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YouTube, HTML5, and Comparing H.264 With Theora
David Gerard writes "Google Chrome includes Ogg support for the <video> element. It also includes support for the hideously encumbered H.264 format. Nice as an extra, but ... they're also testing HTML5 YouTube only for H.264 — meaning the largest video provider on the Net will make H.264 the primary codec and relegate the equally good open format Ogg/Theora firmly to the sidelines. Mike Shaver from Mozilla has fairly unambiguously asked Chris DiBona from Google what the heck Google thinks it's doing."
DiBona responded with concerns that switching to Theora while maintaining quality would take up an incredible amount of bandwidth for a site like YouTube, though he made clear his support for the continued improvement of the project. Greg Maxwell jumped into the debate by comparing the quality of Ogg/Theora+Vorbis with the current YouTube implementations using H.263+MP3 and H.264+AAC. At the lower bitrate, Theora seems to have the clear edge, while the higher bitrate may slightly favor H.264. He concludes that YouTube's adoption of "an open unencumbered format in addition to or instead of their current offerings would not cause problems on the basis of quality or bitrate."
Ogg Vorbis was better in quality than MP3 - back then (and even today) the most popular compression for music. However, AAC and WMA are also better than MP3 - and people actually sold music in AAC and WMA formats as well as MP3.
Theroa is not better than h264 (the new popular standard for video on the Internet, many Blu-ray discs, HD satellite, and HD broadcast in some parts of the world), so it's not a repeat of Vorbis at all. Theora just scores higher on a scoring algorithm when compared ot a single h264 encoder, the open-source x264.
There are an awful lot of players which support ogg. Almost anything from Cowon, iRiver or Sansa does. And almost all the Chinese brand/no-name/shop brand players support ogg even though they fail to explicitly state this (preferring to emblazon their players and packaging with mp3 and wma logos). I used to import and sell mp3 and mp4 players and generally it's only the very cheapest mp4 video players which don't support ogg, that's the ones which claim asf container support is something to brag about.....usually these use an old rockchip video processor.
I have 5 personal players. 2 are old iRivers, H140 and H340, 2 are tiny no name Chinese mp3 players and one is a Chinese mp4 video player. Only the iRivers claim to support ogg audio but the cheap mp3 players handle it fine as well. I lived in SE Asia and every cheap mp3 player I ever checked played ogg audio too. Not a single one made mention of it in the instructions, the specs, on the box or on the player.
Ogg Vorbis is also used in video games because it has some other advantages: it supports 6-channel audio, and has support for bit-accurate decoding, allowing seamless looping of audio, and it sounds better at lower bitrates. I know MP3s can be kludged to do some of these, but it's easier just to use Vorbis in these cases.
Our upcoming game will actually be shipping with both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis audio. The MP3 decoder we're using is significantly more efficient than the reference Vorbis libraries, and allows us to play more simultaneously decoded channels. However, if a piece of audio needs to loop, to use multi-channel, or if we're encoding a LOT of it (music, voice-overs, etc), we use Ogg Vorbis.
Honestly, the cost of the license isn't really an issue at all. It's all about what does the job best for us, and MP3 and Vorbis each have strengths and weaknesses.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Pirates have the advantage that they don't have to pay for patent licenses, so H.264 and Theora are both "free". But for law-abiding companies like Mozilla and Google, Theora is free and H.264 isn't.
> Theora just scores higher on a scoring algorithm when compared ot a single h264 encoder, the open-source x264. It doesn't even do that; it only scored higher when using Xiph's PSNR tool, because it respected a buggy colorspace header written by ffmpeg that didn't match the video. x264 won rather heavily when that was fixed, but /. never retracted the story.
Why won't slashdot let me change my terrible username
This document describes the terms of the H.264 license. The license seems to cover both encoding and decoding.