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Theora Ahead of H.264 In Objective PSNR Quality
bigmammoth writes "Xiph hackers have been hard at work improving the Theora codec over the past year, with the latest versions gaining on and passing h.264 in objective PSNR quality measurements. From the update: 'Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Thusnelda pulling ahead of h.264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It's important to note that PSNR is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it's clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantially before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.'
Momentum is building with a major Open Video Conference in June, the impending launch of Firefox 3.5 and excitement about wider adoption in a top-4 web site. It's looking like free video codecs may pose a serious threat to the h.264 bait-and-switch plan to start charging millions for internet streaming of h.264 in 2010."
If they pretend it is going to be free until people get locked in, then pull the pay me or get sued stunt.... then yes.
You lost me at Theora.
This might not pose that much of a threat to H264, sounds like another OGG or FLAC. Superior in a lot of qualities but largely ignored by the majority
Unless some major device manufacturers or youtube like heavyweights get behind it, it's gonna be pretty much limited to the geek community.
what about the free codec's? there is ppl that work on them to so what about them? so that argument really holds no water cause both sides have people that in essence should get paid.
I think it by definition bait and switch. It is offered for free right now ... once it more widely adopted and all your infrastructure is organized around using it you have to start paying in 2010. Which is not exactly heavily publicized. This may surprise people that already purchased the encoder only to find that because their site is popular they have to pay once again.
Software patents should all be invalid.
There are numerous and completely independent ways for people to construct software that does the same thing. Software and data compatibility is far more important that limiting what programmers can write independently without also being required to research whether or not their work is already covered under a patent somewhere.
And to be clear, what software patents do most often is PREVENT people from being paid for their original work or at the very least allow some otherwise uninvolved party to come in and tax your ability to market your work if not block it entirely.
Software protected by copyright? I'm not entirely down with that but it makes a lot more sense than patenting software.
Wikimedia, Mozilla, Redhat... Only thing left is to start seeding Theora pr0n on cheggit. Sounds.... slinky... sexy....
The vast majority of the streaming is flash encapsulated. The host can use any codec they want and it is transparent to the client. By doing this, the client never notices, and they don't pay royalties. It's more likely than you think.
how exactly do you switch out a software agreement? even if there was a clause in there stating "we can change this at anytime" if they tried changing it to greating disadvantage you, i'm no lawyer, but i suspect you'd have a great get out of jail free card right there. the other option is to simply stop using it so they can't sue.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Sure, Theora is great, so is OGG Vorbis and FLAC... Unfortunately I can't really play any of those formats save for on my computer, and if I'm using something other than Linux, I most likely will have to install extra software in order to play them. So no, I don't think this will be some big improvement until I can play them on everything without extra software.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
the launch of Firefox 3.5 is impeding?
Is Firefox being impeded by the conference, or is Firefox impeding the conference?
Or was it an impending release?
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
if your laying out cash on infrastructure i'd say it serves you right for not doing your homework first.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It's looking like free video codecs may pose a serious threat to the h.264 bait-and-switch plan to start charging millions for internet streaming of h.264 in 2010.
Either it's true, or I missed Slashdot's article.
H.264 is a specification, not a codec.
There are various codec implementations of it.
x.264 being the most popular.
Main Concept being the best overall.
Nero being one of the first to market and as usual being slow and bloated and buggy.
DivX as usual being late to market but driving the push for playback in embedded devices, while being at the top in terms of quality and decoding speed.
your making zero sense. the free codec's are willingly given away for free, where here /. is yet again wailing when they have to pay for something.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
But unlike the article's summary says, broadcast will still be free for markets less than 100,000 households, and $10,000 "per market" per year thereafter. That's hardly "millions of dollars".
From the license:
* Over-the-air free broadcast - There are no royalties for over-the-air free broadcast AVC video to markets of 100,000 or fewer households. For over-the-air free broadcast AVC video to markets of greater than 100,000 households, royalties are $10,000 per year per local market service (by a transmitter or transmitter simultaneously with repeaters, e.g., multiple transmitters serving one station).
* Internet broadcast (non-subscription, not title-by-title) - Since this market is still developing, no royalties will be payable for internet broadcast services (non-subscription, not title-by-title) during the initial term of the license (which runs through December 31, 2010) and then shall not exceed the over-the-air free broadcast TV encoding fee during the renewal term.
E pluribus unum
test versions of Thusnelda pulling ahead of h264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases
Please tell me that's not an actual product name.
sic transit gloria mundi
What software agreement? I think that they are licensing patents. They have merely said that you don't have to pay to use the patents before 2010, but if you use the patents after that, you may need to pay (depending on volume). Yes, products that have shipped will be safe, but most companies want to continue shipping products, which will be affected by the royalty demands.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
that's sweet fuck all considering they have a free pass up to 100,000 customers. i can't think of a fairer way to allow the industry to asses a piece of technology.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I mean, let's dump flash and mp3s and begin to seriously promote .ogg. But the picture now is that you will see mp3 streams well before .ogg streams on Linux and OSS friendly sites. It's absurd!
do you really hate paying people for their work that much?
It depends how much...
Im happy to pay people how much i think their work is worth to me, but only a victim would pay what a capitalist says their work is worth.
I don't mean to belittle Theora, I've really been rooting for them over the years. And this recent test does look fantastic.
But I can't help wonder what settings they are testing x264 with. x264 has recently been shown to be highly sensitive to clips like the Akiyo one tested here -- it also lost to some other H.264 encoders that it usually beats fairly consistently. The version and settings used to encode this one make a WORLD of difference.
Theora will over take h.264 though I doubt that it will seeing as h.264 has already gained so much momentum :-(.
"...even if there was a clause in there stating "we can change this at anytime"..."
That's *exactly* what's in the MPEG licenses. And software vendors don't get indefinite licenses for distributing MPEG implementations, they have to reup on a regular basis.
Since the last update and alpha release, work has centered on two basic tasks: correcting the substantial energy leakage in Theora's forward DCT and optimization of the quantization matricies (and matrix selection). Here's an early example of Thusnelda with some early quant matrix tuning, along with the new forward DCT versus Theora 1.0 discussed below (same encoder parameters, equal bitrates):
Greg Maxwell has been doing automated regression and comparison testing of the ongoing Thusnelda work against previous versions of Theora, and because there's so much anecdotal FUD flying around about Thusnelda and (especially) h264, he threw h264 (the x264 encoder) into the testing mix too. The following PSNR chart is data collected against the 'Akiyo' QCIF test clip:
X axis is kbps, Y axis is PSNR in dB
The important thing to note is that objective error steadily decreases from Theora, to the SVN version of Thusnelda, to the early experimental Thusnelda work that includes some matrix optimization (but not yet adaptive quantization). Also worth noting is that something is very very wrong with Theora support in older versions of ffmpeg, which for some reason, outside reviewers insist on using to compare Theora against other codecs. The bug is not actually in ffmpeg2theora; the same ffmpeg2theora version linked against a recent ffmpeg does not exhibit the same problem.
Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Thusnelda pulling *ahead* of x264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It's important to note that PSNR is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it's clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantianlly before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.
Forward DCT
The original VP3 was designed with a forward/inverse DCT pair without perfect reconstruction that exhibits substantial and highly nonuniform energy leakage. It appears that the only real consideration in the design and implementation of the original transform pair was speed on a single platform [a classic case of premature optimization].
Original transform error
The peak and mean square error charts (values arranged by position in the 8x8 output matrix) make clear just how poor the original forward DCT is. (This is an excerpt from the full test and is representative of the results across all input conditions)):
IEEE1180-1990 test results (VP3):
Input range: [-256,255]
Sign: 1
Iterations: 10000
Peak absolute values of errors:
3 3 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 3 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 3 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
Worst peak error = 3 (FAILS spec limit 1)
Mean square errors:
2.1289 0.9616 0.6611 0.3385 0.3458 0.6426 0.5268 0.3499
0.4746 0.6312 0.6130 0.4239 0.4310 0.6287 0.6312 0.4315
0.4706 0.6238 0.6300 0.4228 0.4159 0.6278 0.6357 0.4191
0.3642 0.5461 0.5286 0.3527 0.3467 0.5368 0.5413 0.3405
0.3483 0.5285 0.5463 0.3531 0.3499 0.5389 0.5294 0.3421
0.4331 0.6090 0.6244 0.4272 0.4218 0.6296 0.6172 0.4209
0.4164 0.6225 0.6191 0.4248 0.4285 0.6206 0.6331 0.4269
0.3419 0.5315 0.5428 0.3586 0.3560 0.5299 0.5390 0.3482
Worst pmse = 2.128900 (FAILS spec limit 0.06)
Overall mse = 0.523162 (FAILS spec limit 0.02)
Improved transform
A
What about decoders?
asses?
Or perhaps you meant assess?
I laughed trying to read your comment.
Karnal
To
Xiph hackers
Your OGG tag looks and sounds odd, for music I mean, now Theora should be the free video codec of choice ? I admit it is slightly better the Vorbis/ogg/xiph oddities but come on. Does it evoke video, film or movie ? Does it inspire us to switch from MPEG ? I can't even pronounce it without bad aftertaste.
What happened when GIF patents threatened just about everything on the internet? PNG... and we all know how well that caught on... you've probably never even heard of PNG right?
Are you serious?
PSNR numbers don't mean anything anymore. When using Psy-RD and AQ they are completely useless.
my reading was $10,000 per year per local market service... assuming your internet services hits many thousands of local markets you would hit the maximum royalty for Participation ie millions. This may be an inaccurate reading. Your reading seems logical as well.
No royalties were levied on mp3 implementations until MPEG changed their minds in 1998, ironically not long after the format really took off, and delivered Cease-and-Desists to every free encoder project and a bunch of companies too.
"Thanks, boys, for promoting our format for us. We thought it was only good for hold music over ISDN! Since you did such a fabulous job, we're gonna have to ask you to hand everything over right fucking now or we sue you into oblivion. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out."
Don't you remember that was the whole reason Ogg and Vorbis got started? We just had Unisys/GIF threaten to sue everyone, then we had MPEG threatening to sue everyone and someone finally had the guts to say no fucking more. MPEG can't even keep its own members from suing each other, and you plan to trust them for the basis of your own smaller business?
But one thing is funny, MPEG has mostly (mostly) behaved since then. Maybe MPEG is only playing fair now *because* of Ogg? Ogg is pretty much the only viable non-MPEG codec effort left.
How are they pretending? The linked license agreement explicitly states the term of the agreement, and even notes that some activites are royalty-free until then *for the express purpose of increasing market share*. It's not a bait-and-switch if they inform you about the switch ahead of time.
How is that any different than a company selling a physical product deeply discounted or below cost for an initial period of time in order to gain market share?
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
asses
I think a link to goatse is in order.
Seriously though, curse words and misspellings don't really add weight to your argument.
... to the Slashdot crowd, anyway. To the rest of the world, not so much.
#DeleteChrome
once it more widely adopted and all your infrastructure is organized around using it you have to start paying in 2010. Which is not exactly heavily publicized.
How does being in the license agreement itself count as "not heavily publicized?" C'mon, people... anyone who signs a legal agreement like a patent license without having a lawyer look over it is a moron.
It's not bait and switch if they tell you about the switch up front.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
I'm less worried about benchmarks, more worried about, you know, seeing an actual production, ready for end-user codec released. This only finally happened end of 2008 to all of no fanfare (I didn't see it on /. or anywhere). That is a loooong time they've been messing with it (2001 was when VP3 with open).
The problem is, if you take forever to make it "perfect" you miss the boat. The reason MP3 got so popular is not because it was the first compressed music standard capable of near CD quality. It was also not because it is the best lossy compression standard. It is because it was good enough, at the right time. It's compression level was small enough that people found it usable (as opposed to things like ADPCM which do knock the size down, but not enough) on the technology of the day, and it did it while giving quality good enough people liked it.
So in my opinion it really is to late, they needed to release a couple years ago. As it stands, I think they've missed the boat. Blu-ray is done and uses VC-1, MPEG-4, and MPEG-2, ATSC is done, uses MPEG-2, Flash Video uses H.263 and VP6 (and also H.264), mobile stuff uses MPEG-4 (part 2 and 10). They have just missed the boat. So they release a codec in a year or two or five that's maybe a little better than MPEG-4 part 10... Ok so what? Nobody will really care. Net connections only get faster, harddrives get larger, so even if you offer 20% better compression it doesn't matter, people will stick with the standard.
Vorbis had more of a chance since it actually did get released around the time that there was interest in upgrading from MP3 to something better for some things. However they largely lost out (it does have some use, in game engines for example) in part because of their silly naming and in part because of their poor surround support. However Theora is too little too late as far as I can tell. The world is already settling in to their HD codecs and once the standards get entrenched, they'll stay there until there's a compelling reason to switch.
Timing is important. If your product isn't ready when it is needed, it isn't going to get used no matter how awesome it is in the end.
And following Thusnelda will be Snuppflog. They're just internal project names.
Intel chooses boring internal codenames like towns, we choose silly things that our incredulous detractors dare us to use. But only if we like them.
The benchmark that looks good in the lab.
YMMV.
The "objective" benchmark that has been "especially kind to Theora."
What the hell am I to make of that?
It's one clip -
apparently of a geek dead on his feet after pulling one too many all-nighters.
You can drown in techno-babble.
I want to see video.
Richly detailed backgrounds.
Textures. Wood and fur and cloth and grass. Subtle rendering of flesh tones.
Give me a real taste of how well your codec handles action. Take your camera outdoors. In the rain. Out on a boat. Take it on stage.
First off, most people don't care about lossless compression. It's a niche market. After all, even on extremely good sound gear, you are hard pressed to pick out 256k MP3 from uncompressed in blind tests. Also, popular though it might be, it wasn't popular enough for the big boys to pick up. Both Apple and Microsoft did their own lossless formats. Windows Media Audio has a lossless mode, and Apple uses ALAC. Now while Windows Media Player will happily play FLAC if you install a DirectShow codec (don't know about Quicktime), FLAC isn't included.
So popular in a small niche maybe, but not making any waves over all.
Pair this with Cortado, instant flash killer!
I played around with Cortado a few years ago, it was impressive at the time. Java applets in the browser is a much more appealing alternative to me than flash. With the option of having embedded video with a fall back to the Java applet in the future, this is a win all around.
The Wikipedia page tells me somebody is already doing this.
The PSNR graph is quite interesting. To get comparable PSNR values from a recent x264 for the given source, you will have to use ridiculously low settings. I got about 700fps, with the required (lowest) settings, which still give better PSNR at 250kbps (47.333db) and above (300kbps is 48.222db), than is marked on the graph. This is with the lowest possible x264 settings, one-pass ABR. Also note, how the PSNR graph for x264 looks like a perfect logarithmic curve. None of the other plots are as smooth. Now, if you were feeling paranoid, you might get the feeling that they didn't even test their source with x264 at all.
Why would either Slashdot or Streisand apply here? Just wondering. Slashdot traffic isn't exactly likely to bother MITnet much, and I'm hardly likely to censor my own post or have MIT remove it.
I *had* been thinking of adding some gradient improvement screencap examples though.
How is that any different than a company selling a physical product deeply discounted or below cost for an initial period of time in order to gain market share?
That practice is called 'dumping' and is illegal for most goods and services, at least in the United States.
To be fair, the whole thing is part of 'the Ogg Project'. Saying 'Theora is Ogg' is not actually incorrect, and it might get you laid at parties.
No need to be such a stickler, here have a beer.
h.264 is not bait and switch. do you really hate paying people for their work that much?
Yes it is, and yes I do, especially when it comes to "intellectual property" holders milking what are essentially commodity technologies.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I like the concept of theora, but to be perfectly frank, it just isn't well supported enough to be useful for me. If I use mp4, I can use the same files on my Winders box, my linux box, and my recently purchased DVD player. With theora, it is a bit of a struggle to get anywhere close to that level of interoperability (not aware of any common DVD players that support it at all).
Sure, I might be able to pull it off if I was extremely anal about my purchases, but who has the time for that?
Best,
* Internet broadcast (non-subscription, not title-by-title) - Since this market is still developing, no royalties will be payable for internet broadcast services
Translation: Its free until the market is large enough.. then we start charging you.
$10,000 per year per transmitter? I'm guessing that would be per server when they start charging for internet streaming.
Internet broadcast (non-subscription, not title-by-title)
Therein lies the rub. YouTube, Hulu, and the like are on demand, which is how I understand the term "title-by-title".
You have to measure the PSNR of each codec with the same tool, silly (and avoid doing colorspace conversions which are lossy in the interchange. Keep the output in YCb'Cr' format). If you're using the x264 encoder's reported PSNR *cough*ahem* it's known to be wrong. It always reports way higher than other tools, like it's forgetting chroma is subsampled or its log-space algebra is just wrong or something.
Let me check myself with the clip linked in the article....mmmm lessee.... yep! that's what you're doing. So, BZZZT, no gold star, try again.
The results are real:
x264-0.0.0-0.20.20080905.fc10.x86_64 was used.
PSNR computed with dump_psnr (tool that ships with Theora), so that the same tool could be used with multiple formats. I compared the decompressed lossless yuv4mpeg files. You can easily reproduce these results: Grab http://media.xiph.org/video/derf/y4m/akiyo_qcif.y4m and the current Theora Thusnelda SVN, the above mentioned x264 and go to town. Encode with defaults. Constant QI in both cases. (CRF and other common wisdom x264 knobs hurt PSNR in this case, though because of the nature of the test I would have stuck with defaults regardless)
This test wasn't intended to be a critical bake-off between formats. Thats something for a third party to do anyways. I feel somewhat dirty for having a part in something being spun this way.
A big concern for Theora is performing well enough that no one feels the need to regret using a freely licensed format. Being as good/better than some particular encumbered encoder would be great, but really it is just important to be in the ballpark. The videophiles are going to use whatever feels sexiest today (read: best marketed) regardless of licensing, CPU consumption, or even real quality.
While completely real this testing was not *at all rigorous*, you can think of the x264 example as something provided to give the graph scale and not something you can use to say that Theora is superior, only that its not laughably worse. I think this does show that some of the claims that "theora sucks" are over-hyped.
I initially created these graphs because someone published a paper with highly flawed and unreasonable results showing Theora doing >30dB worse than x264. So a lot of the testing parameters came from trying to mimic his particular test rig so I could understand his mistake. -- It just so happens that the graph makes a nice statement about Theora's improvement over time, so Monty made use of it in his latest report to his employer on Theora's progress.
No one involved with Theora is saying that this test says that Theora is generally better. It's only "Look, you can stop fretting about quality-- we're basically in the right ballpark now. It's time to get other issues like adoption, software support, etc fixed while the final polish is being put on the new encoder".
--Greg Maxwell
I've also commented on this reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8iphn/theora_encoder_improvments_comparable_to_h264/
The host can use any codec they want and it is transparent to the client. By doing this, the client never notices, and they don't pay royalties.
The manufacturer of the playback device (if not a PC) pays royalties to Adobe for Flash Player and passes these on to the client.
It's more likely than you think.
What is "centipedes in my vagina"? Oh wait, this isn't Jeopardy!.
"Unfortunately I can't really play any of those formats save for on my computer"
Wrong
FLAC fine. But have you anything to play Theora video that isn't a PC?
Oh, and don't forget to rockbox your iPod.
From the page you linked: "not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd/4th gen Nano, Classic or Touch". That's why kelnos says Rockbox doesn't count.
subjectively...it looks like a giant blob!
ack!
We have a Java based decoder for Theora which works really well (at least for the 99.9% of the public which isn't a geek with the classic (and largely justified...) geek hatred of Java). The Java can be used as a slick automated fallback for the video tag.
A Flash Theora player could be done (and a Flash Vorbis audio player also exists), although it would require flash 10-- which probably still has a market smaller than Java (so much for no download!). It would also be fairly slow: The video decode in flash is entirely native code, flash only recently got a VM powerful enough to do this.
What the world really needs for video is browser integration. Some of the firefox 3.5 demos have been amazing. All this codec stuff is really sausage making that typical users don't care much about.
Time Warner signed me up for cable internet @ USD$25/month. 6 months later, they upped it to USD$40/month. Same deal.
:(){
PSNR not only does "not measure perceived quality", it's also of next to zero worth in determining the effectiveness of a codec. For one, x264's psychovisual optimizations actually drop the PSNR and SSIM of the output compared to a non-psychovisually optimized encode. For an example of how meaningless PSNR is, look at
http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/x264vsElecard/
Of worth noting is that in these screenshots, Elecard has a higher PSNR than x264.
Talk to average users, and ask them "what is a flac file?", and "what is a wav file?", then ask them "which one would you use to record audio?". 99.999% would say "wav".
Actually, that percentage of your 'average users' would just *blink* with glazed over eyes...and not have a clue what you are talking about.
I say this after having worked tech support for Creative Labs, dealing with mp3 players and your 'average users.
Now I will agree that more 'average users' will recognise a *.wav file as a sound file compared to recognising a *.flac file as a sound file...if we leave 'lossless' and other qualifiers out of the equation.
But 99.999%????...'average users'???
Hah! I would not touch that statistic with a bleach-soaked 10 foot pole, because I know where you pulled it from, and it's drawing flies already, because it stinks so bad!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Ah, you wish to make a victim out of the person who DID the work. You believe your opinion of what the product is worth is more important than what THEY think it is worth.
Uh, this article here on Slashdot is about *brand new* improvements to Theora, how it is vastly better from original Theora of even one year ago, and also about how a really old broken version of ffmpeg was also causing really terrible quality problems....
So you post several year old screenshots made with an old, unknown [but definitely broken due to age] version of ffmpeg.
BRILLIANT. Seriously, dude, fewer bonghits.
Yeaaah. First of all, let me just say that I'm not claiming Theora is better than H.264, or even on quite equal footing (as gmaxwell said, that isn't really even the point). So there, that's out of the way.
In any case, your suggestion to eyeball these comparisons that are just insanely old considering the improvements Theora has gone through is pretty clueless, more so with you even admitting to their datedness. (Sure, x264 has improved as well, but Theora has had the *cough* benefit of rather much more low-hanging fruit due to the not very high quality of the original encoder inherited from VP3.)
So I'm gonna ask _you_ to use your eyeballs and follow the link in this very article, 'cause there are before/after shots there of old and new Theora encoder output. Then come back saying that these ancient comparisons are representative of the performance of the current code. That is, after all, what this article is about.
No one person can be objective, a fair value can only be reached when their is competition.
Patents and copyrights are government granted monopolies, therefore anti-competition, and thus will always be unfairly priced.
Image quality vs bitrate means very little without mentioning CPU/memory usage. H.264's greatest weakness is the heavy CPU load on playback, it's just not friendly to low-cost and/or mobile devices. If Theora can get within the ballpark in terms of quality, but beat H.264 in speed, that could be the edge it needs to hit the mainstream.
Right now it's little more than an academic experiment. Floating point everything can give you fantastic quality, but it will crawl so slowly that people will choose a lesser-quality alternative that runs faster.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Is the recurrent use of "energy" some sort of weird internal jargon for speed or efficiency?
I'm sorry for dropping the "d" at a rather unfortunate place. (at the "looks gooD". Again... I apologize. You comment looks stiff and firm, with a well-defined form. Almost throbbing, one might say...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
But 99.999%????...'average users'??? Hah! I would not touch that statistic with a bleach-soaked 10 foot pole, because I know where you pulled it from, and it's drawing flies already, because it stinks so bad!
I looked at his links, and what I see backs him up. This optimization of the x264 codec is optimized for SSIM (Structural SIMilarity, a measurement of image comparison accuracy), which inherently decreases PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio). After all, an accurate, less densely compressed image will actually show textures and such better! I personally like to be able to pause a video I'm watching, and look at say... the whiskers on Hugh Jackman's face (I'm sure you guys might like the equivalent). While PSNR is important for determining compressibility, in lossy compression, you're talking about losing details no matter what. Some people want those smaller file sizes! Comparing apples with oranges is more of a taste comparison than an aesthetics debate, but it's still important to be informed about the real differences.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
I'm sorry for dropping the "d" at a rather unfortunate place. (At the "looks gooD".) Again... I apologize. You comment looks stiff and firm, with a well-defined form. Almost throbbing, one might say...
(If I answer to fix my error, at least I should be funny. ^^)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Except that Time Warner didn't do this for the express purpose of preventing competitors from entering the market (that's what municipal monopoly contracts are for), they did it so that you'd be more likely to sign up for a more expensive package than you normally would and that you will come to like it so much you keep it even after the discount goes away.
If this were MS, people would be whinging that they're just trying to get sufficient lock-in to make going another route down the road infeasible once they start extorting users (and by this I mean producers, as they are really the ones using the technology licenses here) for $$$. As it is, I'm shocked to see people whine that they aren't entitled to make money on a technology for which there could be a comparable Free alternative. Wow. It's the same plan, just a different corporate overlord.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
how exactly do you switch out a software agreement? even if there was a clause in there stating "we can change this at anytime" if they tried changing it to greating disadvantage you, i'm no lawyer, but i suspect you'd have a great get out of jail free card right there. the other option is to simply stop using it so they can't sue.
They do. They can, and you don't.
If the license is too unbalanced, then you take them to court. You do not have the option of ignoring the license and doing your own thing.
ISP brings a cap into your unlimited broad band.. No problem. They only have to let you know they changed the terms. Not what they changed.
WGA? Change in the behaviour of the software after you bought it. Don't like it, don't use it.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
First off, if you even spent 5 seconds reading the title on that page, you'd realize that it is a comparison between H.264 encoders and that the point I was making is that PSNR can't be trusted for anything. Now, if you want some screenshots of the "new and improved" Theora failing, here: http://saintdevelopment.com/media/ [saintdevelopment.com] Notice how the "new" thungrewhatever build has somehow miraculously gotten worse than the old stable version. Also note that it is easily beaten by decades old formats like Xvid and even incomplete crap like Snow.
First off, if you even spent 5 seconds reading the title on that page, you'd realize that it is a comparison between H.264 encoders and that the point I was making is that PSNR can't be trusted for anything. Now, if you want some screenshots of the "new and improved" Theora failing, here: http://saintdevelopment.com/media/ [saintdevelopment.com] Notice how the "new" thungrewhatever build has somehow miraculously gotten worse than the old stable version. Also note that it is easily beaten by decades old formats like Xvid and even incomplete crap like Snow.
First off, if you even spent 5 seconds reading the title on that page, you'd realize that it is a comparison between H.264 encoders and that the point I was making is that PSNR can't be trusted for anything.
Now, if you want some screenshots of the "new and improved" Theora failing, here:
http://saintdevelopment.com/media/ [saintdevelopment.com]
Notice how the "new" thungrewhatever build has somehow miraculously gotten worse than the old stable version. Also note that it is easily beaten by decades old formats like Xvid and even incomplete crap like Snow.
Summary says fees begin for H.264 in 2010. The article actually says that fees for H.264 started in 2005, the 2010 date is the date at which the current fee schedule ends and a new one (perhaps cheaper, perhaps more expensive) will begin.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Now, if you want some screenshots of the "new and improved" Theora failing, here:
http://saintdevelopment.com/media/ [saintdevelopment.com]
Uh, that version is also six months old. We're talking about *new*, remember? Not last thanksgiving before any version of Thusnelda was even released.
It's free, from the BBC. It's never blocky because it uses wavelets.
The real winners were JPEG and FLASH.
People used to encode most web images with GIF. Now they use JPEG. Yes, even for line art and text.
People used to encode most web animations with GIF. Now they use FLASH.
MNG and APNG never took off. Neither got much browser support. MNG wasn't compatible with anything. APNG was way too late to the party.
Notice how the "new" thungrewhatever build has somehow miraculously gotten worse than the old stable version. Also note that it is easily beaten by decades old formats like Xvid and even incomplete crap like Snow.
Excuse me?
More rational reporting would indicate that the recent first alpha release of the Thusnelda theora encoder:
http://noraisin.net/~jan/diary/?p=77
produces comparable video quality to H.264+AAC at 720p but out-perfoms h264 in both speed and compression.
A codec that optimizes PSNR is optimizing the wrong thing. The quality of a lossy codec needs toÃY be measured by perceptual quality, not PSNR, because the way you get good compression ratios is by dropping bits where people can't see them being dropped.
Furthermore, perceptual quality is just as objective as PSNR. Perceptual quality doesn't mean that you ask people "do you like this", it means that you measure quality relative to a mathematical model of what people actually see.
They have merely said that you don't have to pay to use the patents before 2010, but if you use the patents after that, you may need to pay (depending on volume).
No, they didn't say that at all. If you read the MPEG LA news release linked from the summary, it says:
To encourage early marketplace adoption and start-up, the License will provide for a grace period in which no Participation Fees will be payable for products or services sold before January 1, 2006.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
Biased, I know, but here's what an x264 developer had to say in response.
Quote: They apparently used the worst possible x264 settings (yes, subme 0 and so forth) in order to make Theora look better--if Theora didn't win such a test I would be shocked indeed! Instead, they just proved the fact that they're a bunch of liars who are no better than the worst of the proprietary companies they claim to compete against.
What do you think streaming video on the internet is used for, really? And your username is 'karnal' and all! Sheesh!
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Given an infinite processing power, infinite memory and enough bandwidth, ANY codec will be "pulling ahead of h.264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases." Or at least, between this version and the uncompressed one, it will be impossible to tell them apart. Some would say that given an infinite memory, processing power and enough bandwidth, you don't to compress at all (but that's just rhetorical.)
An MPEG2 video encoded at 50Mb/s may possibly look better than the same video encoded in H264 at 5 Mb/s, but that's not the whole point of compressing it in the first place. Heck, there are even some blu rays encoded in MPEG2 without any visual issues.
The real deal is actually keeping some quality as the bitrate decreases, not as it increases.
You might want to be less offensive when you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
I wasn't replying to you, and neither was xiphmonth, as you might notice from the subject line "Re: Use your peepers" (and the fact that our comments aren't nested into your comment's box). The comment we _did_ reply to was merely modded down after we did so. Push the "parent" button of my comment to view it.
I'll grant you though that the slashdot UI is slightly confusing in this. I was also confused for a second or two when the original post disappeared and thought our replies had been reparented to yours (I wouldn't put such things past slashdot ;] ). Still, be more careful when frothing.
Nnoo, that's not what that little comparison says. It only compares different Theora versions, and not very rigorously at that. Still, for a small casual comparison it's a okay. As the comments say, the sky isn't as good with the new encoder output, but in this comparison that output also happens to use 20% less bandwidth...
can implement the decoder in Unichrome Pro III and release documentation
and doubly so when it's a recent arrival.
Triply so when an earlier incumbent is bought by Apple who refused to use Off in their music players stating that it couldn't handle it.
Then Rockbox firmware did it and showed them they were wrong.
or dedicated processor, the power needs disappear.
With Theora being free to implement and h264 accelerations not after 2010 (the year they break contract?) it will be better and cheaper to make Theora accelerators rather than h264 ones.
Two things you can do. Go to OpenCores.org. Start working on an MIT-licensed dedicated decoder. Then start encouraging companies like TI, Qualcomm, and Samsung to incorporate it in their next ARM SoCs. Alternatively, see if you can port the existing software implementation to the DSPs found in these products. Decoding MP3 on an OMAP3 uses around 200mW when you do it on the CPU and around 15mW when you do it on the DSP.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"You believe your opinion of what the product is worth is more important than what THEY think it is worth."
That's how capitalism works, Toonol. What you think your product is worth doesn't matter, only what people will be willing to pay for it. It can come out in your favour (like that IPhone app that did nothing), or to your loss (the vast majority of would-be artists).
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
They (xiph) did a mistake when measuring the psnr. That lowered the results by more than 4 dB for x264.
"Turns he out he did everything correctly... but he used ffmpeg for outputting the raw y4m file to have its quality measured by dump_psnr (but not for theora). Apparently, ffmpeg flags the output chroma as "420mpeg2" instead of "420", which results in over 4db of PSNR being slashed off of x264's results unfairly."
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8iphn/theora_encoder_improvments_comparable_to_h264/?sort=hot
First, they tested akiyo, which is a terrible piece of test footage. GMAFB
Second, the measure of a codec is how well it does under greater compression. Any codec can be optimized to be better at higher bitrates.. again GMAFB
Anyhow. Most codecs can match h.264 in a clip like akiyo. Its a clip that is kind to compression. Put the same codec through the real world paces and real world deployments that h.264 and MPEG 2 have been through. It rarely is about the codec itself, it is about the containers, and making the codec adhere to industry standards so that they can receive wide adoption.
In broadcast it is about the ability of the codec to maintain bitrate, its about its ability to be manipulated in the compressed domain. It is about the ability to be used efficiently in a mixed codec environment and the support of the tools the companies work with.
In Post and Studios (hollywood) its about the delivery platforms. What platforms support the codec because Hollywood supports the ones that matter.
In the world of hardware set top boxes, its about:
Compatibility
What will all the 5 year old cable boxes support and can their server infrastructure support it
Conformance
How consistent is it and to what standards, and does it meet all the requirements for the stream 'systems' that they use
Compliance
Does it support fcc mandated flags and user data, how about the features the advertisers are looking for....etc.etc.etc..
First, use some real world test footage. Make your target 5Mb (new target for hollywood, esp disney), 7Mb, 11Mb for HD, 1080P24 content.
Encode some sports, especially cycling and watersports.
Stop using PSNR which is a TERRIBLE measure for comparing the quality of two different codecs. PSNR is only useful for comparing a codec to itself, looking for one measure of improvement.
Talk to the industry so that you can understand how a codec is really used, because if all you are trying to do is beat h.264 at the internet game, let me tell you, you have already lost. All the FUD about license dollars does not apply to 99% of the content on the internet. It only applies to the Hollywood studios and Broadcasters who are the ones who influenced the h.264 licensing to something that *works* for them. The licensing costs are a non-issue. The highest cost for a license in hollywood is for blu-ray media, not the codec by a long shot.
Talk to the people who create the tools that Hollywood uses:
Digital Rapids (http://www.digital-rapids.com)
Rhozet (www.harmonic.com)
Amberfin (www.amberfin.com)
Tektronix (www.tektronix.com)
Those companies have far more influence in Hollywood and the broadcasters than anyone Else because at the end of the day, they are the ones making the tools that make the video you watch.
In short, influence those that have influence and you might stand a chance, otherwise you will become another non issue (Vorbis, Dirac, FLAC, etc)
Theora is also free, and it plays on the pocket-size COWON D2.
I'm sorry to say this, but Theora it's not even close to H.264 when it comes to internet streaming and video conferences. Sure, it is a nice codec for recording and storing video, but its architecture makes it very hard to use it for any realtime application. This is mostly due to three reasons. First, it requires sending a pretty sizable header in front of the stream, which makes it hard to have a client connect in while a stream transmission is in progress. Secondly, it has no support for fragmentation, i.e. splitting encoded frames into UDP sized chunks. Finally, it has no resilience to packet loss. There's more, but these three are the most important ones.
I really wish there would be a free alternative to H.264, but, unfortunately, Theora ain't it.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
if your laying
It's you're, short for you are. Is it really that difficult?
Turns out there was an error in the methadology used in the original comparison, which hit x264 for more than 4 dB of difference.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8iphn/theora_encoder_improvments_comparable_to_h264/c09eyvc
Edit: HAHAHA! We figured out what was wrong--thanks a ton, gmaxwell, for coming on IRC and resolving this! Turns out his testing methodology was flawed... but not in the way I thought!
Turns he out he did everything correctly... but he used ffmpeg for outputting the raw y4m file to have its quality measured by dump_psnr (but not for theora). Apparently, ffmpeg flags the output chroma as "420mpeg2" instead of "420", which results in over 4db of PSNR being slashed off of x264's results unfairly.
Oops. We already have a patch submitted to ffmpeg for the problem and a retraction of the Theora comparison results is in the works. Thanks to gmaxwell for taking the initiative and David Conrad (Yuvi) for finding the bug!
The Doom9 thread on the same topic:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146893
Anyway, given H.264 is a more recent codec that is highly optimized for PSNR and has had many years of refinement in a number of implementations, it's hard to conceive of how Theora could even approach it in compression efficiency, let alone beat it.
My video compression blog
Schmoopy Ahead of ED-209 In Objective WKRP Quality
Posted by tomzyk on Thu May 08, '09 10:41 AM
from the whats-the-whozits-huh dept.
[ Media ] [ Technology ] somebody writes
"Bliggerblah hackers have been hard at work improving the Schmoopy codec over the past year, with the latest versions gaining on and passing ED-209 in objective WKRP quality measurements. From the update: 'Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Quasimodo pulling ahead of ED-209 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It's important to note that WKRP is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Schmoopy. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it's clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantially before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.' Momentum is building with a major Open Video Conference in June, the impending launch of Firefox 3.5 and excitement about wider adoption in a top-4 web site. It's looking like free video codecs may pose a serious threat to the ED-209 bait-and-switch plan to start charging millions for internet streaming of ED-209 in 2010."
yeah. so um... this article has something to do with "video codecs". gotcha. And I only got that after reading the article multiple times and bolding some of those keywords in there.
Shouldn't an "article summary" at least summarize what the hell it's talking about? Even a simple "[an open video codec]" inserted right after the initial mention of "Theora" would have done wonders to the layman's comprehension of it, thus preventing my head from asploding in trying to understand this gibberish. Maybe we could even add in some more useful links to the summary to make it easier on us folks that aren't in-the-know? (H.264 Theora PSNR etc...)
Or is this too much to ask?
(Yes, I know... "Welcome to Slashdot!" and "You must be new here.")
Karma: NaN
You certainly can't link against it without being GPL/MIT yourself but I doubt that stops you using calling a program that does the encoding of a file with x264. As an example LAME is GPL and gets used all over the place. The ffmpeg stuff is also quite popular.
I guess "popular" would need to be defined. Are we counting programs or are we counting videos produced with a particular encoder? I'd guess that whatever Adobe ships would be the most popular for the later and some open source thing if you were counting the former...
First, the GP said "only a victim would pay what a capitalist says their work is worth", not what they think it's worth. The GP singled out "capitalists", whatever he or she meant by that--certainly not the formal definition, which is basically those who create, own, or utilize capital goods--but it really applies to negotiation with anyone. Even if you assume the other party is acting altruistically, which is never a safe thing to do, they can't possibly know what the product will be worth to you, relative to the available alternatives, which is what matters when deciding whether to make a purchase.
Second, it is frankly ridiculous to claim, as you have, that simply choosing not to purchase a product victimizes those who would attempt to sell it to you. There are two factors which fully determine whether a given trade will take place: the price below which it makes no sense for the seller to agree to the trade (because they would be taking a loss, or others are offering more for the same good), and the price above which the trade makes no sense for the buyer (because the cost would outweigh the benefit, or others are offering the same good for less). If the former is above the latter then no trade will occur, and buyer and seller go their separate ways no better or worse off than they were before. Otherwise, an effective price will be set somewhere between the seller's asking price and the buyer's offer, and both benefit from the exchange (ex ante). Either way there is no victim; no one loses.
The sibling comment by "bug1" isn't quite correct; a fair price can be reached in any case where two or more parties agree to trade voluntarily. Competition tends to drive prices down, but the price remains fair--not less than the seller's costs, or more than what the buyer believes the product to be worth--even in its absence. The problem with force-backed monopolies lies in the way they prevent voluntary trade from taking place. Those who rely on copyrights and patents for their income are not wrong for setting "unfair prices"; on the contrary, they are accomplices and beneficiaries of the government-sponsored aggression with which said monopolies are enforced, which is a far more serious charge.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
It's more likely than you think.
What is "centipedes in my vagina"?
Where the hell did that come from? You're a freak.
FYI, it came from a meme derived from an ad for ContentWatch censorware.
And you are either seriously bad at reading comprehension and/or logic if you are going to jump down my throat about this.
If you are UPGRADING from MP3 to something new, one of the considerations is surround support. This was a consideration for all sorts of applications that ended up using something else. The question with any format was "What does this get us over MP3?" This is the reason why things like AAC was chosen for use in Quicktime/iTunes audio. If all it offered was a little better compression, maybe Apple wouldn't have been interested. However that's hot the only thing. Surround also isn't the only thing, but it is one of them.
The point of Vorbis wasn't to be MP3, it was to be better than MP3. There is no market for "just another MP3." You want people to switch from what they are using, there's got to be a good reason.
Im hopping that parent jus making fun of teh gps post...utherwise, its just sad =(
While I agree shit on the shit talking part, as you so aptly demonstrate by talking shit, PCs are not a niche market. In first world nations, just about every household has a computer. That is not a niche market any more than a TV is a niche market.
Actually, they did say what the GP said two items above the one you quoted:
Internet broadcast (non-subscription, not title-by-title) -- Since this market is still developing, no royalties will be payable for internet broadcast services (non-subscription, not title-by-title) during the initial term of the license (which runs through December 31, 2010) and then shall not exceed the over-the-air free broadcast TV encoding fee during the renewal term.
(My emphasis)
Well, Moonlight's new preview release includes support for Silveright's Raw AV Pipeline:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/First-Moonlight-20-Preview-Out-ndash-with-Smooth-Streaming/
The Raw AV pipeline would allow Ogg demuxing with Vorbis and Theora decoding to happen inside managed code in Silverlight/Moonlight.
So users who had either installed wouldn't need to install Ogg to get playback. The web site could just detect the plugin and embed a Silverlight player that includes the decoders.
Hmmm. Looks like someone's even working on one for Vorbis at least:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Mar-24-1.html
My video compression blog
Also, interframe encoding with wavelets has never been done well. Say what you will about classic Discreet Cosine Transformation codecs, those small blocks make it easy to track motion vectors between frames and get efficient interframe coding.
While I like wavelets for still images, they're not so much better than DCT that it makes up for DCT's advantages for interframe coding.
And implementations matter more than the transform. H.264 High Proifle can outperfom JPEG2000 for still image coding. That in-loop deblocking filter and CABAC are big helps.
My video compression blog
And being in the industry, I can state that big content companies and all the device companies have been well aware of this coming for some time, and they're a pretty frequest topic of discussion.
MPEG-2 and the original MPEG-4 codec had somewhat similar termrs, so this is really just business as usual in the digital media industry. Things are actually a lot more affordable with VC-1 and H.264 than with MPEG-2.
My video compression blog
Lossless formats matter less than lossy formats, because, apart from metadata lossage, there's no generational decay. Converting MP3s to Vorbis to AAC or whatever is a terrible idea, but installing the Xiph.org QuickTime package and turning your FLACs into ALACs is roughly as painless as this sort of thing will ever be.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It was posted.
And, to be fair, if they'd gotten a hundred grand in grants a couple of years ago, I'd wager that development would have moved along quite a bit further. Unfortunately, codec optimization is a rather arcane and specialized art; it doesn't lend itself very well to contributors dipping their toes in.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think it has something to do with a specific technical use of the word "energy" in signal processing. My best guess is that codecs apply a set of transformations to a signal and then encode the result; if the result is less energy-intensive, it's smaller when encoded.
Of course, this is just a guess, and I may be mangling the ideas. Search for "residual energy" to see what I've been looking at.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Even if there wasn't, it doesn't matter. PSNR is UTTERLY WORTHLESS for comparing different codecs. It is an extremely simplistic measure of mathematical deviation from the absolute values of each pixel on the screen.
You can easily write a codec that is very strict in storing the "easy bits" exactly right, while completely and terribly distorting everything else on screen, while still getting a great PSNR. Your eyes just don't work that way. Things like adjusting the level of HF noise on screen negatively effects PSNR, yet it's something that is only barely consciously perceived by humans.
Think of something like stationary block artifacts in dark areas. While humans pick-up on those video artifacts easily, PSNR doesn't penalize the video any more than it would for errors in areas of bright, fast-moving objects, that you wouldn't be able to see except by frame-stepping through the video.
This is not true at all. There are lots of very easy ways to improve PSNR. Of course, this involves sacrificing video quality. And it usually only works on certain types of video, ath the expense of others.
On2 is notorious for that. As soon as a standard video codec comes out, they put something together that gets great PSNR numbers, and goes crazy with marketing that trumpets those figures. Meanwhile, anyone who has actually used the codec can tell you that it doesn't come close to matching the hype.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well, I think it's overstated to call PSNR Utterly worthless. In practice, it's a useful ballpark indicator of how a codec is doing. For a car analogy, it's perhaps like trying to figure out speed from the RPM gauge; relevant, but not the whole story. And while there are all kinds of theoretical things that can be done to fake out PSNR, in the real world an encode with a bad PSNR is almost alwasy going to look pretty bad. It's certainly possible for two clips with a PSNR difference of 2 dB to have the mathematically less accurate one actually look better, but it's rare to have a big PSNR difference not indicate a big perceptual difference.
You can easily write a codec that is very strict in storing the "easy bits" exactly right, while completely and terribly distorting everything else on screen, while still getting a great PSNR. Your eyes just don't work that way. Things like adjusting the level of HF noise on screen negatively effects PSNR, yet it's something that is only barely consciously perceived by humans.
I think that would be harder to do in practice; a codec that looks good with poor PSNR, sure, there's tons of tricks. But one that looks bad with great PSNR? It cerrtainly isn't going to happen by accident, although perhaps someone with a very... specific sense of humor could build something like taht for their own amusement. And as tickled as I am by the idea, I can't think of any of the various oodec-related practical jokes over the years that involved buildn't an actual new encoder.
With H.264 in particular (which is the comparison point here) the strong in-loop deblocking filter will soften the kinds of sharp lines where human vision cares more than PSNR. That loop filter is probably the strongest single innovation in H.264, since it lets video degrade into softness, without introducing new erroneous detail at high quantization like older codecs did. So, unlike MPEG-2, having a highly compressed frame doesn't have the same negative impact on a later frame predicted from it.
But the loop filter softens detail, which makes it hard to have a few bad pixels and lots of great pixels in the way you desribe; instead it'll get blurring a a bunch of pixels will be off. Sure, it can be disabled, but then overall PSNR goes down a bunch as well.
All that said, I think SSIM is a better metric than PSNR for today's codecs in today's usage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSIM
But PSNR plots on a rate distortion curve are a good initial indication of compression efficiency in practice.
My video compression blog
About the middle of 2008 with the release of ffmpeg2theora 0.21 did theora really become general purpose encodable. But regardless, LAME was still being 'perfected' in 2008 and it's an MP3 codec. Theora didn't miss the boat, and as far as open source standards go (that run on current hardware e.g. not dirac), it's it for video, unless you got the gigs to go MNG/FLAC.
That's for broadcast digital TV. Here are the U.S. TV markets, assuming they mean DMA markets (unclear). Everybody bigger than Jackson, TN has to pay (and I'd imagine that Jackson will, too, after the next census data update). This part has nothing to do with Internet streaming. It has to do with the number of unique programs the TV station simultaneously transmits. A station that airs a network affiliate on its first subchannel, 24-hour news on its second subchannel, and 24-hour weather on its third subchannel. If that is a top-172 DMA station, it will cost $30,000 per year to do so because there are three services. It doesn't matter if that spans into a second market using a repeater; it still costs only $30,000. At least that's the way I would interpret it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
And what if they offer you 48 KHz 20-bit lossy versus 44.1 KHz 16-bit lossless :)?
We think about the CD master or YV12 as being "lossless" but both represent a lot of perceptually tuned compromises well before they hit a codec. You can't estimate quality with a diff or a spec; it requires good ears, good content, and good reproduction equipment to figure out what's a difference that matters and what's a difference that doesn't.
We care about how it is percieved by the human auditory system here; it's not like we're trying to make bats dizzy.
My video compression blog
Read the patents... There is nothing "novel" about them. In fact most could be challenged. But because there are so many patents on lame aspects of "novel" implementation details, it would cost way too much and take way too long.
There is nothing novel in h264. But lawyers are making a mint.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
it's not like we're trying to make bats dizzy.
Bats get dizzy on my '45s ;)
We think about the CD master or YV12 as being "lossless"
"Lossless" to me is used in reference to a codec that, when used, does not mathematically lose any audio definition from the source you give it. We lose plenty of definition going from instrument to microphone to mixing to CD. All we as consumers can control is how much we lose from CD to our digital libraries and from there how much we lose and what colour we add in selecting our playback equipment.
Getting the ultimate playback setup is mega expensive; choosing a lossless codec is comparatively not.
"Xiph" is actually from the Greek [encoding issues] (sword) by way of 'Xiphophorus' (sword-bearing, pseudolatin?) from the genus name of a fish (Xiphophorus helleri).
Googling for "Xiphophorus helleri" gives me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_swordtail which says genus=Xiphophorus, species=helleri.
So it's a fish with a sword---a swordfish.
Which is also a great movie (if somewhat cheesy). One of the characters is a Finn (not a fin!) named Torvalds; there's also some crypto going on, with the mandatory bogus terminology, some people blowing each other up, and Halle Berry's naked tits! ;)
imdb entry: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244244/
Might that have inspired Xiph?
Sure, many enjoy the psychological effect of knowing it's lossless. Storage is cheap enough that it coudl be worth it.
Pesonally, I tend to be more annoyed at my earbuds to enjoy that :).
My video compression blog
Sure, many enjoy the psychological effect of knowing it's lossless.
OK there is a psychological effect in play, but it's not snake oil and I believe it's a sound, legitimate choice. When you do a mass digital library import, which can take a whole weekend, you know that you will at some point read about a brand spanking new codec that blows yours away, and encoding fashions will come and go. Choosing lossless means that all new versions can do is improve on file size; nobody can tell you that a new codec is so good that it's worth re-ripping your entire library for quality reasons. That's the main reason why I chose lossless in 2004 and I'm glad I did.
...but I concede, it's annoying that I can't get much music on my phone without messy dual libraries :(
The software agreement that is linked in this article is for the license period that ends on December 31, 2010. Currently, there is no other license for the period beyond that so to accuse them of bait and switch and say that we may have to pay or may not have to pay is pure hyperbole & speculation.
A good way to foment the open source masses, but a little too Fox News for my taste.
The initial terms are only valid through 2010. After that they can charge what they want.
But, I hope Theora will be a force to keep them honest. I'll opt for a Theora source where available.