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.)"

Comments

Seems pretty clear to me

[steveha]

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