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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.)"
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
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
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
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
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