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."

Comments

bullcrap

[timmarhy]

h.264 is not bait and switch. do you really hate paying people for their work that much?

Re:bullcrap

[CSFFlame]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[arbiter1]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[bigmammoth]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[erroneus]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[timmarhy]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[timmarhy]

"Which is not exactly heavily publicized"

if your laying out cash on infrastructure i'd say it serves you right for not doing your homework first.

Re:bullcrap

[timmarhy]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[samkass]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[whoever57]

how exactly do you switch out a software agreement?

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.

Re:bullcrap

[timmarhy]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[bug1]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[Anonymous Coward]

"...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.

Re:bullcrap

[Brian Gordon]

What about decoders?

Re:bullcrap

[karnal]

asses?

Or perhaps you meant assess?

I laughed trying to read your comment.

Re:bullcrap

[bigmammoth]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[kelnos]

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?

Re:bullcrap

[kelnos]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[ScrewMaster]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[Anonymous Coward]

* 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.

Re:bullcrap

[dmsuperman]

Time Warner signed me up for cable internet @ USD$25/month. 6 months later, they upped it to USD$40/month. Same deal.

Re:bullcrap

[Toonol]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[bug1]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[Miseph]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[JohnBailey]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[Lachlan Hunt]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[fractoid]

What do you think streaming video on the internet is used for, really? And your username is 'karnal' and all! Sheesh!

Re:bullcrap

[Vintermann]

"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).

Re:bullcrap

[Anonymous Coward]

if your laying

It's you're, short for you are. Is it really that difficult?

Re:bullcrap

[JesseMcDonald]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[Anonymous Coward]

Im hopping that parent jus making fun of teh gps post...utherwise, its just sad =(

Re:bullcrap

[FrangoAssado]

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)

Re:bullcrap

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[TheTurtlesMoves]

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.

Re:bullcrap

[dave87656]

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.

i just shit an obama

[Anonymous Coward]

#2. The deuce.

Hold up

[Anonymous Crowhead]

You lost me at Theora.

Re:Hold up

[sympathy]

read a book then kill yourself faggot

Re:Hold up

[Anonymous Coward]

also, step 1 is optional.

Free codecs are not a major threat

[EvilToiletPaper]

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.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[amicusNYCL]

This might not pose that much of a threat to H264, sounds like another OGG or FLAC.

Theora sounds like another OGG, huh? Imagine that.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[Anonymous Coward]

like wikipedia, you mean?

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[Anonymous Coward]

This might not pose that much of a threat to H264, sounds like another OGG or FLAC.

Theora is OGG. Perhaps you meant "Vorbis"?

And FLAC is the most popular lossless audio codec I can think of. How many artists do you know that distribute in Apple Lossless?

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[eqisow]

Like FLAC? FLAC is certainly not as popular as mp3, but that's hardly a fair comparison. It is, by far, the most popular lossless audio codec. A simple search on any torrent site will show that.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[Brian Gordon]

With audio it was like "what you don't support mp3 all my stuff is in mp3! screw you!" With video it's like "durr video files?" and big business can use the best option without alienating users.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[ushering05401]

Until the first lawsuits come down...

I'm just saying that it is pretty hard to imagine what benevolent purpose the current agreements could possibly serve.

 

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[kelnos]

Theora is OGG. Perhaps you meant "Vorbis"?

Ogg is a container format. Theora is a video codec. Theora is not Ogg.

Of course, the full name of the codec is actually "Ogg Vorbis," (though it looks like Xiph is trying to move away from that name) so the OP may technically be correct, even though it's less confusing to refer to the audio codec as Vorbis and the container format as Ogg.

How many artists do you know that distribute in Apple Lossless?

Annoyingly, because the only compressed lossless format the iPod supports is Apple Lossless, a lot of people prefer it over FLAC, even though FLAC is technically superior and more freely available. But yeah, haven't heard of any artists releasing in it...

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[kelnos]

Yeah, unfortunately that's been my feelings about Theora as well for some time. It seems like a great project, and the alleged freeness of the codec is a big plus to me as an OSS advocate... but no mainstream hardware device supports it, and no major content provider uses it. Most companies are used to paying royalties for these sorts of things, so H.264 adoption isn't really slowed down by the cost.

Vorbis has been around for over 10 years, stable for 7 or so, but mainstream use just isn't there yet. Theora has been considered stable for barely 6 months, the bitstream having been frozen less than 5 years ago. H.264 has been in wide use for at least a few years now; Theora's facing an uphill battle.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[fishbowl]

"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"

Show me a professional working in audio production who doesn't know about FLAC. FLAC is *anything* but ignored.

With a codec like FLAC, it's not a subjective question of "superiority" -- the question is more along the lines of "is this lossless compression better than, say, the hardware compression built into an HP LTO-4 Autoloader?"

The business decision comes down to something more like "Do I need twelve or sixteen of these $75 tapes, and do I need 20 or 60 hours to do the job?"

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[nirjhari]

Unlike OGG, Theora had some kinks to iron out, e.g HD rendering. I am glad to see that being taken care of.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[schon]

FLAC is certainly not as popular as mp3, but that's hardly a fair comparison. It is, by far, the most popular lossless audio codec.

Sorry, at this point, I must point out that wav would be the "most popular" lossless audio codec.

A simple search on any torrent site will show that.

Sorry, that only proves that it's the most popular amongst geeks who download from torrent sites.

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".

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[eqisow]

If we're being that pedantic, then the answer isn't wav either, it's redbook. Even with CD sales slumping, their popularity far outstrips anything else. 326 million albums were sold in 2008 and that doesn't count burned CDs or non RIAA sales.

In all actuality, if you take away the CD numbers that I think you were counting for WAV, FLAC is probably beating it. Being well-known is not the same as being the most used. Most people know what a phonograph is, after all.

And remember, ac-3 doesn't count because it's lossy.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[Goaway]

Except that Theora is pretty much inferior in all qualities except being free.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[JackieBrown]

The thing is, it's not a hard market to break into on the desktop level.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[Anonymous Coward]

WAV is an audio container format.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[Anonymous Coward]

Hooray for ignoring context.

If that's how you want to play it, then the most popular uncompressed audio codec is actually the neural protocol used between your eardrum and your brain. Everybody who isn't stone deaf uses that, and is so familiar with it that they can actually process it in real time in their heads!

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[haqatak]

I'm sorry to report that not even XBMC supports Theora - which is very unfortunate, since I find that streaming wise - nothing comes close on narrow broadband.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[fractoid]

Pretty sure that's compressed, bro. The ear does substantial processing itself, including conversion to the frequency domain. Not being digital, it's also lossy.

MOAR PEDANTRY! :D

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[91degrees]

People seem happier wit multiple video formats than multiple audio formats. The relative rarity of standalone digital video players and level of improvements may be a factor here. Right now I'm mainly using MKV with h264. A year or two ago I was using mostly divX. Before that, some other format in an AVI container.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[Anonymous Coward]

But yeah, haven't heard of any artists releasing in it...

http://livephish.com/ -- not actual "releases" per se, but official soundboard recordings.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously linear PCM is teh debil.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[ShieldW0lf]

You think OGG is ignored by the majority?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Usage

Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Guitar Hero... those are just stupid open source projects for geeks, right?

Mozilla is building support for Theora and Vorbis into Firefox. Which means you can publish audio and video without paying a dime and expect that a significant portion of the population will be able to use them.

Is this significant enough to see massive abandonment of alternatives? No, probably not.

Is it significant enough that site operators can save a ton of money on licensing costs by encoding multiple versions and using Vorbis and Theora when the client software has support and using proprietary alternatives only when necessary?

Damn straight it is.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[khellendros1984]

I think that you are confusing "lossy" with "inaccurate". In a certain way, all digital audio is lossy when compared to analog. An analog wave is smooth (at least until you go down to planck time), so any form of digitization will introduce a sort of stair-step effect into the audio. Your wetware is all analog, so no stair-stepping.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[ultranova]

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

There are two important differences between these situations.

Firstly, MP3 already packs good quality sound to such a small size that the additional size reduction of OGG is unnoticeable in modern - or even older - devices. With videos, however, the we're talking about huge files. Not only are these large enough to matter even with modern hard drives, but they also affect streaming video producers a lot. A few percent reduction translates to lots of dollars when we're talking about terabytes per month.

Secondly, MP3 is a de facto standard. It's synonymous with packed sound in people's minds. When you download sound, people expect it to be in MP3 format. This is very different from the world of video codecs, where no format truly dominates and people are used to installing a dozen codecs to watch the videos. One more for Theora won't make a difference, especially since most popular codec packages already have or will include it, and it's a very small download. Once it's installed, Theora videos will play on whatever media player the user uses.

Based on this, I'd say that if Theora is truly technically as good as - and especially if it's better than - H264 (or any other codec for that matter), it has pretty good chances of gaining marketshare. There's simply too much incentive to use the best codec, and no good reason not to use Theora.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[daybot]

[FLAC] ...is, by far, the most popular lossless audio codec.

Maybe on torrent sites, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple Lossless wasn't a contender as the most popular lossless codec, being the only lossless codec supported out of the box by iTunes and the iPod/iPhone.

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[daybot]

Pretty sure that's compressed, bro... MOAR PEDANTRY! :D

I think you're confusing "Slashdot" with "4chan", but don't tase me, bro!

Re:Free codecs are not a major threat

[kelnos]

How do you figure? Desktop level is dominated by what people download. Second comes video that people get off their camcorders and things they make themselves. The people who actually convert video between formats is a tiny subset of the people who watch video on their desktop. And now many people making amateur video are likely using H.264 because of YouTube. What mainstream GUI authoring tools currently exist that support Theora as a native or easy-to-choose format?

bigmammoth == sweet mammaries!

[Anonymous Coward]

A Sunday School teacher asks a boy where bigmammoth was born. The boy answers "Allentown." The teacher corrects him, "No, it was Bethlehem." The boy replies, "Well, I knew it was some place along Rt. 22."

Moral of this? Fuck you bigmammoth. That's the fucking moral.

Uh, that's exactly what's happening isn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikimedia, Mozilla, Redhat... Only thing left is to start seeding Theora pr0n on cheggit. Sounds.... slinky... sexy....

Remember

[CSFFlame]

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.

Problems.....

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:Problems.....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Unfortunately I can't really play any of those formats save for on my computer"

Wrong

Oh, and don't forget to rockbox your iPod.

Re:Problems.....

[PhrostyMcByte]

My Cowon D2 can play Vorbis and FLAC.

Re:Problems.....

[obi]

To play H.264 content you also need to install extra software (on Windows). Installing a Theora codec in addition to a H.264 codec isn't really a big deal is it?

Re:Problems.....

[FourthAge]

Codec downloads are bad; users will go elsewhere rather than expend extra effort downloading something that *might* be a trojan, *might* not work on their machine, and *will* require the administrator rights that they don't have at work.

Video sites really struggled before the Youtube era because codecs had to be downloaded and no solution worked properly on every platform. Everyone remembers Windows Media, the pisspoor Realplayer and the unspeakably dire Quicktime. Youtube bypassed that cruft, which is why it succeeded where the earlier sites failed.

Theora could really take off if a Flash-based decoder could be made for it, so that no codec download was required, and any video site could use it transparently. But how much of the video decoding for Youtube is actually written in Flash, and how much is done by a H264 accelerator in the Flash virtual machine?

Re:Problems.....

[kelnos]

It's true (and I've worked on one of the hardware players linked from that page), but until *Apple* puts FLAC support on the iPod (sorry, as cool as Rockbox is, it doesn't count), it's not going to get wide use. As much as I hate Apple's domination of the hardware music player market, that's the reality.

Re:Problems.....

[bhassel]

As can just about any of the Sansa players.

Re:Problems.....

[rts008]

As much as I hate Apple's domination of the hardware music player market, that's the reality.

I agree 100%. It is to the point now that for mp3 players, everyone is trying to 'play catch-up' with Apple, for better or worse. It's just the fact of reality for now.
It could change, and probably will.

I however will not even try to attempt to predict what the changes may be...there are too many variables in too many related/significant areas IMHO.
It would be easy at this stage to expect some undefined hardware/software combo to take off in directions most people could not predict accurately: cell/smart phones, netbooks, e-book readers, mini hand-held PDA-like PC's, XXX, etc....mastoid implants with an implanted PC....

Re:Problems.....

[pxc]

And the generic Coby player my girlfriend bought yesterday.

Re:Problems.....

[Toonol]

Reinforcing the truism that the cheaper the MP3 player, the more features and versatility it will have.

Re:Problems.....

[Christophotron]

It plays Theora as well.

The moar you know.....

Re:Problems.....

[obi]

Theora could really take off if a Flash-based decoder could be made for it, so that no codec download was required, and any video site could use it transparently. But how much of the video decoding for Youtube is actually written in Flash, and how much is done by a H264 accelerator in the Flash virtual machine?

All of it is done by the VM. However these days AVM2 in the flash player is decent enough to have a complete bytecode based Vorbis decoder. It's most likely too slow for Theora though.

On the other hand, there's Cortado - a java applet able to play Theora. Good enough?

Re:Problems.....

[spankyofoz]

Cowon players are more expensive than an equivalent ipod, which is the obvious benchmark in the category.

Not everything made in Aisa is cheap and nasty

Re:Problems.....

[hitmark]

This because the device itself is whats supposed to bring in the cash, not having it act as a "gateway drug" to some service(s).

Re:Problems.....

[squizzar]

The reason I got an IRiver IHP140 (and replaced it at nearly the same price from ebay after I blew my first one up) was because they have proper support for Vorbis (and with rockbox they support a whole lot more). It's a shame that they stopped making decent sized HDD Players (everything they do is 20GB or less now) but I presume competing with crApple iPoods isn't a particularly sensible business choice. That said when it came out it was a better price, better performance (sound,battery life etc.), and better price (and price/GB storage) than the iPod. I presume it didn't have the marketing or instant cult appeal that the iPod.

I'm dreading having to upgrade or replace it as I haven't seen anything that has quite the same level of simple functionality. Perhaps I'll have to get an iPod video (and stick rockbox on it).

Re:Problems.....

[petermgreen]

Theora could really take off if a Flash-based decoder could be made for it, so that no codec download was required, and any video site could use it transparently. But how much of the video decoding for Youtube is actually written in Flash, and how much is done by a H264 accelerator
  I'm fairly sure the video playback youtube uses is built into the flash vm. The custom stuff written in actionscript (flash's scripting language) just the interface controls etc.

Afaict actionscript is pretty slow as a programming language so writing a full video codec in it's probablly not very pracical.

Java OTOH is capable of doing a full decoder and one is indeed availible from http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/ for an example of it in use see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tupolev_Tu-95.ogg .

Re:Problems.....

[radoni]

With a simple firmware update to the latest and greatest from SanDisk, your Sansa Fuze and/or Sansa Clip get manufacturer sanctioned support for ReplayGain-capable FLAC and Vorbis.

I've owned a Clip, and now a Fuze. These are my "go to" devices, I confidently recommend them for the minority of portable media player consumers who don't want an iPod.

If you don't like the firmware on the Clip or Fuze, you can be a nerd and compile and use a work-in-progress version of Rockbox alternative firmware. It works quite well on the Fuze, and I'm not sure about the Clip. I think the SanDisk firmware is equivalent-or-better than a mostly-functioning Rockbox build. Fanatics insist that Rockbox will work on their portable media player purchase... okay choice is nice, but I am happy with the vendor firmware support of FLAC and Ogg Vorbis.

I consider Vorbis to be dead-on-arrival codec for music sales. The way storage prices go, and Sansa player compatibility, I've shifted toward buying CDs for archival as FLAC/cue. What's the point of buying music in Vorbis format?

The real strength of Vorbis is in games development. Avoiding a license fee by using a free format like Vorbis is a huge win for Rockstar Games in example, where Ogg Vorbis is used for all the game music... or at least that's how I remember it.

The "win" for the FLAC format is driven not by it being the most efficient. Its popularity is driven by being good enough, nearly first in availability, being stable and having few restrictions to implement (leading to wider user base). You can't say it sounds better than the competitors, it was in the right place at the right time.

Theora is late to the scene as a general video storage format. The encoder is not (yet) fine-tuned, and so it isn't good enough. There are few restrictions but development is on-going, which loses out to existing and stable "good enough" implementations of other standards (xvid, x264, flv container). There is no on-going format war because whatever DRM-free format Apple (as a consumer acceptance monopoly) chooses will be the new de facto portable media format. The only door that can be left open is if Apple rejects ALL non-DRM format playback, which hasn't happened yet.

Vorbis and Theora share the fate of being ignored or unwanted by the majority iPod-using crowd.

Behind the scenes, Dirac (a freely licensed non-Xiph video codec) is posing a huge win as a video archival format. Its use offers clear advantages to broadcasting operations. The demand is there for support on big-ticket editing equipment.

I observe that FLAC and Dirac are to be successful, while Vorbis and Theora reap gradual improvements along the way. Improvements in Theora encoding alone are not enough to make it a competitor to h264. You're just going to have to cheer along with everyone else who want a low to medium bandwidth video codec that is simply "good enough", but without the irksome licensing restrictions.

Embedded streaming audio and video playback on the "web" do offer opportunity for Theora and Vorbis ubiquity. It's the only market cornered by a standards body (W3C) that might actually enable player acceptance comparable to the size of the iPod user base.

Re:Problems.....

[metamatic]

Pity it can't play MPEG-4 audio according to the specs, or Cowon would have quite a competitive product that might tempt some iPod users.

Re:Problems.....

[Taibhsear]

My Archos 5 can as well. And winamp plays those and almost all other formats natively (I think even ape now as well).

Re:Problems.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but with flac, you can convert at the drop of a hat into any lossy format of your choice, while retaining the original lossless copy. This is exactly why I archive my music in flac format, and simply generate lossy files from the flacs as the need arises.

Re:Problems.....

[Proneax]

Cheaper? Than an ipod touch sure but the D2 and other players from cowon aren't cheaper than most players, they just have more features...

Re:Problems.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, but since I almost exclusively use my phone for portable audio I'm stuck with MP3 playback. Unless anyone knows of a small, light, cheapish (say ~£50 for a PAYG model) phone available in the UK that plays Vorbis I can only use the codec on my computer.

I use my phone for this, so I don't have the weight of an extra device weighing down my pockets. Any MP3 player which has a screen large enough to be useful takes up too much pocket space.

impeding?

[Drantin]

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?

Re:impeding?

[Anonymous Coward]

A police officer walks into a computer conference and yells, "Hey, who here's a pedant?"

99% of the hands go up and the last 1% erase their porn stashes in a panic.

Re:impeding?

[bigmammoth]

typo :( ..meant impending

Re:impeding?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's okay for you to make typos; we have editors to fix them.
Wait, what's that? I'm getting something through my earpiece...

Re:impeding?

[fractoid]

And this one guy stands in the cop's way, refuses to move and when the cop's about to taser him, yells IM PEDANT!

Did I miss something?

[Tubal-Cain]

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.

Re:Did I miss something?

[martijnd]

The Bait&Switch comment seems a little vague -- but a practical reason for free high quality codecs can be found on WikiMedia:

Why are free codecs important? Wikimedia (and anyone else that wants to switch to free formats) wonâ(TM)t have to pay millions of dollars to in licensing costs to use the h.264 codec and wonâ(TM)t have to sacrifice quality in the process. More importantly it means anyone can encode or decode these files without paying for a license to do so. This means both free and proprietary software can support this format. Where as previously only controlled free as in beer distributions like adobe flash could support video on the web. It enables free software projects like firefogg to package the encoder and give it away for free. It helps opens up the video communication platform for distributed two-way communication.

Re:Did I miss something?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Did I miss something?

[NormalVisual]

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.

Witness the common pea-green Wagon Queen Family Truckster...

What?

[sexconker]

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.

Re:What?

[uhmmmm]

Main Concept being the best overall.

Oh? this (and this follow up post) seem to indicate that it's not so clearcut. Looks like x264 beat MainConcept in most tests, and the major tests it lost in were rather unrealistic.

But in the interest of full disclosure, Dark Shikari is one of the main developers on x264, so he's got an obvious bias. Doesn't necessarily make him wrong though.

Re:What?

[kelnos]

-1 Annoying Pedantry

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who works in the broadcast industry and does codec hacking professional, I can tell you that MainConcept's h264 encoder is a complete piece of dog turd.

x264 is substantially faster, and produces higher quality output, especially at higher bitrates.

Re:What?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

but both livejournal and youtube uses x264 for encoding for example

Re:What?

[sexconker]

Yeah, I simply don't trust doom9 people in terms of their codec shootouts.

The people running the comparisons and analyzing the results are the people developing the codecs.

Reminds of when they would always put XviD above DivX, even though DivX was easily the winner if you used it right. (Sure, it took longer usually, but the output was worth it.)

Keep in mind Main Concept is a "professional" codec.

Of course, I use x.264 because it's easier and faster (usually) and any difference is going to be minor, and yes, just like Pluto and Neptune, sometimes the streams cross.

I'm sorry, what?

[glwtta]

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.

Re:I'm sorry, what?

[Randle_Revar]

Vorbis, Ogg, Theora
And you are surprised by Thusnelda?

But is only the name of the new Theora encoder code base. When it is done it will just be Theora to the masses.

Re:I'm sorry, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The final product name is BroomHilda.

Re:I'm sorry, what?

[CSMatt]

MP3, H.264, MPEG-2.
Can you think of anything else so mainstream whose names are so cryptic?

Re:I'm sorry, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Coincidentally, Thusnelda appears to be falling behind h264 in terms of name quality regardless of bitrate.

Re:I'm sorry, what?

[rts008]

Well, looking at your UID, I won't ask if you are new here, but....

'Bring up the GIMP!'[my pardons to Quentin T.]

Re:I'm sorry, what?

[wall0159]

Yeah - Vorbis should've hired the same marketing dept that came up with 'h264'! (snort) Open-source idiots...

Let's support ogg and theora first

[bogaboga]

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!

Re:Let's support ogg and theora first

[Hurricane78]

Well, the only reason I ever had to encode an MP3, was because my el-cheapo MP3-player only plays... guess what. ^^

Other than that, my whole CD collection is now OGG. Unfortunately I did some serious ABX tests, and apparently on my current set-up, I can't distinguish a lossless WAV from a 128 kb/s MP3. *cries*

Re:Let's support ogg and theora first

[TheRaven64]

Unfortunately I did some serious ABX tests, and apparently on my current set-up, I can't distinguish a lossless WAV from a 128 kb/s MP3. *cries*

This kind of listening test depends a lot on both the music and the speakers. With my laptop speakers even 128Kb/s MP3 is probably better than it needs to be. From the machine plugged into my HiFi, I can often tell the difference with MP3s at any bitrate for some kinds of music, but not for others. I can't tell the difference between 256Kb/s AAC for any of my music, but I can with 128Kb/s AAC for a few tracks, and so I rip at 256Kb/s to avoid having to listen to each track carefully, decide whether it has noticeable artefacts, and then re-rip if it does; the extra few GBs of disk space is worth less than my time.

What are the settings?

[PhrostyMcByte]

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.

Re:What are the settings?

[Anonymous Coward]

Defaults. Constant qi (many of the fancy settings reduce psnr on this clip in any case). The problem you're mentioning is with rate control. Not applicable.

But even if it were, this test isn't intended to show Theora as better. It's intended to show that theora is improving (and that other tests using this clip have been flawed). x264 is provided as an H.264 example for for scale.

Re:What are the settings?

[benwaggoner]

...although without rate control and with such a short clip (12.5 sec?) it really hard to make much of these numbers even if PSNR was calculated correctly.

We need to see a few minutes of video, with a VBV constraint.

Hopefully...

[stms]

Theora will over take h.264 though I doubt that it will seeing as h.264 has already gained so much momentum :-(.

Repost of TFA in case of Slashdot/Streisand affect

[Anonymous Coward]

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

i just got off the toilet

[Anonymous Coward]

i shit out an obama.

plop!

Why the idiotic naming again?

[moon3]

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.

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[Hurricane78]

Can someone explain to me, what the problem of you native English speakers with those names is?
"Ogg" sounds great to me. Like an odd egg perhaps? Interesting.
"Theora" could be some Theater theory opera thing. Nice sound in my ears. Sounds noble.
"Xiph" obviously stems from "cypher", eg. cyphering -> encoding. With a pinch of alien name / high tech space thing in it.
Only "Vorbis" reminds me of a German computer shop chain called "Vobis" (I didn't particularly like them)... with a bit of an "orbit" in it.

By the way: I am a person who prefers creative names to acronyms. Acronyms are just stupid/lazy. Either you make a real word out of your technical acronym, or you imagine some image/feeling, and then find the words you assign with it, to form a word out of them.

MPEG is not even a name for a format. It's the name of the group that created the format. That's how non-creative they were. In the words of Marvin: It's so depressing. ^^

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[moon3]

I am not a native speaker either mate, but those names ring a bit dissonant note in me. It is just my opinion so bear with me.

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[xiphmont]

"Ogg" is actually a term from an early internet game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogging

Theora is named after Theora Jones, a secondary heroine character from the movie 'Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future' about a dystopian future where video media is overwhelming, centralized, oppressive, dangerous, and an off switch on a television is illegal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora_Jones#Theora_Jones

"Xiph" is actually from the Greek ξÎÏÎÏ (sword) by way of 'Xiphophorus' (sword-bearing, pseudolatin?) from the genus name of a fish (Xiphophorus helleri). Which is where I picked it up in middle school. I'd been using it for my software projects since I was 14 or so and by the time Xiph.Org was a real thing [many many years later] I wanted to change the name to something less silly and my co-founders voted me down. They liked Xiph. It became the precedent-setting silly name.

Vorbis is from Terry Pratchett's _Small Gods_ and I dearly hope Mr. Pratchett considers it a compliment. It was meant as tribute to my favorite fictional villain, Archdeacon Vorbis. "A mind like a steel marble"

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...".

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[shutdown -p now]

"Ogg" is actually a term from an early internet game.

I've always thought that "Ogg" is from "Nancy Ogg", also courtesy of Discworld?

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Explaining the origin of the stupid names doesn't make them any less stupid. You guys need a serious lesson in marketing. Nobody outside of a certain subset of basement dwelling mouth breathers is going to go looking for an "Ogg Theora" compatible media device. Ever. DiVX compatible, mp3 player, HD - these are terms people can remember and understand. And nobody in the consumer world is aware of codecs or their differences. They don't know that DVD is mpeg2, or that blu-ray is VC1, h264, or mpeg2 depending on the whim of the manufacturer. Nobody is going to put Theora playback into a device because there will be no consumer demand for it - it's a stupid name.

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Ogg the carrier! Yeah man those were the days. I was chosen dead last out of everyone in the 1998 summer draft league, I'll take that to my grave as a personal honor.

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[TheRaven64]

Nancy Ogg? Hand in your geek card now!

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[tepples]

a dystopian future where video media is overwhelming, centralized, oppressive, dangerous, and an off switch on a television is illegal

How do such TVs generate their own electric power?

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Telling him what the stupid names mean is not the same as explaining why the stupid names are used.

Re:Why the idiotic naming again?

[shutdown -p now]

I already don't have one ever since I said that I don't like Star Trek in any of its incarnations ;)

Fighting the money machine never works!!

[erroneus]

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?

Re:Fighting the money machine never works!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Choosy moms choose GIF.

Re:Fighting the money machine never works!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, and as a developer for Internet Explorer, I thought I'd heard of every image format already!

Re:Fighting the money machine never works!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'know, GIF is still common, but I don't think it's too uncommon to see PNG nowadays. Just a couple examples off the top of my head:

xkcd

The blog of Shimura Takako (a manga artist).

Of course, looking at that sample, maybe it's a people-who-make-comics thing.

Re:Fighting the money machine never works!!

[f16c]

I use PNG at work often enough for use in Word documents. Paint has it as an option. For some reason it is a bit smaller and looks better than anything other than BMP in word. Jpeg isn't used for much other than photographic images of setups and such.

Re:Fighting the money machine never works!!

[kelnos]

I'm not sure you can really apply the same reasoning here. Back when the GIF patents were an issue, people (and companies) were way less interested in throwing money into internet-related activities. Nowadays, licensing yet another codec seems like the norm.

Also the cost of reencoding a huge video library may be more than the cost of just paying the patent fees. And you also have the chicken/egg problem to deal with: who's going to sell/distribute Theora video when no (or very few) hardware players support it, and playing it on PCs requires the user to install additional software?

Re:Fighting the money machine never works!!

[CSMatt]

You're kidding, right? GIF is fading away into obscurity, save for animation and simple graphics, and PNG is dominating in the field of lossless images.

GIF's LZW patents may have expired worldwide in 2006, but GIF's suckiness sure hasn't.

Re:Fighting the money machine never works!!

[Hurricane78]

You haven't worked in the web development business for the last 5 years have you?
We now use one large PNG image map for the site's UI imagery. And JPEG for photo-like images.
Mainly because 256 colors and one bit transparency just suck. Especially for gradients. An JPEG can't do neither transparency, nor well-compressed, good-looking gradients.
Also, semi-transparent stuff is all the hype now.

You *can* actually do them in Internet Explorer too. Because, as weird as it sounds, you can actually add DirectX filters to your CSS stylesheet. Which happen to work very well with PNG transparency.

The only reason to use GIF, is to do fading buttons and similar stuff. But usually I do not need them and just go with a static :hover image. If I really need to get fancy with the graphics, I use Flash or maybe SVG anyway.

As a final note, I'd like to mention, how well your user name fits your comments. ^^

Re:Fighting the money machine never works!!

[erroneus]

Yes, I was being sarcastic. I was actually showing that free solutions CAN catch on and dominate.

Re:Fighting the money machine never works!!

[erroneus]

How is it that people actually missed the sarcasm??? Do I need to hold up a "Sarcasm" sign? (No! I don't have a sarcasm sign!)

Re:Fighting the money machine never works!!

[petermgreen]

PNG... and we all know how well that caught on... you've probably never even heard of PNG right?
png was moderately successfull. Every major browser added support for it (at least for the features of png that were also in gif, transparent truecolor png support wasn't added to IE until pretty late on) and some sites did switch to it. Still a lot of sites stayed on gif and eventually the patents expired.

PSNR?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you serious?
PSNR numbers don't mean anything anymore. When using Psy-RD and AQ they are completely useless.

Re:PSNR?

[Anonymous Coward]

Turning of AQ reduces PSNR for this test. Psy-RD was not used.

Are you forgetting the previous bait and switches

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Try to check your spelling next time.

[Anonymous Coward]

asses

I think a link to goatse is in order.

Seriously though, curse words and misspellings don't really add weight to your argument.

This is very important...

[93 Escort Wagon]

... to the Slashdot crowd, anyway. To the rest of the world, not so much.

You know

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:You know

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a zero-sum race to the near-present. We got a lot of future ahead of us. Blu-ray is a stopgap to Internet delivery, which is still in its infancy. At that point, it's just a matter of updating a player to whatever is best, not whatever is the standard. What's best will dictate the standard... hopefully.

Re:You know

[Hurricane78]

[...] in part because of their silly naming and in part because of their poor surround support.

You really are serious about this, aren't you? I thought you were serious until I read this. So how is the surround support in MP3 (That is not even a name. It's an abbreviation. For a name that also contains an abbreviation. How stupid is that?)? (Hint: It has none.)

Everything else in your comment looks goo. So what is your point with this?

And you were so close...

Re:You know

[rts008]

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.

Overall, I generally agree with your post, but I am not so quick to write Theora off.

What I do propose though, is to call this phenomenon the "Duke Nukem Forever Effect", in honor of DNF dying.[tongue_in_cheek]

All joking aside, you raise valid points, but I hope you are wrong about Theora being 'too little, too late'*, as I see a lot of benefit to the end user overall with it in use.

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.

How very true, and will be more of a factor as we 'progress in technology'.

I will offer a small counter argument though: sometimes looking 'back' at tech/ideas we discarded in the past can have some significant bearing on now/future tech.(more like what was impossible in the past may be possible and useful now/in the future. YMMV, of course)

*my interpretation-correct if wrong, please.

Re:You know

[trawg]

It is because it was good enough, at the right time.

This is such an awesome, succinct way of explaining the sometimes-inexplicable success of so many things. I will be sure to use it again!

I actually don't think it's too late for Theora to have an impact though.

The big thing is the tag that is being considered for HTML5. If Firefox and Opera and Chrome all bust out solid support in release builds soon, we'll be converting our video library to support it (catalogue of video game trailers on ausgamers.com - I realise one site isn't enough, but if others feel the same...)

The big roadblock is IE - even with IE8's improved 'standards compliance' I can't see them wanting to encourage any other video streaming stuff when they're pushing silverlight so hard.

Interesting times though.

Re:You know

[CSMatt]

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.

Timing is important, but so is vendor acceptance and popularity.

The Xiph codecs have failed to reach a mass audience for the same reasons RealMedia, QuickTime, and Windows Media failed: obscurity. MPEG succeeds because it is a de jure standard. In a sane world, supporting a format that costs a grand total of $0 in licensing fees to implement would make complete sense, but because Vorbis and Theora do not have the seal of ISO approval vendors tend to ignore them. The codecs under the Xiph umbrella that do see large adoption usually do so because interoperability is not necessary (Vorbis usage in games) or because MPEG did not fill that niche (FLAC).

More important, however, is popularity. MP3 survives because the computer illiterate associate the very name with digital audio, to the point where it would not surprise me if some people think that CDs literally contain MP3 files. Napster helped considerably here: the fact that it shared exclusively in the MP3 format helped popularize the name and the format, at just the same time that CD rippers started to appear. Digital audio players are called "MP3 players" by the politically incorrect. Not even Microsoft was able to get people to use an alternative format, and they had the advantage (save for the "N" editions) of having their player bundled with Windows for almost a decade now. They finally caved with Windows Media Player 10 after seeing so much usage share lost to Winamp and later iTunes due to Windows Media Player's complete lack of built-in MP3 support up until then. If Microsoft failed to push WMA, and AAC only succeeds where people otherwise have no idea that is is not in fact an MP3 file (such as the default ripping format in iTunes, or on Blu-Ray discs), it's no surprise that Vorbis failed to replace the format by now. Advertising a "Vorbis player" will never work, because no one has any idea what that is. MP3 is the format of Internet distribution thanks to its popularity, and if a digital audio player does not play MP3 files at a minimum, it will never sell, period.

Re:You know

[MemoryDragon]

No they did not loose the boat, HTML 5 will get a video tag finally, and guess what, which format will be supported out of the box due to having no licenses involved...
The entire WM9 and MPEG4 file formats usually mean licensing costs!

Re:You know

[BiggerIsBetter]

If the latest video quality surpasses x264, there's only one thing they need to get me to use it: A GPU accelerated encoding library/app.

Re:You know

[m50d]

You really are serious about this, aren't you? I thought you were serious until I read this. So how is the surround support in MP3

The point is not the surround support in MP3, the point is when you're looking to upgrade from MP3, a few years down the line. At which point your obvious options are AC3 or later AAC (lots of surround support, along with hardware decoders), WMA (took a while, but good surround support now), maybe RealAudio (who cares, not I), or ogg (rather poor surround support). At which point you're going to go with AAC.

Reading comprehension, it's useful.

Re:You know

[TheRaven64]

The other roadblock is Safari. Both Apple and Microsoft license H.264 and ship enough units that the flat rate (rather than the per-license rate) applies. By supporting it, and not Theora, for video tags, they can provide a de-facto standard that F/OSS browsers can't easily copy. Other browsers on Windows or OS X can use DirectShow / QuickTime for playback, but on *NIX they have to use something like x264 (GPL'd, so can't be used by MPL'd engines like Gecko or LGPL'd engines like WebKit) or rely on an external program for decoding.

Re:You know

[averner]

once the standards get entrenched, they'll stay there until there's a compelling reason to switch.

Lack of royalties or usage fees seems like a pretty compelling reason to me!

Re:You know

[Just Some Guy]

By supporting it, and not Theora, for video tags, they can provide a de-facto standard that F/OSS browsers can't easily copy.

I don't think Apple really wants to go down that road right now. They've cottoned to the whole "open standards" idea, inasmuch as it lets them compete against bigger players. I think they'd be more than happy to use something FOSS-friendly if it meant knocking support out from under Microsoft-specific tech like Silverlight.

Re:You know

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Gecko is tri-licensed: MPL, GPL, LGPL

Re:You know

[Burkin]

Except if that were really all that compelling to the commercial users of MPEG standards they would have come up with something like this on their own. To companies like Apple, Sony, Paramount, etc who are some of the biggest users of these standards the royalty fees are mere pittance to them. If none of these bigger players are going to switch to Theora (and pretty much none of them will) it has no viability.

Re:You know

[JustNiz]

Just the existence of a viable free competitor will cause Microsoft to go into embrace-and-extend mode so they will have to do stuff like cheapen WM9 licencing, make it more open, or try and take ownership of HTML5.

The sad thing is that we already know that regardless of how good the ogg codec is, consumer hardware manufacturers won't bother to use or even include support for it in their current and near-future consumer products. Mostly because all the relevant standards (around blu-ray and HDTV) are already defined and there's already compliant equipment out there so interoperability is the driving issue now, not technically better quality or performance.

Its still worth having a good open HD codec around though,If only because it puts Microsoft on the back foot. Who knows, maybe the next fad (UV-ray?? SuperHD??) will include suppport for it in whatever the new standard will be.

Its not as bad as it sounds as it cant be more than a couple of years before blu-ray and current HD is superceded as they have to keep coming up with new and incompatable formats just to sell us ever more tvs, players and the same tired old movies on multiple different formats over and over again.

Re:You know

[evilviper]

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.

Actually, you're UTTERLY WRONG here...

MP3 got so popular precisely because it was the first open-standard (MPEG-1) audio codec that was designed to provide nearly CD-quality sound (mono) over ISDN lines (64kbps). The only alternatives were the much lower quality proprietary options from the likes of RealAudio.

MP3 certainly did sound better at 128kbps than anything else out there (though it didn't take much longer for the earliest version of AAC to arrive...).

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

That's a terrible comparison. The next, small step up in bandwidth and quality was MP2, which was widely used outside of the internet. In many ways, it's quite a shame MP3 gained popularity rather than MP2. If nothing else, music (at 192Kbps) would sound much better, and the patent troubles would have been over a couple years ago. Plus MP2 would have been a no-brainer to use it for DVDs and HDTV, rather than using MP3 on portables, and Dolby Digital/AC-3 on non-portables.

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)

Vorbis lost, in large part, because the quality wasn't much better, yet the decoding requirements were MUCH higher. While Xiph was gunning for MP3, AAC snuck in to fill the niche, and deprived Vorbis of its potential foot-hold for world domination. Then, Vorbis stagnated, and HE-AAC soundly ended any debate.

Re:You know

[w000t]

1) x264 is an encoder, so it would not be of any use to Firefox anyway... ffdshow on the other hand (most complete decoder available in any platform) is LGPL and could be used both by firefox and WebKit (though it doubt a decoder it's going to be embedded into any web engine).
2) Yes, neither MS of Apple are likely to support Theora out of the kindness of their hearts, but they don't control the web like they do the desktop/office. They might be forced to change their tune if sites the size of Wikipedia start making extended use of it.

Correct!

[xiphmont]

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.

Re:Correct!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thusnelda is actually a Geman given name (albeit a very, very rare one these days). :)

Re:Correct!

[tomzyk]

The word on the street is that the next project will most-likely be named Scuzzlebutt.
"PatrickDuffyForALeg" was just too much to type in all of their Project-, Resource- and Change- Request forms.

Re:Correct!

[Apocros]

This is more or less off-topic, but project code names can be an incredibly complicated thing. Engineers like to pick fun names, management types like to quibble and force name changes. Where I work, we've had directors complain that some past internal project names (like "Thor", "Baal", "Shivah") were offensive because they were "pagan". Said person had enough clout that now we have rather uninspiring themes, like trees ("oak", "maple", "pine").

It's also unbelievable the amount of high-level arguing that goes on to choose a theme, or rip some team a new one if they dare ignore the theme.

So Thusnelda and Snuppflog are rather refreshingly original...

I contradict myself.

[westlake]

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.

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.

Re:I contradict myself.

[Hurricane78]

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.

Show me *any* geek who has ever done that. Or even seen any of that. We have only one action. With one skin tone. And you don't wanna see any part of it. Believe me. ^^

Re:I contradict myself.

[Anonymous Coward]

The example frame grab is from the new star trek promo, as a slashdot user you should recognize it. It's a very high action clip.

The particular frame was selected by a a reddit user advocating H.264 (vs old theora) in a thread a couple of weeks back.

The PSNR test is against Akiyo which is a boring talking head clip, but a standard in codec testing.

I'm not sure where your claim of contradiction comes from: The submitter to Slashdot exaggerated, not the Theora developers. The point here is that Theora is improving and that it's at least in the same general ballpark for some clips.

Re:I contradict myself.

[Anonymous Coward]

The "objective" benchmark that has been "especially kind to Theora."

Well "objective" as it is used here doesn't mean unbiased. It just means you have objective criteria, like measurements etc. to evaluate the quality of the codec, opposed to subjective "measurements" like a real persons opinion about the picture quality.
Depending on what and how you measure, objective measurements still can/will be biased

Re:I contradict myself.

[TheRaven64]

So we're comparing H.264 encoded from some higher-quality source against Theora encoded from H.264? In what possible way is this a worthwhile thing to bother with?

Re:I contradict myself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fur? Subtle rendering of flesh tones? Outdoor action? What kinds of videos do you actually want to watch? :)

Re:I contradict myself.

[cstdenis]

Obviously there is only one video suitable for comparing codecs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

Due to it's extremely high popularity any codec that doesn't render it optimally is a failure.

Still doesn't mean much

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's a niche market - but it is a VERY lucrative one. The people who think they can hear much better sound from their lossless files are the ones spending $$$ on high-end speakers, headphones, sound cards, HiFis...

(Not saying that they can't hear any better, but some probably can't at least some of the time - it's more about elitism than high standards sometimes.)

That Microsoft and Apple both created their own just goes to show that it's worth doing. Naturally, they're going to create their own of whatever we're talking about if there's any advantage to creating one at all. Otherwise, they can't infest it with DRM. Popular has nothing much to do with it (I mean, neither of them deal heavily in mp3 now, do they?)

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[profplump]

People willing to spend $$$ on high-end speakers should just use uncompressed audio -- the doubling their storage is probably trivial compared to their other gear.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[Draek]

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.

And this matters because...? high definition video is also a niche market, as Blu-Ray vs DVD sales analysis would show. Yet obviously we're talking about popularity within its scope, otherwise not even the iPod would be popular, if we were to consider the entire human race.

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.

Remember WMA? and AAC? no, the "big boys" ignored FLAC not because it wasn't popular enough, it was because both have *very* strong NIH sentiments against it, as they did with MP3.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[mgblst]

You know what else is a niche market, PCs. Most people in the world don't own one, so it is a niche market. And you know what isn't a niche market, stupid fucking wankers talking shit.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[Clarious]

After all, even on extremely good sound gear, you are hard pressed to pick out 256k MP3 from uncompressed in blind tests.

Well, you can, depend on the type of material tested though.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[CRCulver]

Old uncompressed formats like WAV has limited support for metadata and more than 2 channels. So if you are building a music library on your computer, better to use something where you can abundantly tag and encode DVD audio to.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[Anonymous Coward]

I can tell the difference between 256k MP3 and uncompressed CD-audio. But I've got freakishly sensitive ears that can hear at high frequencies better than yours can. I tend to hear the lower frequencies as one big smudge though.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[David Gerard]

DVD audio is already encoded.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[metamatic]

That Microsoft and Apple both created their own just goes to show that it's worth doing. Naturally, they're going to create their own of whatever we're talking about if there's any advantage to creating one at all.

In the case of Apple Lossless vs FLAC, the advantage is lower hardware requirements for decoding, and use of the MPEG-4 container format, thus allowing them to implement it on iPods more easily.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[benwaggoner]

Remember WMA? and AAC? no, the "big boys" ignored FLAC not because it wasn't popular enough, it was because both have *very* strong NIH sentiments against it, as they did with MP3.

Er, it was more that FLAC requires around, what 4-6x higher bitrate beyond a perceptually lossless codec?

Putting lossles files on a capacity constrained device like a portable media player is spending a lot of bits for a placebo effect.

Both AAC and WMA offer substantially bettter audio quality than MP3 at lower bitrates. WMA implementations also offer a 2-pass VBR mode, allowing predictible file size with the qualtiy advantages of VBR. And again, if you trying to put as much high quality music into as small enough space, those matter.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[daybot]

Putting lossles files on a capacity constrained device like a portable media player is spending a lot of bits...

Yes, when we had 512MB media players and used 56K modems it was a big deal. It's still a big deal with flash players because flash is expensive. It's not a big deal for today's internet connections and hard disk media players. When >100GB flash players hit the mainstream, I think lossless will become the new standard, just like 15 megapixel pocket cameras have.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[SiChemist]

The advantage of having a library of audio in a lossless compression format is that you can transcode it to any lossy format for your portable device without introducing artifacts. Going from WMA to MP3 would introduce errors.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[benwaggoner]

15 megapixel cameras still support JPEG :).

Really, there's no more point to mathematically lossless audio than for video or images. We've got good models to know what kinds of artifacts are audible, and modern VBR codecs do an excellent job of raising bitate where it's needed to prevent those. And both AAC and WMA have better theoretical maximum accuracy than MP3, even if one is a golden ear sensetive to a few MP3 edge cases.

And its not like it's lossless from the mix anyway, it's lossless from the 16-bit 44.1 master. Those are bigger percetpual compromises than the difference between lossless and a good lossless.

And even if capacity is cheap, saving bits on audio leaves more for video or files or whatever. And makes for much faster syncs.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[daybot]

And its not like it's lossless from the mix anyway

That's a fucking excellent idea! I would actually start buying music downloads in preference to CDs...I'm off to call the Big Four!

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[burris]

Lossless is important for archival purposes. What do you do when a new lossy codec with significantly better performance comes out?

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[turbidostato]

""I can tell the difference between 256k MP3 and uncompressed CD-audio.

I bet you don't and challenge you to a double blind contest... so I am: I'll give you the advantage of listening while blind -doubly!

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[Draek]

Really, there's no more point to mathematically lossless audio than for video or images.

Of course there is: storage. I rip all my CDs to FLAC, and then convert them to 128kbps MP3s for my portable player. And if I ever get a 30GB+ one, I'll just grab the FLACs, convert them to 256kbps MP3s and get the same quality I would have if I had ripped them from the CDs itself. And yes, the same applies to both video and images, as any professional photographer would tell you. You do *not* delete the RAWs for a photo you care about, ever.

Personally I don't give a crap about WMAs and AACs, they're below MP3s in ubiquity and below FLACs in quality so I'd have the worst of both worlds: lossy codecs that I have to actively look for players that support it. No thanks.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[benwaggoner]

Yes, an archive for future transoding is a perfect use for Lossless. There have been various MP3/WMA + diff technologies proposed over the years, which would enable a "good enough" mobile encode plus entropy data to get back to lossless from there. That said, modern CPUs are probably fast enough to transcode from lossless faster than the transfer rate of portable devices, so I don't know if there's any point in preencoding anyway.

Personally, I think there's a pretty good value for lossy codecs better than MP3.

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[DrSkwid]

>Old uncompressed formats like WAV has limited support for metadata and more than 2 channels.

Meta data you can keep, nChannels went > 2 at least 2 years ago. Do keep up

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[DrSkwid]

if 16bit 44.1 is your master, you're no pro

Re:Still doesn't mean much

[benwaggoner]

Yep. 16-bit is something you master to, not master from.

Cortado

[mysteryvortex]

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.

Re:Cortado

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Cortado

[David Gerard]

I wish this were the case. Wikimedia uses Cortado and the Java startup time still makes it suck for the first one you click on. Roll on Firefox 3.5.

Flawed test

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Repost of TFA in case of Slashdot/Streisand aff

[xiphmont]

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.

For one, it's usually illegal

[xiphmont]

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.

Re:For one, it's usually illegal

[chaim79]

Then why haven't video game companies been hammered? Just about all video game consoles for the last decade or so have been sold at a loss for market share.

Re:For one, it's usually illegal

[PitViper401]

it would be dumping if initially they sold PS3s (for an example) for $50 for the first two months to build interest and then jacked the price to $400.

Re:For one, it's usually illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

But they don't then hike the price to take advantage of the market share.

Re:For one, it's usually illegal

[Skillet5151]

Nah more like if they sold PS3's for $50 until their competitors withdrew from the market then jacked the price to $1500, but dumping isn't that big of an issue with luxury goods like game consoles anyway, because people will just stop buying them if the price is too high.

The robber barons were famous for doing that kind of thing to crush anyone who didn't bend to their will, but with more important goods (steel, oil). And now for some reason Carnegie and Rockefeller are names most people respect. So much for karma eh?

Re:For one, it's usually illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not dumping.

Dumping is attempting to put the competition out of business by selling well below cost.

Simply trying to increase (or create) marketshare by selling below cost is a common business practice. Most businesses engage in it. For more details, consult those books of coupons that you get in the mail from your local supermarket every week.

Re:For one, it's usually illegal

[profplump]

Are you suggesting that MPEG LA wasn't trying to totally prevent competition? Because it sure looks like that was their intent.

Re:For one, it's usually illegal

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Just about all video game consoles for the last decade or so have been sold at a loss for market share.

I'm not claiming to be an expert on this topic or anything but the last time I heard about this the key ingredient was whether or not they were selling it at a substantially lower price in one region than in another. Like selling the PS3 in Japan for $500 USD but $75 USD in the United states, that'd be dumping.

Re:For one, it's usually illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

"most goods" by no means all.

Besides, "sold at a lost" is for the most part a convenient urban legend. (I.e. makes the platform more attractive if you think it was sold at a loss, and you don't think so much about $600 being a lot of money to spend on *games*) At worst such goods are sold very close to cost at least after a little tiny bit of creative accounting.

Re:For one, it's usually illegal

[kelnos]

AFAICT, anti-dumping regulations mainly only come into play when international trade is involved (or so says wikipedia). And even then, it doesn't appear to be illegal in the sense that corrective action can be taken; the best a "victim" of dumping can do is impose a tariff to raise the price of the dumped goods. Really, though, seems like just another form of economic protectionism.

Even if dumping is illegal domestically, how about selling a physical product at cost, or with a very small margin, as a "special introductory price" in order to gain market share? I don't see anything wrong with that, legal or otherwise.

Re:For one, it's usually illegal

[kelnos]

Competition from whom? At the time, Theora wasn't even 1.0. I don't think anyone has seriously considered On2's newer codecs for mainstream HD work. That leaves... what? WMVHD? Maybe. But WMV has its own exciting licensing schemes (though IIRC Microsoft's per-unit royalties are pretty cheap).

"But I'm Richard Stallman." "Oh, Okay then"

[xiphmont]

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.

Re:"But I'm Richard Stallman." "Oh, Okay then"

[soundguy]

Saying 'Theora is Ogg' is not actually incorrect, and it might get you laid at parties.

I'm fairly certain that I would not WANT to get laid at most parties where video codecs are being discussed and debated.

/sausage festival

Re:"But I'm Richard Stallman." "Oh, Okay then"

[cerberusss]

I'm fairly certain that I would not WANT to get laid at most parties where video codecs are being discussed and debated.

/sausage festival

I had a girl once who screamed OGG OGG in bed. Followed by "OD".

(Yeah, yeah, as if...)

Re:"But I'm Richard Stallman." "Oh, Okay then"

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a girl once who screamed OGG OGG in bed.

You fucked a crow?

Re:"But I'm Richard Stallman." "Oh, Okay then"

[Loko Draucarn]

A girl who can combine sex and Netrek. That one's a keeper.

Re:"But I'm Richard Stallman." "Oh, Okay then"

[kelnos]

Ooh, thanks for the beer!

spotty support for theora

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

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,

YUO FAIL IT?!

[Anonymous Coward]

if desired, we distribution. As Ago, many of you exemplified by seesion a8d join in national gay nigger Long term survival

title-by-title

[tepples]

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".

No, confuzzled hacker

[xiphmont]

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.

Re:No, confuzzled hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

avoid doing colorspace conversions which are lossy in the interchange. Keep the output in YCb'Cr' format

I fail to see how this could possibly go wrong, with a YV12 source (QCIF) and identical output colorspace.

Re:No, confuzzled hacker

[xiphmont]

Well, one tester (and Greg's graph was generated to rebut his graph) was converting each output frame to PNG and then feeding them into one of a number of PSNR tools one by one to get a PSNR result. The conversion from YCb'Cr' to RGB is lossy, but apparently this particular author didn't know that.

He was also using multiple PSNR tools because some were mysteriously not working with some video inputs. Given that there's no one standardized way to calculate PSNR, that led to additional data lulz.

And for x264, he apparently didn't generate his own numbers, he just used someone else's published numbers.

Anyhow, He reported that x264 was 30-ishdB (!) better than Theora. Wha? If every Theora frame was black, that still wouldn't account for that much difference. YUV12 is only 40-45dB deep!

In other words, the whole point of the graph was originally to illustrate and rebut these errors, and it turned out to be a nice regression test too.

Also, for the record, the x264 curve is not perfectly smooth, but that it's as smooth as it is attests to the fact that it's a nicely tuned codec. That Theora is lumpier is one indication it still has more tuning to be done.

Also, Greg's response below is way more levelheaded than mine. He actually collected the data himself (so has more detailed, accurate and first-hand knowledge) and he also probably hasn't been drinking whiskey all night.

The results are real -- but don't miss the point

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Royalties payable to Adobe

[tepples]

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!.

Re:Royalties payable to Adobe

[Anonymous Coward]

What is "centipedes in my vagina"? Oh wait, this isn't Jeopardy!

Where the hell did that come from? You're a freak.

Only on some long-discontinued iPod models

[tepples]

"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.

Re:Only on some long-discontinued iPod models

[Christophotron]

FLAC fine. But have you anything to play Theora video that isn't a PC?

straight from the theora website

The COWON devices rock. I bought my SO a Cowon D2 for her birthday because it was tiny and had an SDHC slot, unlike any of its competitors that I can remember. She mostly uses it to watch dual-audio subtitled anime tracks in OGM format. Guess what, it also plays Theora. And FLAC. And Vorbis. Etc etc. Sweet little gadget, I need to get myself one now.

Re:Only on some long-discontinued iPod models

[Anonymous Coward]

> But have you anything to play Theora video that isn't a PC?

The next version of Firefox will natively support OGG codecs Theora (video) and Vorbis (audio).

http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/07/native-ogg-vorbis-and-theora-support-added-for-firefox-31/

Firefox, and its embedded version Fennec, runs on many devices that aren't PCs.

VLC supports Theora.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player

"It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS, Syllable, BSD, MorphOS, Solaris and Zaurus, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads for version 0.8.6".

Most of those platforms aren't PCs.

Re:Only on some long-discontinued iPod models

[wakingrufus]

I agree. I recently got a 16GB iaudio7 from cowon.
plays every format I want, in addition to having great battery life (60 hours of play time. i have verified this.). its flash based, and it was only 120 USD.

Objectively better....

[Anonymous Coward]

subjectively...it looks like a giant blob!

ack!

Flash is possible, but no cure all.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Dumbest, most meaningless post story ever.

[thewebchat]

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.

RIAA statistical methods....

[rts008]

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!

Re:RIAA statistical methods....

[schon]

Actually, that percentage of your 'average users' [...] I would not touch that statistic with a bleach-soaked 10 foot pole

Considering you did, I can only assume that you know I'm right, but don't want to admit it.

Thanks though.

Use your peepers.

[Jamie's Nightmare]

Screw PSNR. Use your eyeballs. Though dated, these screen shots pretty much seal the deal. Theora sucks, quality wise. I'm actually a big fan of Vorbis, but that's because I've found it to be a better codec for audio, but the same isn't the case for Theora's video quality.

Re:Use your peepers.

[xiphmont]

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.

Re:Use your peepers.

[mjrauhal]

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.

Re:Use your peepers.

[thewebchat]

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.

Re:Use your peepers.

[thewebchat]

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.

Re:Use your peepers.

[thewebchat]

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.

Performance matters BIG TIME

[billcopc]

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.

Re:Performance matters BIG TIME

[Microlith]

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.

The catch is that industry involvement alone gives H.264 an edge. IC companies are putting effort into making low-power chips that can decode H.264 in hardware, in realtime. So the CPU-efficiency of Vorbis goes out the window, and everyone sticks with the existing standard.

Re:Performance matters BIG TIME

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point.

Fortunately, The reference Theora decoder is quite fast compared to the available H.264 decoders. No surprise: Theora is a smaller, simpler format with fewer features.

Sadly a lot of open source software uses FFMPEG which has a broken an dirt slow Theora decoder.

The Theora decoder also does not have assembly optimizations for ARM NEON and the like, so it isn't much faster than H.264 on platforms where it matters the most. Of course, anyone could contribute support but sadly most open source multimedia developers are busy enhancing encumbered codecs.

(FWIW, there is a lot of talk of "hardware support" but all that usually amounts to is proper optimization on some general purpose CPU or DSP. Not magical special patented format only asicsâ" the proprietary codecs of today are too complex and rapidly changing to justify doing a specific ASIC for them)

Re:Performance matters BIG TIME

[Burkin]

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.

Except that a good number of the big industry players have their hands some how involved in the patent pool of H.264. If you think they are going to ditch H.264 for some no-name free codec then you are living in a dream world. http://www.mpegla.com/avc/avc-licensors.cfm

Re:Repost of TFA in case of Slashdot/Streisand aff

[Toonol]

Is the recurrent use of "energy" some sort of weird internal jargon for speed or efficiency?

Whoops...

[Hurricane78]

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...

MOD UP!!

[nicodoggie]

If not for the entire comment, at least mod it up because of this part I quoted...

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!

Why?

[Celeste R]

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.

Whoops...

[Hurricane78]

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. ^^)

Are you incapable of reading the English language?

[thewebchat]

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/

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.

linked post about fees is summarized incorrectly

[YesIAmAScript]

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.

Use your... oh, nevermind.

[xiphmont]

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.

modern PC hardware can handle Dirac

[r00t]

It's free, from the BBC. It's never blocky because it uses wavelets.

Re:modern PC hardware can handle Dirac

[freqmod]

Well, it should never be blocky because it uses overlaping blocks and not because of the wavelets. However it is blocky anyways (at least schrodinger) on low bitrates.

The biggest problem with dirac is that it is badly tuned and low bitrate doesn't cause an unfocused picture, but hi frequency artifacts.

Re:modern PC hardware can handle Dirac

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, because it's free, high quality and doesn't have built in DRM, the BBC aren't keen to make use of it.

nearly -- PNG lost too

[r00t]

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.

Re:Are you incapable of reading the English langua

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

that's the wrong thing to optimize

[speedtux]

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.

x264

[simonloach]

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.

Re:x264

[NorQue]

Also says there:

Apparently this wasn't a test of x264 versus Theora at all. Instead, it was a blog post designed to debunk this incredibly awful paper that claimed H.264 had up to a 20db advantage over Theora.

But then another blogger hijacked the graph and posted it to demonstrate that Theora was now as good as x264. And away it went...

No settings is another sign of the "quality" of that article, after all it is well known what impact they have on encoding quality. It's like saying "look, there's a rotten apple and a fresh peach, so all peaches are better than apples".

I don't get it

[diabolus-ex-machina]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[TheRaven64]

An MPEG2 video encoded at 50Mb/s may possibly look better than the same video encoded in H264 at 5 Mb/s,

Not always. I'm going to dramatically oversimplify here, so don't take this as a detailed explanation of how these CODECs work:

MPEG-2 uses the sum of sine waves in two dimensions to represent macroblocks. In order to represent a square wave with sine waves, you need to add an infinite number of them together, so to accurately represent a sharp transition from, for example, black to white, you'd need infinite bandwidth for MPEG-2. With anything less, you get artefacts around the sharp edges. For a sufficiently small frame size, these artefacts will be smaller than a pixel and so lost in rounding, but not always.

The real deal is actually keeping some quality as the bitrate decreases, not as it increases.

It's both, and this is what H.264 is really good at. MP3, for example, does not really gain much above around 160-192Kb/s. If you have artefacts in this range, you are likely to have artefacts at 320Kb/s too. MPEG-2 has a much narrower range of bitrates than H.264 where the quality scales well with the bitrate. H.264 was designed to scale anywhere between mobile phone screens and HDTVs. MPEG-1 is even worse than MPEG-2 in terms of upwards scalability, but at very low bitrates can sometimes give better quality.

Re:Are you incapable of reading the English langua

[mjrauhal]

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.

Re:Are you incapable of reading the English langua

[mjrauhal]

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...

Now VIA

[FithisUX]

can implement the decoder in Unichrome Pro III and release documentation

Nothing is well supported

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

If you have an FPU

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Want to make Theora popular?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Results were wrong, mistake in measuring x264

[j8ee]

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

The measure of a codec

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Modern PC hardware can't fit in my pocket

[tepples]

Theora is also free, and it plays on the pocket-size COWON D2.

Theora is not even close to H264

[Algan]

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.

PSNR metrics were calculated wrong - x264 Theora

[benwaggoner]

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.

I love articles that speak in gibberish!

[tomzyk]

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.")

Re:I love articles that speak in gibberish!

[evilviper]

Or is this too much to ask?

Yes.

Why do you believe you are entitled to understand every story that is posted to /.? Do you walk around hospitals and interrupt surgeons, telling them to "dumb it down a bit" so that YOU can understand that "gibberish" they're speaking?

Hopefully not.

Well...

[Sits]

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...

Re:Well...

[sexconker]

I was saying "popular" in terms of what a person (not a company) would use to compress something, given that they are using H.264 and a choice.

Apple's implementation is crap, especially the decoder. I don't know if it's their own code or if they have a custom build of the main concept codec, for example.

In terms of videos, it x.264 would be the most popular. Both for videos on sites like you tube, and for bluray/dvd rips.

In terms of programs, I think main concept would be the most popular, unless you count things that are just a GUI interface for x.264 and such (such as megui), then it's x.264 again.

Of course, then you could get into the whole issue of compressor vs decompressor. I know I'll be setting it up so that Divx decodes while x.264 encodes (until Divx gets their stuff up to par on the encode side).

Re:Well...

[benwaggoner]

I'd suspect:

QuickTime's H.264 gets the largest number of unique files, due to iPod etecetra transcoding.

Main Concept gets the most eyeball-hours, since it's used inside the tools used for lots of the big web sites.

x264 would e the leader for user generated content, both from the big UGC sites, and from hobbyist encoders.

"X? In my Y?" It's more likely than you think.

[tepples]

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.

I am serious

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

No, not really

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Ogg for Silverlight, not instead of Silverlight

[benwaggoner]

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

Wavelets and DCT; not so clear cut

[benwaggoner]

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.

License fees well known in the industry

[benwaggoner]

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.

Lossless conversion is lossless.

[Grendel Drago]

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.

Re:Lossless conversion is lossless.

[kelnos]

It's true, but for your average point-and-click user, they don't know how to convert formats. Most of them don't even know what a codec is. They just expect to push the "purchase" button on the pretty webpage, plug in their music player, press the "sync" button, and have everything work. The iPod is king; aside from those who still cling to DRM-encumbered formats and have to sell WMA (since Apple won't open up FairPlay), no one who wants a lot of customers would sell music in a format not supported by the iPod.

Yes, converting from FLAC to ALAC is about as painless as it'll get, but for most people, that's still too painful. Sadly enough...

The release was noted.

[Grendel Drago]

This only finally happened end of 2008 to all of no fanfare (I didn't see it on /. or anywhere).

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.

I think it's technical.

[Grendel Drago]

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.

Re:PSNR metrics were calculated wrong - x264 Theor

[evilviper]

Turns out there was an error in the methadology used in the original comparison, which hit x264 for more than 4 dB of difference.

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.

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.

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.

PSNR better than nothing, less than perfect

[benwaggoner]

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.

Re:PSNR better than nothing, less than perfect

[evilviper]

That loop filter is probably the strongest single innovation in H.264, since it lets video degrade into softness,

Except for the fact that it existed in several other codecs like H.263p, VP3, etc., LONG before H.264 was conceived.

Re:PSNR better than nothing, less than perfect

[benwaggoner]

In-loop deblocking, sure. But the H.264 combined with adaptive block size in High Profile, seems particularly well suited.

Re:PSNR better than nothing, less than perfect

[evilviper]

a codec that looks good with poor PSNR, sure, there's tons of tricks.

*Ahem*

You you believe that one codec can look very good with uncharacteristically poor PSNR, yet you still believe PSNR is useful for comparing different codecs...?

But one that looks bad with great PSNR? It cerrtainly isn't going to happen by accident,

Sure it will. PSNR just doesn't work that way. It is utterly useless for comparing the values of different encoders.

See:
http://www.on2.com/index.php?603

And this PDF:
http://www.on2.com/file.php?185

Or will you just accept, on PSNR figures alone, that On2's proprietary crap vastly outperforms H.264, as well as every other codec on the planet?

Re:PSNR better than nothing, less than perfect

[benwaggoner]

You you believe that one codec can look very good with uncharacteristically poor PSNR, yet you still believe PSNR is useful for comparing different codecs...?

I imagine such a codec is theoretically possible, but doesn't exist. So it's had no imapct on any actual PSNR tests to date :).

Sure it will. PSNR just doesn't work that way. It is utterly useless for comparing the values of different encoders.

No argument it's not perfect, but it is useful, and is used to good effect by people making codecs. PSNR is a pretty accurate way to measure the effect of changes to any part of the codec other than perceptual optimizations.

Or will you just accept, on PSNR figures alone, that On2's proprietary crap vastly outperforms H.264, as well as every other codec on the planet?

Absolutely not, since they didn't give enough info to really understand what they did. We'd need to get Dark Shakiri or someone like that to do their best x264 encodes to get a useful comparison.

Re:PSNR better than nothing, less than perfect

[evilviper]

We'd need to get Dark Shakiri or someone like that to do their best x264 encodes to get a useful comparison.

Good idea... Maybe you'll listen to him when he tells you that PSNR is useless for comparing codecs. I'm clearly getting nowhere. Oh well.

Re:PSNR better than nothing, less than perfect

[benwaggoner]

Eh? He's talked about PSNR plenty of times as a way to compare implementations and codecs.

Re:PSNR better than nothing, less than perfect

[evilviper]

He's talked about PSNR plenty of times as a way to compare implementations and codecs.

Feel free to point to them...

Let's see what a quick search turns up...

"Unsurprisingly, the encoder I develop for completely trashes every commercial solution I've put it against. I'm not sure whether this speaks for our effectiveness or that everyone else just sucks. Though my own research suggests its because everyone seems to think that PSNR == quality, which is a recipe for visual disaster."
http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/9331/173944.aspx#173944

"x264's recent psy optimizations have proven quite definitively
that one can achieve greatly improved visual quality while decreasing
both PSNR and SSIM"
http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/x264-devel/2009-February/005624.html

Re:PSNR better than nothing, less than perfect

[benwaggoner]

I think we're saying the same thing here; PSNR is not an ironclad indicator of quality on its own. While PSNR is a reasonably useful first-order hint, one should never assume that two PSNR values that are only somewhat appart means there will be a proporational difference in quality.

But the farther apart two encodes are in PSNR, the more likely there's going to be a visible difference. It's be very surprising to have a clip with a 10 dB worse PSNR actually look better. But within 1-2 dB, not surprising at all.

This is probably because the YV12 color space itself "bakes in" a fair amount of perceptual optimization, in terms of chroma subsampling, luma precision, and in particular the use of a perceptually uniform gamma curve. If we were talking about PSNR versus the Raw input from a camera's Beyer pattern CCD, it'd be much less useful in predicting subjective quality.
One simple example of something that improves visual quality while lowering PSNR is dithering; it reduces banding by adding LSB noise.

more like the middle of 2008

[zigfreed]

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.

And it isn't always lossless lossy

[benwaggoner]

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.

Re:And it isn't always lossless lossy

[daybot]

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 -- "Swordfish", awesome movie :)

[jonaskoelker]

"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?

Re:And it isn't always lossless lossy

[benwaggoner]

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 :).

Re:And it isn't always lossless lossy

[daybot]

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 :(

Start Charging Millions?

[aldop]

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.