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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eww. Kill Flash applets with Java applets? Wasn't Java in the browser killed years ago, and for a reason? I'd rather use <video> with a Flash fallback. At least Flash loads almost instantly and doesn't install a sneaky background task that keeps running after you close the browser. There are some quite nice Flash video players out there.
It's not a "bait and switch". A Bait and Switch is when you offer a particular product, wait for people to come to buy it, then announce you don't have it and push a different product with higher margins on them. If the MPEG LA were, say, to say that in 2010 they plan to charge people for using H.264, and then in 2010 announce that they've decided to refuse to license H.264 to anyone, and that you can only license MPEG2, then that would be a bait and switch.
What the submitter appears to think is a bait and switch is offering something for free on a temporary basis while announcing that continued use after a cut-off date will require payments. Some idiot will doubtless make some drug analogy here, but to the best of my knowledge drug dealers do not, up front, announce they're planning to charge in the future for drugs they're currently giving out for free, nor if they do do they set a ceiling on how much they plan to charge.
In reality, this is a fairly normal business practice. Microsoft is doing it with Windows 7, for instance.
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.
I can't even pronounce it without bad aftertaste.
Yet "MPEG" invokes feelings of movies and not, say, some part of an assembly line machine? "Hey, boss! The M pegs in gearbox four are falling out of alignment!"
What's intrinsically video-like about "MPEG"? "But we've always done it that way!!!!!1!" isn't an excuse, you know. Neither is "Well, it's an acronym for blah blah...".
It's free, from the BBC. It's never blocky because it uses wavelets.
Is x.264 really the most popular? It's GPL'd, which means that it can't be included with any non-GPL'd software. I'd be willing to bet that Apple's Quicktime H.264 implementation is the most popular, as it's bundled with every Mac and downloaded by a lot of Windows machines.
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.
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