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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.)"
If I were to choose between a proprietary, obfuscated, possibly patent-encumbered format and an open, free, community-geared format, I'd always choose the latter, without all that nitpicking about performance and technicalities. In the end, it all boils down to whose interests you want to support -- those of a patent holder who's gonna charge you every single time you watch a video, or your own.
On the other hand, consumers are strange and bewilderingly uninformed creatures. They rarely choose what's in their best interest (as shown by the mp3/ogg controversy, by the wide acceptance of DRM-ed content, and so on).
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
I sort of knew Theora was a bit behind than Mpeg-4, but I didn't realize by how much.
YEAH BUT IT'S OPEN SORES SO IT'S BETTER
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.
We should next compare black cocks to white cocks, and see which one most women prefer. Personally, I'd prefer a nice hard, throbbing black dick ramming me up my ass and then taking it out and shoving in deep down my throat, slobbering all over that meaty treat. God, my tiny pencil dick is hard, a full 2.5 inches!
Besides all the other fundamental misconceptions presented here, the most blatant may be this one: OS is not a SDM of any kind, and has little in common with actual methodologies.
Strike one. Go reread "The Cathedral and the bazaar". The Open Source "model" is most commonly promoted as a superior software development methodology. Sit there and claim otherwise till you turn blue in the face, but it wont change reality.
open sourced options are more widely used (more popular)
Strike two. Popularity != Quality. McDonalds has sold billions of hamburgers, but I don't ever see them on a list of best burgers.
But you are not a developer so anything other than end user apps probably don't count for your purposes.
Strike three you're out. You still have not provided a single example of a TECHNOLOGY that is both open source and unquestionably better than its closed source counterpart. Hand waiving and vague generalizations are not good enough.
Whether it is end user applications, developer libraries or server components, open source has only so far demonstrated that it is spelled using the four letters F, A, I and L. The proof is in the pudding folks, go to any open source developer meeting and most people will be using Macs with OS X, and if they are web developers they will be using Safari, Flash and Mpeg4, not Linux, Theora or any other substandard, second rate "open source" tools or libraries.