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."

Comments

Theora FAIL

[drinkypoo]

Understanding TFA linked from your "equally good" link to a slashdot story? YOU FAIL IT!!! From TFA:

Let me reiterate- and this is important- as folks have run way too far cherrypicking quotes from this update: Both before and after the correction, this graph shows only that Theora is improving. PSNR means very little when comparing Theora directly to x264. PSNR is an objective measure that does not represent perceived quality (though they correlate), and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. None of these PSNR measurements, including clips where Thusnelda 'wins', mean that Thusnelda beats x264 in perceived quality, as it certainly does not (yet ;-), only that the gap is closing even before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.

So just to recap, you have suggested that Ogg Theora video provides quality comparable to H.264 based on a study using a specific development-version Ogg Theora video codec and a specific H.264 encoder (x264) which is NOT the best encoder around, when it in fact has inferior SnR (the only thing the study was meant to test) as compared to x264, which has inferior SnR as compared to other H.264 encoders?
I don't know who failed bigger, you, Soulskill, or the peoples of slashdot who actually use the firehose... but you have all failed miserably.

With all that said; is there any reason they can't add Theora support later?

Re:Theora FAIL

[Jurily]

With all that said; is there any reason they can't add Theora support later?

The codec Youtube uses will severely affect everything else on the net, if they come out first. You can't deny that.

How long will it take for IE to have support for another codec? They will have Youtube support in no time, I guarantee you that.

Re:Theora FAIL

[mariushm]

IE will probably render any video tag through Silverlight, forcing you to install it. That's how you make market share for your products in Microsoft land.
On the good side, Silverlight 3 has support for both WMV and h264 and can decode them in hardware using the video card.

Re:Theora FAIL

[IntlHarvester]

I don't see a problem with this approach. One of the silly things about HTML5 is that it looks like browser vendors are all going to run off and implement their own media stacks. Which just increases bloat and potential security issues. Why not just use WM, QT, or whatever comes with the OS?

Not to mention that if I'm RTFAing correctly, Firefox's <video> tag is already incompatible with Chrome's.

Re:Theora FAIL

[samkass]

YouTube may have some effect on the de-facto internet codecs, but Theora has been losing this battle for awhile now so this isn't an out-of-the-blue decision. Many desktop and embedded video chips can decode h.264 in hardware, it's the primary Blu-Ray codec, it's used in several video chat applications, and many cable and satellite providers are going from MPEG2 to h.264. In addition, YouTube has been using h.264/AAC for over a year for "high quality" videos and videos delivered to iPhones, so they already have an h.264 infrastructure.

And for consumers, it actually seems to work really well. The "encumbered" nature of the codec may affect some tiny number of people, but for most it appears to be a huge win.

Re:Theora FAIL

[hairyfeet]

I personally don't give a flying crap if they do it by bashing pixies over the head to squeeze pixie dust into the hardware, all i care about (and I'm guessing 99.995% of the public agrees) is that my CPU isn't being pounded when I'm running 1080p. And since I happen to have the box in front of me I'll be happy to quote from it. Quote-

Multi Code Hardware Acceleration. Enables inloop deblocking, Motion Compensation acceleration for the latest codecs including H.264, WMV9, DivX. programmable video engine with enhanced post processing capabilities.

Now again me and the bazillion other folks buying these things don't give a crap HOW they are doing it, all we care about is we can watch 1080p while doing half a dozen other things because our CPUs aren't being pounded into next week. And my earlier point still stands. with the rise of Netbooks, Nettops, and Ion based platforms more and more of the video decoding is being done on the GPU instead of the CPU. Even on a dual core desktop like mine offloading to the GPU gives the video a nice fast cache of GPU RAM and a processor more designed for video decoding than a general purpose CPU, which lets my CPU do other tasks, as well as cut down on heat as today's GPUs are a lot more heat efficient than CPUs.

If Theora wants to be taken seriously they need a GPU based hardware decoder than works on the big three, Intel, ATI, Nvidia, and they need it yesterday, and they need to start offering it to the GPU manufacturers so they can bundle support like they do for WMV9, Divx, and H.264. Because out of the box with the default drivers my Radeon decodes all of the above as well as Mpeg2. The Nvidia does the same. Folks don't want to go play "hunt the decoder" they just want it to work. So while I applaud the Theora guys for trying to come with a free high def codec I'd say they still got a ways to go for mainstream use. Hardware decoders for the big three should be right at the top of the list IMHO.

Decoding Chips

[chonglibloodsport]

Superior in objective PSNR Quality. OK.

How about CPU utilization? Are there any ultra-low-power decoding chips that play Theora?

H.264 already has a large install base of devices that play it. Is there enough of an advantage to Theora to warrant dumping all of those for new ones?