, Google, or some other interested party would just buy the H.264 patents outright and let them lapse, but somehow I don't think that's very likely.
- available to be implemented by anyone and everyone without paying a cent or even asking for permission, with a BSD implementation available to all for free.
vs
- full of patents held by the big names of the industry, available under per-user licensing fees and any implementation not blessed by them exposes itself and anyone who uses it to big, very costly lawsuits in the US.
And when we're talking about a proposed standard for the entirety of the world wide web, things like t
The license is the single most important thing. It determines whether or not you can use the software at all, or for your specific purpose, whatever that is.
When we're talking about establishing a standard for the Web, which everybody is expected to be a) able and b) allowed to use, there is nothing more important than the license.
And it's encumbered in ways that affect how people can use it. For example, LAME (and various other MP3 stuff) isn't included in Debian or Ubuntu; people have to go out of their way and use non-standard, often unsupported repositories.
emerge lame
How did I go out of my way?
Did I break the law?
The license is the single most important thing. It determines whether or not you can use the software at all, or for your specific purpose, whatever that is.
Actually the license has really no effect at all for the end user in either of these cases. The only people who are effected by the license are people who are either creating H.264 encoders/decoders or those who are creating and streaming H.264 content.
Which is everyone. The Web isn't just a TV, that's where it's power comes from. And lets not forget mashing, which requires encoders and decoders. If developers have to pay when writing this software, the software gets more expensive and content creation gets stiffled.
Because it will cost firefox 5 million + to have h.264 included per year....Are you going to foot the bill?
But wait theres more. In order to get a license you need to sign a contract. Now that contract has things like *all* playback implementations *must* support various DRM etc (aka zones). These strings make firefox or another implementation non free, lack freedom and generally incompatible with most GPL type licenses.
Oh and they are going to charge for content soon too.
The reference implementation of Theora, like that of Vorbis is under a BSD-style license to help it gain wider adoption, so your point is valid even for propietary browser makers such as Opera.
My results (Score:5, Funny)
Both make terrible concrete. I recommend you buy some mix at the hardware store instead.
Porn Industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Let the porn industry sort it out.
Seeing as they are the only people that actually make real money on the web, we can count on them to pick the most cost effective and highest quality video technology.
Parent
Re:Theora sucks a nut (Score:4, Insightful)
Who is this 'Anonymous Cowardon' who keeps posting? Somewhere behind my computer a small pile of spaces seems to have leaked out...
Parent
Disclosure (Score:5, Funny)
Three "errors" in this test (Score:5, Informative)
There are three things that this test doesn't consider:
For real life examples, that also include sound see "YouTube / Ogg/Theora comparison" [xiph.org] and "Another online-video comparison" [xiph.org].
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ogg is definitely superior to those other audio codecs.
I've been playing with audio/video encoding a lot recently, at extremely low bitrates. I'm not quite ready to post my results, but here's the gist of it:
Using the Saga Frontier Intro [youtube.com] as a baseline, with lots of tingy sounds that you'd find in a PS1 game, these had the same subjective quality:
3GPP AAC+; 28kbit (But doesn't mux properly into mp4; only mkv)
CT AAC+; 36kbit (But explosions are still a little off)
FAAC; ~50kbit (But explosions are still a litt
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
nobody uses video alone like in this test, there's always audio and the audio codec associated with Theora (Vorbis) rocks: same quality as MP3 for half the bitrate. Bits saved on the sound can be used to improve the video; and, yes, it is apples-to-apples comparing the overall bitrate of Ogg/Theora+Vorbis against an all-Mpeg-4 solution.
Using mp3 suddenly makes it not an all-mpeg4 solution. What's the comparison between Vorbis and AAC?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
He claimed OGG is twice as good as MP3 is, not even 0.3%... Nevermind that MP3 doesn't even enter the equation when comparing H.264 to Theora (both because H.264 is typically paired with AAC audio and the video quality is the important question here, given the comparatively small size of audio), but that's also a blatant lie. You won't get double the quality out of OGG or AAC when compared to MP3, no way.
Re:Three "errors" in this test (Score:5, Informative)
The need to prove Ogg Theora is better is to attempt to counter this concern.
Parent
Re:Three "errors" in this test (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing you're missing is that users are irrelevant in this situation. The decision lies with the publishers.
If a publisher had to pay a lot of money to MPEG-LA, and suddenly they have another option, that is a big deal.
If you want to become a publisher and you don't have a lot of money or a large legacy of content, then this is an option where before you had none. That is an even bigger deal.
As far as user choice goes, the vast majority just watch what is there and have no clue what the difference is. Discussing their opinion is pointless.
Parent
Re:Three "errors" in this test (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Three "errors" in this test (Score:4, Informative)
If the codec is included with their browser, that won't be a problem.
Parent
Re:Three "errors" in this test (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention the one that comes with hardware acceleration. even my cheapo $50 HD4650 comes with H.264, DivX, and WMV hardware acceleration out of the box with stock drivers. Does Theora even have hardware acceleration yet? With the move to netbook/Nettop and green computing hardware video acceleration is the present and the future. If Theora doesn't want to be DOA they need to get hardware acceleration for the big three (ATI, Intel, Nvidia) working NOW and get the GPU manufacturers to pack it in.
Because even on may nice super fast AMD Dual core having 1080p decoded on the GPU instead of the CPU just makes for a nicer experience overall. Not to mention the fact that GPUs use less power and create less heat than modern CPUs and with it already 100f in the shade here in AR temp matters.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not really. Bitrate is the video data itself, but there will still be overhead associated with the format. So even at the same bitrate if one format has more intrinsic overhead then the file can be larger.
Surprisingly different (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Surprisingly different (Score:5, Informative)
I noticed in the last discussion that Theora does better when you take a single frame and look. It seems to have a lot more details. However, it's apparent in the clips that the detail comes at the expense of smoothness between frames. If you watch the background it's jumping around a lot, making it look fuzzy, presumably as Theora tries to preserve various details.
Parent
Re:Surprisingly different (Score:5, Informative)
Theora is based on VP3, which is a generation older than MPEG-4. It's been improved a lot, but it's still old technology. Tarkin had a lot more potential, but a few years ago Theora was doing something and Tarkin was still mostly theoretical so the developers focussed on Theora. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake. Theora competes well with MPEG-2, but no one is using MPEG-2 for web distribution.
Longer term, Dirac looks more promising. It's comparable quality to H.264, is royalty-free, and has two open source implementations. Schroedinger, the newer one, is MIT licensed, and so can be use anywhere. Currently, the CPU load is too high for everyday use, however.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, the developers of Theora found several glaring mistakes in the reference implementation of VP3 which brought it immediately to the same quality and bit rate level as MPEG-2. Everything since then has been vast improvements on both the encoder and the decoder.
It's like the LAME MP3 encoder. The vast improvements made in the encoder reaped huge benefits without even changing the decoder. With Theora, Ogg (and by extension, we) control both the encoder AND the decoder.
It's really not as bad as you th
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Apache? An argument can be made for Firefox vs IE too. Yeh open source sucks so much that Apple built OS X from it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeh open source sucks so much that Apple built OS X from it.
Unix was proprietary, and built by AT&T. Unix. [wikipedia.org]
Nextstep used parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD, sure, but that was just the cheap path to Unix.
If you accept the GP's premis, his point is still valid.
Nice try though, kthxbye.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox is a slow, bloated piece of crap that fails in comparison to Chrome or Safari.
Chrome falls into the "proprietary or whatever" category because it's made by Google. Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
Blender is a joke compared to commercial software in that field.
"I've asked this every time this topic comes up. Can anyone name a SINGLE piece of open source software that does anything better than it's closest closed source (or otherwise "proprietary" via patents or whatever) counterpart?"
FF's closest counterpart is clearly IE, considering marketshare, and FF is certainly better than IE. In terms of memory usage, FF beats Chrome and Safari. In terms of page loading times, nothing beats FF + Adblock Plus. You dismissed Chrome, yourself, and the only things Safari do
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Chrome falls into the "proprietary or whatever" category because it's made by Google. Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
The rendering engine used by Chrome and Safari (webkit) wasn't made by any company. In fact, its origins are KHTML. the rendering engine used by KDE.
Re:Surprised? Don't be, it's open source. (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
Huh? This is an utterly ignorant claim, almost not worth replying to.
But if you look at good open source projects, I doubt you can find even a significant minority (much less majority) that were initiated by a commercial vendor.
Anything from things like Linux to most libraries should in no uncertain terms confirm the idea that no, it's not commercial entities that seed most good open source products or projects. It is useful to also have companies starting OS projects, and sometimes taking ownership. But it's not much of a requirement. Just icing on the cake.
What is much more useful is the opposite: good open source projects resulting in new companies. That is much more common than the reverse.
Parent
Re:Surprised? Don't be, it's open source. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want to disagree with your overall point or start a flame war, but really, putting MySQL up against Oracle/MSSQL?
C'mon.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are seriously going to put Java against .NET and MySQL against SQL Server (which is dishonest, because Oracle is the kickass proprietary database at the top of the heap), you have clearly never used either of the latter. Shit, MySQL barely even counts as a database.
If you'd said PostgreSQL you'd have looked a little more credible (because PostgreSQL is actually a very good database!), but I'm going to put my money on "you're a fucking idiot."
Subjective Measures (Score:4, Informative)
Subjective measures are really the best way to evaluate video quality. There are (objective) quantitative measures such as PSNR, but they don't really tell you what the impact of video compression does for the eye. Video quality evaluations mostly involve showing clips (like these) to a large amount of people and asking them which they liked better. There is a lot to consider in terms of how the video responds to packet loss, jitter, etc.
60% more bitrate for same quality (Score:5, Informative)
The important line from the article: "Theora uses 1600kbps, or about 60% more bandwidth than Mpeg-4 to reach about the same quality."
Also useful to get some scale: "The uncompressed clip is 349 megabytes, while the 1600kbps Theora clip is 2 megabytes -- Theora may lag Mpeg-4 at this time, but it still yields great compression."
and "Theora is significantly better than Mpeg-2. Mpeg-2 required about 2400 kbps to hit the subjective quality level above, 50% higher than Theora's bandwidth."
Some things I would have liked to have seen: 250kbps, 500kbps, 2mbps, 8mbps videos, with subjective quality difference (rather than same subjective quality at different bitrates). Theora is apparently very good at lower bitrates, and not everybody has an awesome broadband connection, so they may be forced to watch lower-bitrate streams. Does the HTML5 video tag support selecting streams based upon available bandwidth?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I had to use the direct links, but noticed that the ogg version was 10% taller but the same contents. A skewing like this could easily explain bad perceived quality, did anybody else notice this or it is just my Firefox 3.5 beta on linux that's messed up?
10% taller visually? I think that's because that both videos were encoded at 704x576. That gives us an 11:9 aspect ratio for both, however the H.264 version has a 4:3 display aspect ratio set, so that it looks correct. It would be better if they had used square pixels for their raw source, so we don't need to compare anamorphic displaying of the videos as well.
Seems pretty clear to me (Score:5, Insightful)
The situation seems pretty clear to me.
Theora is just not as good as H.264; you can get better quality with the same bits in H.264, or similar quality in fewer bits.
Theora is, however, good enough for general use for Internet video. It's at least as good as H.263, which actually has been used for years. (Breathless claims that Theora would need twice as many bits as H.264 are just silly.)
Since Theora is free in all ways, browsers can just build it in, and sites like Wikipedia are going to use it. Since H.264 is better, sites with money will pay the H.264 fees to save money on bandwidth. And, if I had a web business, I'd hesitate to paint myself into a corner with H.264; the patent owners have the power to jack up the royalties if they decide to.
In short, both Theora and H.264 will be found on the Internet in the near future. And we can all just get along.
(Now watch Theora fanboys and H.264 fanboys team up to mod this post down through the floor... :-)
P.S. Ogg Vorbis never toppled MP3 from the throne. However, the existence of Vorbis may have exerted some downward pressure on the licensing fees for the paid codecs. In a similar way, the existence of Theora may cause the patent holders for the other video formats to not try to charge quite as much.
steveha
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ogg Vorbis died because it had a stupid name. Really, Ogg Vorbis? Or just "ogg" for short. You might as well have named it "Ugg". Or "blech".
Next time try something that doesn't sound like retching. Never underestimate the power of a really terrible name to kill a product.
Re:Seems pretty clear to me (Score:4, Insightful)
and MP3 is such a totally alluring name? people don't care what it's called as long as it's what they're used to.
Acronyms like MP3 are used all the time - my laptop is a T500, the military has guns called M1 through M1000, cars have V6 engines, etc, etc, etc. Number-letter acronyms are commonly used in technology nomenclature; when people hear 'MP3' they expect something technological, and that's what they get.
Ogg, on the other hand, could be onomatopoeia - it sounds like a grunt. It's very off-putting. The only place I can imagine it fitting in well is as a name for a hardcore punk band.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That doesn't necessarily prove that Vorbis didn't make a difference.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
He never claimed it made the licensing costs go down. He claimed it may have exerted downward pressure. In other words, he believes that if it hadn't been for Vorbis, MP3 licensing costs would have probably increased more. Since that's pure speculation, you're going to have a hard time refuting it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that when a normal person uses the term "downward pressure" when referring to the cost of something it does mean that the price goes down
Really! "Downward pressure" cannot slow the rate of rise? "Downward pressure" only exists when something is actually going down? This is fascinating; I had no idea. (Because I'm not a "normal person", you see. How could I be expected to know?)
How do you find out these things? Is there a society that decides what terms a "normal person" can use? I'd like to jo
More to than bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
60% is bit of a price to pay, however IMHO the point of the video tag is tighter integration with your website than is easily achievable with flash. Hopefully theora will improve and compete with mpeg-4, but there are still many advantages to using it over flash for embedded video (for stand alone pages, it doesn't matter so much as most users have a plugin to handle mpeg-4)
*Interacts with the rest of the page easily (TBF actionscript, et al can achieve this)
*Much lower cpu usage. While flash is particularly bad, theora is particularly good
*Cross architecture. As people browse the web on phones, pdas, etc, this does actually matter
*Much less likely to be exploitable (TBF webhosts don't care, but users should)
*Open standards.
I don't think theora should be seen as simply a tool to replace flash videos but it should be seen as an opportunity to better integrate video into sites and/or make video content available to more people annoy people with video backgrounds
Why nobody speaks about Dirac? (Score:4, Interesting)
Dirac is supposed to be a great opensource, patent-free codec, yet nobody seems to care a lot about it in all those HTML5 video talks....
The specific encoder matters too (Score:5, Insightful)
Only one point I wanted to mention (since the article and comments have all been--- oddly balanced for Slashdot)
The article points out that current Thusnelda is not as high quality as the best available h264 encoder at high bitrate video and unlimited encoding time. No argument there, it's true. Thusnelda still has a ways to go, despite the distance it's come; the current alpha still has no Adaptive Quant whatsoever, which will go in before final release.
However, the vast majority of users are not using x264. If you look at the h264 YouTube encoder, which has been designed for speed rather than 'work as long as you like to optimize the output', suddenly Theora is exactly on-par. In short--- Theora is every bit as good as the way that the real world is going to end up using h264 for the forseeable future. And the users of that 'inferior' h264 encoder seem pretty happy with it.
Anyway, this isn't disagreeing with anything you've said, it's simply a practical way to look at the difference.
Monty
Fiasco! The fractal codec (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone remember it? The author screwed up and coded parts of it on university time so had to revoke the GPL license since they could not prove which parts were or were not university property.
I spent a month compressing a highly scaled video clip and was able to put about 20 seconds on a floppy. I could compress a complex jpeg with the static compressor into 4 - 20k.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4367 [linuxjournal.com]
Bandwidth wise it's marvelous, it's the number crunching to compress it that's the killer. I'm not a coder and his paper is marginally comprehensible but there is no way I could recreate the codec.
License (Score:5, Informative)
The license is the single most important thing. It determines whether or not you can use the software at all, or for your specific purpose, whatever that is.
When we're talking about establishing a standard for the Web, which everybody is expected to be a) able and b) allowed to use, there is nothing more important than the license.
Parent
license is not the most important thing (Score:3, Insightful)
The license matters a whole lot less than the potential patent encumbrance for the codec.
The developers of Theora state that the codec is not encumbered by patents, but to my knowledge, there's been no legal tests of that and no intensive review of the possible areas of infringement by a patent attorney. That's a serious issue for the uptake of the codec by vendors, since they're potentially on the hook if it later turns out that the codec infringes on people patents and the holders want to be dicks about
Re:License (Score:5, Informative)
People providing decoders have to pay the license fee.
"Royalties to be paid by end product manufacturers for an encoder, a decoder or both (âoeunitâ) begin at US $0.20 per unit after the first 100,000 units each year. There are no royalties on the first 100,000 units each year. Above 5 million units per year, the royalty is US $0.10 per unit."
This causes issues for free software especially with the gpl because there is a clause which says you cannot restrict the distribution of the code but by having to pay a license fee this is a restriction.
Parent
Re:Help me out, please (Score:5, Informative)
The license means that every product that includes an encoder or decoder for MPEG-4 (including AVC / H.264) needs to pay the MPEG-LA a small free for every version they sell (or give away). This is incompatible with Free Software. Imagine that FireFox included an MPEG-4 implementation. The Mozilla Corporation makes enough money that they could afford to pay the maximum annual fee for this license, but what happens after you download it? If you give a copy of FireFox to someone else, then you need to pay the license fee (except you can't, because the MPEG-LA doesn't offer licenses except in large quantities). Maybe Moz. Corp. could pay that license too, but what happens in a few years time when they decide to stop? Suddenly, no one can redistribute any copies or derived works of FireFox. The root problem is that it is not possible to get a license for MPEG-4 that permits the kind of arbitrary redistribution that Free Software entails. Although the license fees are capped, they are capped annually, so each year you need to pay again or you no longer have a license to distribute code implementing the patents.
This is why Theora is better as a standard format. Anyone can implement it, at no cost and with no restrictions. H.264 is better quality, and so makes sense as an optional format for HTML 5 to support, but requiring it would mean that it would be impossible for the second-most-popular web browser to be HTML compliant. Of course, in an ideal world, the W3C, Mozilla Corporation, Google, or some other interested party would just buy the H.264 patents outright and let them lapse, but somehow I don't think that's very likely.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody.
Yes!
This is why stuff like that gets separated from everything else and marked something like "non-Free" or "non-U.S. users only." Check it, you'll see.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not "a little better", it's:
- available to be implemented by anyone and everyone without paying a cent or even asking for permission, with a BSD implementation available to all for free.
vs
- full of patents held by the big names of the industry, available under per-user licensing fees and any implementation not blessed by them exposes itself and anyone who uses it to big, very costly lawsuits in the US.
And when we're talking about a proposed standard for the entirety of the world wide web, things like t
Re:Help me out, please (Score:5, Insightful)
Could somebody please explain to me why the license matters?
Because $x per copy costs a lot when you're distributing an infinite number of copies, as most Free Software programs are.
Parent
Re:License (Score:4, Insightful)
The license is the single most important thing. It determines whether or not you can use the software at all, or for your specific purpose, whatever that is.
When we're talking about establishing a standard for the Web, which everybody is expected to be a) able and b) allowed to use, there is nothing more important than the license.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And it's encumbered in ways that affect how people can use it. For example, LAME (and various other MP3 stuff) isn't included in Debian or Ubuntu; people have to go out of their way and use non-standard, often unsupported repositories.
emerge lame
How did I go out of my way?
Did I break the law?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The license is the single most important thing. It determines whether or not you can use the software at all, or for your specific purpose, whatever that is.
Actually the license has really no effect at all for the end user in either of these cases. The only people who are effected by the license are people who are either creating H.264 encoders/decoders or those who are creating and streaming H.264 content.
Which is everyone. The Web isn't just a TV, that's where it's power comes from. And lets not forget mashing, which requires encoders and decoders. If developers have to pay when writing this software, the software gets more expensive and content creation gets stiffled.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But wait theres more. In order to get a license you need to sign a contract. Now that contract has things like *all* playback implementations *must* support various DRM etc (aka zones). These strings make firefox or another implementation non free, lack freedom and generally incompatible with most GPL type licenses.
Oh and they are going to charge for content soon too.
I find discussion of qualit
Re:I thought Theora was GPL-ed? (Score:4, Informative)
The reference implementation of Theora, like that of Vorbis is under a BSD-style license to help it gain wider adoption, so your point is valid even for propietary browser makers such as Opera.
Parent