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Concrete Comparisons of Theora Vs. Mpeg-4
icknay writes "With the upcoming Firefox 3.5 and HTML5 video, there's natural interest in Theora vs. Mpeg-4, but without much evidence either way. Here's clips encoded at various rates to provide concrete comparison between Theora and Mpeg-4. Theora performs decently, but requires more bandwidth than Mpeg-4 (although this is a 1.1alpha release of Theora and Theora has a much better license than Mpeg-4). The quality comparisons are very subjective, but you can try the clips yourself and see how it breaks down. There was an earlier discussion about this, but it lacked much concrete evidence. (Disclosure: it's my page.)"
dude... get with the program... its all about streaming now... THEY encode, u stream n watch...
The situation seems pretty clear to me.
Theora is just not as good as H.264; you can get better quality with the same bits in H.264, or similar quality in fewer bits.
Theora is, however, good enough for general use for Internet video. It's at least as good as H.263, which actually has been used for years. (Breathless claims that Theora would need twice as many bits as H.264 are just silly.)
Since Theora is free in all ways, browsers can just build it in, and sites like Wikipedia are going to use it. Since H.264 is better, sites with money will pay the H.264 fees to save money on bandwidth. And, if I had a web business, I'd hesitate to paint myself into a corner with H.264; the patent owners have the power to jack up the royalties if they decide to.
In short, both Theora and H.264 will be found on the Internet in the near future. And we can all just get along.
(Now watch Theora fanboys and H.264 fanboys team up to mod this post down through the floor... :-)
P.S. Ogg Vorbis never toppled MP3 from the throne. However, the existence of Vorbis may have exerted some downward pressure on the licensing fees for the paid codecs. In a similar way, the existence of Theora may cause the patent holders for the other video formats to not try to charge quite as much.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I bet they get that somewhat figured out, as it should lead to better compression too.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The license is the single most important thing. It determines whether or not you can use the software at all, or for your specific purpose, whatever that is.
When we're talking about establishing a standard for the Web, which everybody is expected to be a) able and b) allowed to use, there is nothing more important than the license.
Let the porn industry sort it out.
Seeing as they are the only people that actually make real money on the web, we can count on them to pick the most cost effective and highest quality video technology.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Technical testing is somewhat irrelevant until the "much better" license has been tested in court. The idea of a completely free codec is a nice pipe dream, but I'm skeptical that they've pulled it off without treading on at least a couple of patents. And unless they can show that to be false, the license they offer is somewhat meaningless. The first large company that steps up and uses Theora could easily end up being the one that gets sued.
So "much better" really depends on the point of view. If you're a small company or an individual, the Theora license is much better since you're not likely to be a big enough target to get sued. But for large companies, the Mpeg-4 license is much better since it has a well known fixed cost associated with it.
If you think the license is the most important thing, your perspective is skewed from too much time spent on Slashdot. MP3 is as "encumbered" as anything else, yet it's ubiquitous. The same will be true of H.264.
It's not "a little better", it's:
- available to be implemented by anyone and everyone without paying a cent or even asking for permission, with a BSD implementation available to all for free.
vs
- full of patents held by the big names of the industry, available under per-user licensing fees and any implementation not blessed by them exposes itself and anyone who uses it to big, very costly lawsuits in the US.
And when we're talking about a proposed standard for the entirety of the world wide web, things like that do matter.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
While the Dirac format is finished (and provides the baseline for VC-2), the encoders and decoders are still very new, and not as optimised quality-wise or performance-wise as they could be. It's got a way to go before widespread adoption, much as the first MPEG-4 ASP encoders were not very good until DivX ;-).
There is of course nothing to stop you using both. The tag fully supports fallback (even allowing you to specify a flash video as a fallback if you want), and implementations appear fairly consistent on this.
Theora makes a fairly good "baseline" codecâ"roughly broadly as good as XviD, not as good as x264, very low CPU requirements for decoding. Encoders will only get better, and if you want to use a more advanced codec for browsers which support more advanced codecs like H.264, and the licensing isn't a problem for you (remembering that MPEG-LA start charging for this next year, which is one definite reason H.264 can't be a baseline codec, as it's not available on royalty-free or even RAND terms!), you can do that and it will work as it should.
Firefox is a slow, bloated piece of crap that fails in comparison to Chrome or Safari.
Chrome falls into the "proprietary or whatever" category because it's made by Google. Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
Blender is a joke compared to commercial software in that field.
"I've asked this every time this topic comes up. Can anyone name a SINGLE piece of open source software that does anything better than it's closest closed source (or otherwise "proprietary" via patents or whatever) counterpart?"
FF's closest counterpart is clearly IE, considering marketshare, and FF is certainly better than IE. In terms of memory usage, FF beats Chrome and Safari. In terms of page loading times, nothing beats FF + Adblock Plus. You dismissed Chrome, yourself, and the only things Safari does better than FF is 1) display advertisements and 2) run javascript.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I don't want to disagree with your overall point or start a flame war, but really, putting MySQL up against Oracle/MSSQL?
C'mon.
The user doesn't care about the license, because it's only relevant if you're encoding video.
YouTube, etc. will have to deal with licensing if they want to re-encode the videos that people upload using that codec. The users won't know the difference.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The license matters a whole lot less than the potential patent encumbrance for the codec.
The developers of Theora state that the codec is not encumbered by patents, but to my knowledge, there's been no legal tests of that and no intensive review of the possible areas of infringement by a patent attorney. That's a serious issue for the uptake of the codec by vendors, since they're potentially on the hook if it later turns out that the codec infringes on people patents and the holders want to be dicks about it.
And it's encumbered in ways that affect how people can use it. For example, LAME (and various other MP3 stuff) isn't included in Debian or Ubuntu; people have to go out of their way and use non-standard, often unsupported repositories.
emerge lame
How did I go out of my way?
Did I break the law?
The license is the single most important thing. It determines whether or not you can use the software at all, or for your specific purpose, whatever that is.
Actually the license has really no effect at all for the end user in either of these cases. The only people who are effected by the license are people who are either creating H.264 encoders/decoders or those who are creating and streaming H.264 content.
Which is everyone. The Web isn't just a TV, that's where it's power comes from. And lets not forget mashing, which requires encoders and decoders. If developers have to pay when writing this software, the software gets more expensive and content creation gets stiffled.
Who is this 'Anonymous Cowardon' who keeps posting? Somewhere behind my computer a small pile of spaces seems to have leaked out...
Only one point I wanted to mention (since the article and comments have all been--- oddly balanced for Slashdot)
The article points out that current Thusnelda is not as high quality as the best available h264 encoder at high bitrate video and unlimited encoding time. No argument there, it's true. Thusnelda still has a ways to go, despite the distance it's come; the current alpha still has no Adaptive Quant whatsoever, which will go in before final release.
However, the vast majority of users are not using x264. If you look at the h264 YouTube encoder, which has been designed for speed rather than 'work as long as you like to optimize the output', suddenly Theora is exactly on-par. In short--- Theora is every bit as good as the way that the real world is going to end up using h264 for the forseeable future. And the users of that 'inferior' h264 encoder seem pretty happy with it.
Anyway, this isn't disagreeing with anything you've said, it's simply a practical way to look at the difference.
Monty
If you are seriously going to put Java against .NET and MySQL against SQL Server (which is dishonest, because Oracle is the kickass proprietary database at the top of the heap), you have clearly never used either of the latter. Shit, MySQL barely even counts as a database.
If you'd said PostgreSQL you'd have looked a little more credible (because PostgreSQL is actually a very good database!), but I'm going to put my money on "you're a fucking idiot."
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Could somebody please explain to me why the license matters?
Because $x per copy costs a lot when you're distributing an infinite number of copies, as most Free Software programs are.
Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
Huh? This is an utterly ignorant claim, almost not worth replying to.
But if you look at good open source projects, I doubt you can find even a significant minority (much less majority) that were initiated by a commercial vendor.
Anything from things like Linux to most libraries should in no uncertain terms confirm the idea that no, it's not commercial entities that seed most good open source products or projects. It is useful to also have companies starting OS projects, and sometimes taking ownership. But it's not much of a requirement. Just icing on the cake.
What is much more useful is the opposite: good open source projects resulting in new companies. That is much more common than the reverse.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
You paid H.264 licensing fees when you bought your Mac, AppleTV, and iPhone. you're not seeing them as line items, but you're definitely paying them.
You are probably violating patents by ripping to H.264 with handbrake. Of course if you're in the US you're already violating the DMCA probably by ripping DVDs so what the heck.
Moving forward, large video streaming services will have to start paying significant fees to stream H.264 video.
You may not see the problem in paying for this, but you are definitely paying.
If this was some commercial offering from Microsoft, you would be criticizing it for using more bandwidth. Because it's an open source thing, you're justifying it by saying, "Eh, bandwidth is getting cheaper."
And then you suddenly assume that the bandwidth argument doesn't exist.
This is a video codec. Of course the bandwidth is relevant. It determines the quality of the video. If you're a video hosting service, you're going to want the codec that delivers the highest quality using the lowest bandwidth. How could you possibly describe it as "absolutely irrelevant" when it's one of the most important things in determining video codec quality?
I don't want to mention the various stuff you could argue about, I just name two that don't even have real competition: Boost and OpenSSH.
Additionally open source software often is more available then the proprietary counterparts. There are lots of instances where proprietary software is only better, because you count features that lots of people barely use. Is Photoshop better than GIMP? I don't know. GIMP satisfies my primitive needs, so why should I pay for Photoshop?
And the existence of open source has even made proprietary software more available. You can think what you want of gcc, but at least now everyone can get a C/C++ compiler for free. The same is very true for databases. The free versions of Oracle and MSSQL only exist because of MySQL and Postgres.
Open source software also lead to higher quality in proprietary software. Just take a look at the piece of shit IE was before Firefox. The internet got far more enjoyable because of Firefox.
And sometimes open source software enables the proprietary software to exist. Just take a look at Mac OSX. Without open source the Mac you adore wouldn't exist.
Because it will cost firefox 5 million + to have h.264 included per year....Are you going to foot the bill?
But wait theres more. In order to get a license you need to sign a contract. Now that contract has things like *all* playback implementations *must* support various DRM etc (aka zones). These strings make firefox or another implementation non free, lack freedom and generally incompatible with most GPL type licenses.
Oh and they are going to charge for content soon too.
I find discussion of quality at these bit rates quite funny. I have decided most people must be blind....
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Companies have only bothered to write GPU shader decoders for H.264 because 1080P H.264 can barely be decoded on a top end CPU.
Theora simply doesn't have that problem. Although there probably is no reason that someone couldn't use CUDA to write a GPU decoder for it, I don't know why anyone would bother. The netbooks don't have the kind of fancy GPUs that would be worthwhile for this yet, so those theora developers should probably instead spend their time working on the ubiquitous ARM processors used to decode H.264 in devices like the iphone and the embedded MIPS CPUs often used in set-top boxes as dedicated H.264 decoders.
The thing you're missing is that users are irrelevant in this situation. The decision lies with the publishers.
If a publisher had to pay a lot of money to MPEG-LA, and suddenly they have another option, that is a big deal.
If you want to become a publisher and you don't have a lot of money or a large legacy of content, then this is an option where before you had none. That is an even bigger deal.
As far as user choice goes, the vast majority just watch what is there and have no clue what the difference is. Discussing their opinion is pointless.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
nobody uses video alone like in this test, there's always audio and the audio codec associated with Theora (Vorbis) rocks: same quality as MP3 for half the bitrate. Bits saved on the sound can be used to improve the video; and, yes, it is apples-to-apples comparing the overall bitrate of Ogg/Theora+Vorbis against an all-Mpeg-4 solution.
Using mp3 suddenly makes it not an all-mpeg4 solution. What's the comparison between Vorbis and AAC?
Customers don't type in "mpeg-4". They don't type in "theora". They type in "britney spears nude". When they find something, they don't react with "ewh, yuck, theora... back button". Either their browser plays it, or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, they install something, or they don't. That's it. With Theora baked into major browsers, the browser plays it, and that's it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth