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

More to than bandwidth

[RiotingPacifist]

60% is bit of a price to pay, however IMHO the point of the video tag is tighter integration with your website than is easily achievable with flash. Hopefully theora will improve and compete with mpeg-4, but there are still many advantages to using it over flash for embedded video (for stand alone pages, it doesn't matter so much as most users have a plugin to handle mpeg-4)
*Interacts with the rest of the page easily (TBF actionscript, et al can achieve this)
*Much lower cpu usage. While flash is particularly bad, theora is particularly good
*Cross architecture. As people browse the web on phones, pdas, etc, this does actually matter
*Much less likely to be exploitable (TBF webhosts don't care, but users should)
*Open standards.

I don't think theora should be seen as simply a tool to replace flash videos but it should be seen as an opportunity to better integrate video into sites and/or make video content available to more people annoy people with video backgrounds

Re:Three "errors" in this test

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention the one that comes with hardware acceleration. even my cheapo $50 HD4650 comes with H.264, DivX, and WMV hardware acceleration out of the box with stock drivers. Does Theora even have hardware acceleration yet? With the move to netbook/Nettop and green computing hardware video acceleration is the present and the future. If Theora doesn't want to be DOA they need to get hardware acceleration for the big three (ATI, Intel, Nvidia) working NOW and get the GPU manufacturers to pack it in.

Because even on may nice super fast AMD Dual core having 1080p decoded on the GPU instead of the CPU just makes for a nicer experience overall. Not to mention the fact that GPUs use less power and create less heat than modern CPUs and with it already 100f in the shade here in AR temp matters.