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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.)"
Both make terrible concrete. I recommend you buy some mix at the hardware store instead.
Disclosure: I'm trying to stress test my server. Please nuke it into the slag of its constituent parts.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I sort of knew Theora was a bit behind than Mpeg-4, but I didn't realize by how much. The Theora clip that has a 60% higher bitrate than the Mpeg-4 still looks fuzzier to my eyes (especially the moving grass).
Subjective measures are really the best way to evaluate video quality. There are (objective) quantitative measures such as PSNR, but they don't really tell you what the impact of video compression does for the eye. Video quality evaluations mostly involve showing clips (like these) to a large amount of people and asking them which they liked better. There is a lot to consider in terms of how the video responds to packet loss, jitter, etc.
The important line from the article: "Theora uses 1600kbps, or about 60% more bandwidth than Mpeg-4 to reach about the same quality."
Also useful to get some scale: "The uncompressed clip is 349 megabytes, while the 1600kbps Theora clip is 2 megabytes -- Theora may lag Mpeg-4 at this time, but it still yields great compression."
and "Theora is significantly better than Mpeg-2. Mpeg-2 required about 2400 kbps to hit the subjective quality level above, 50% higher than Theora's bandwidth."
Some things I would have liked to have seen: 250kbps, 500kbps, 2mbps, 8mbps videos, with subjective quality difference (rather than same subjective quality at different bitrates). Theora is apparently very good at lower bitrates, and not everybody has an awesome broadband connection, so they may be forced to watch lower-bitrate streams. Does the HTML5 video tag support selecting streams based upon available bandwidth?
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
"but the average computer user isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can encode videos with Theora"
HUH?
There are plenty of visual apps to do this, no need for cli and whatnot....
NO SIG
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.
Could somebody please explain to me why the license matters? I mean, I understand that if a license limits mpeg-4 encoding to a single government computer running Windows ME that was lost 5 years ago, that the license is a HUGE barrier to entry to use the codec. However, in this case the license seems to be the only single category in which Theora wins. The compression is worse than mpeg-4. The compression takes more space. But look! The license is a little better! WINNER!
gnome-terminal is better than windows command prompt.
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.
..although this is an 1.1alpha release of Theora..
You say that as if it's against Theora. It's not -- otherwise they would have tested against a released version. There could well improvements in the various mpeg-4 codes if you dig around in developer repositories.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
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.
Firefox? Chrome? Blender?
Apache? An argument can be made for Firefox vs IE too. Yeh open source sucks so much that Apple built OS X from it.
Except for the Apache webserver, I'm stumped.
Not coincidentally, most IT shops never consider Linux for anything outside of webserving.
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
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
title was supposed to be more to "video tag" but i didn't notice Slashdot lamed it up.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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. And even the costs of running a website with over 1 million subscribers is only $100,000 a year and if you have that many subscribers and that much traffic $100,000 is nothing to you. And for most small sites (anything with less than 100,000 subscribers) you pay no royalties at all.
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.
Dirac is supposed to be a great opensource, patent-free codec, yet nobody seems to care a lot about it in all those HTML5 video talks....
Not really. It's not as if no one can use licensed technologies on the internet. Most people do for most of the stuff they use, and don't care.
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.
...or hosting databases: mysql or Oracle.
Obviously you are a desktop user pretending to know something about serious computing.
Linux unseated Solaris as the reference platform for Oracle.
You probably don't do anything interesting with desktop computing either.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There are three things that this test doesn't consider:
For real life examples, that also include sound see "YouTube / Ogg/Theora comparison" and "Another online-video comparison".
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
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.
I hope you realize that Firefox was initiated by Mozilla, or did they finish the full frontal lobotomy after your first post?
Apache, lighthttpd, vsftpd, squid
Linux , bsd, darwin kernels
mythtv
vim/emacs/nano
mysql/PostgreSQL
GCC/llvm
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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.
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.
Samba v. Windows .Net
Pidgin v. AOL Instant Messenger
Java v.
JBoss v. Websphere
MySQL v. SQL Server
OpenWRT v. any proprietary consumer grade router
vim v. any other text editor
tinydns v. Microsoft DNS
postfix v. Microsoft Exchange Server
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
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.
Do the MPEG4 patent holders indemnify their licensees against violations of others' patents? If not, you're taking the same risk either way.
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?
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.
The rendering engine used by Chrome and Safari (webkit) wasn't made by any company. In fact, its origins are KHTML. the rendering engine used by KDE.
Ah, but is it better than Powershell... because objects are so much cooler to pipe around than characters!
Just an FYI: There's actually an Adblock plugin for Safari as well. I use both Firefox and Safari for different things- Firefox is better at anything that needs to stay open for long periods of time or do updates in the background; I find Safari faster for general browsing.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
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.
The key phrase here being "in Debian or Ubuntu".
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
If you don't get it then make sure you are reading at +1 and above. Otherwise you will just hurt your little head.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Isn't FF + Adblock Plus comparison somewhat disingenious. Afterall, you aren't loading parts of the page, in some cases, the more difficult to display parts.
No... that was the whole point.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Who is this 'Anonymous Cowardon' who keeps posting? Somewhere behind my computer a small pile of spaces seems to have leaked out...
The Internet is not purely composed of VDSL links. Some people live in 3rd world countries, with a downlink speed of 256 kbps, if they're lucky.
Which is everyone.
I'm pretty sure not everyone is creating and shipping their own H.264 encoders/decoders. Secondly, the comment amount creating and streaming the content applies to those serving the content (Google, Hulu, etc) not the people receiving.
And lets not forget mashing, which requires encoders and decoders.
Actually you don't pay double if your product is both an encoder and decoder. And the rates for those products are: $0 if you ship less than 100,000 units, 20 cents for every unit above 100,000 and 10 cents for any unit after you ship more than 5 million. So the overhead cost of buying a licensed and branded h.264 encoder for the end user is anywhere from 0 dollars to 20 cents. Pardon me while I don't get up in arms over 20 cents.
If developers have to pay when writing this software, the software gets more expensive and content creation gets stiffled.
Yeah, by a whole 20 cents per unit at it's most expensive. And that's only for those units that you ship above the free limit of 100,000.
sudo apt-get install lame
If you prefer that one
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
If you copy and paste it into a text editor, you'll discover that there's actually a collision between a space and an anti-space there. (That's sort of like anti-matter, but more digital.)
ffmpeg is known to have several encodng problems both and with theora.
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
Hmm. I sense from your post that you have not actually tried this.
I use opera and always have, but I downloaded the chrome beta to try this test. Doesn't work, no video, I still get the "if you see this you don't have html5".
wtf?
Need Mercedes parts ?
Will someone just get to the point and tell me how this will affect my porn-watching experience?
"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?"
Inkscape perhaps, although I've only tried a few commercial alternatives. Audacity. Lyx and LaTeX definitely. GNUCash arguably. Firefox of course. Mediawiki, Apache, Python. Bash, aptitude.
What does that look like? A two-dimensional space, in 3-space...
But really, seconded. I keep thinking it's a particle.
To continue on this train of thought, where is my Large AnonymousCowardon Collider?
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
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."
People providing decoders have to pay the license fee.
"Royalties to be paid by end product manufacturers for an encoder, a decoder or both (âoeunitâ) begin at US $0.20 per unit after the first 100,000 units each year. There are no royalties on the first 100,000 units each year. Above 5 million units per year, the royalty is US $0.10 per unit."
This causes issues for free software especially with the gpl because there is a clause which says you cannot restrict the distribution of the code but by having to pay a license fee this is a restriction.
> open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck
Correction: open source projects that are not commercial-supported have a much higher chance of sucking. KHTML was open source for years before Apple took it under its wing and made WebKit for its own ends. Now we've seen an explosion of use/interest in it (Safari, iPhone, Chrome, G1, Palm Pre, etc), whereas when Apple announced WebKit, the near-universal reaction was "KHTML? What's that? Why didn't thy use Gecko?".
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Which is one of the huge reasons why Linux is not usable for the average person.
OUT OF THE BOX, I'd want my OS to be able to play a DVD, and I'd want to be able to watch streaming content and videos from the web. Oh, and rip music I could play on my iPod/iPhone (or Zune LOL). Linux can really do none of these, at present, so how would ripping to Vorbis or Theora be anything good here at all?
Well let's make sure that doesn't happen with Web video, and support Theora as the base standard rather than MPEG.
You may have broken the law.
http://lame.sourceforge.net/tech-FAQ.txt
6. Does LAME use any MP3 patented technology?
LAME, as the name says, is *not* an encoder. LAME is a development
project which uses the open source model to improve MP3 technology.
Many people believe that compiling this code and distributing an
encoder which uses this code would violate some patents (in the US,
Europe and Japan). However, *only* a patent lawyer is qualified to
make this determination. The LAME project tries to avoid all these
legal issues by only releasing source code, much like the ISO
distributes MP3 "demonstration" source code. Source code is
considered as speech, which may contain descriptions of patented
technology. Descriptions of patents are in the public
domain.
Several companies plan on releasing encoders based on LAME, and
they intend to obtain all the appropriate patent licenses. At least
one company is now shipping a fully licensed version of LAME with
their portable MP3 player.
Note that under German Patent Law, Â11(1) a patent doesn't cover
private acts with non-industrial purposes. Probably interesting for
developers is that a patent doesn't cover acts with experimental
purposes, that aim at the object of the patented invention (Â11(2)).
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
Open Source should join the waterfall model and the "man month" on the scrap heap of failed faddy software development methodologies.
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.
Regarding "better than closed-source" aspect, all I can say is that within Java server-side stuff, it is more common to have open source libraries/frameworks that are better than commercial alternatives (if there are any) than vice versa. And certainly open sourced options are more widely used (more popular); which often leads to them becoming better even if that was initially not the case. Same is true for many other platforms.
But you are not a developer so anything other than end user apps probably don't count for your purposes.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
You have lost, admit it and have a nice day.
This kind of attitude is half the reason people aren't more reasonable in discussion.
If you make discussion about beating others, you derail us from the more valuable goal of cooperatively working towards truth.
Yeah, you were right about downward pressure, but you turned into an asshole at the end there. On behalf of humanity I would ask that you knock that off.
pacpl vs any other batch audio transcoder cdrdao (as used as EAC's burning engine) mplayer ffmpeg any package management toolset/suite vs windows update amule/emule vs edonkey/overnet (whose death kind of writes the judgement in stone) bittorrent vs whatever awful crap the media industry concocted this week truecrypt enfcs matroska mousepad vs notepad ha ha ha moc vs 300 crappy music players thunar/konqueror/nautilus vs explorer midnight commander vs 20 norton commander clones vlc linux kernel vs nt kernel (nt is ok but can it run my router and my nas....no) screen sshfs gcc dictd sqlite bash, bash-completion busybox cowsay :-)
7-zip
kwm, xfwm even metacity vs microsoft window manager
lame vs frauenhofer
ok am bored now will stop. Clearly the purpose and qualities of many of these tools will elude the inquirer, though the limitation is his, not the software's. Nor am I claiming that every free software tool is equal to or superior to a similar proprietary tool, but many are.
I hate to feed the troll above you...but I'm bored. Licensing don't mean squat to home users because they just ignore them. If you went by licensing then MP3 wouldn't be popular, and folks wouldn't be able to rip their DVDs to their portables. But you see we have this little thing now called "Google" which can spit out software to do whatever job you need really really quickly!
Do you honestly think average folks care about license? Really? Because working in PC sales and repair since the days of Win3.x I've found folks just ignore the hell out of licenses if they don't pretty much say "do what you want and have fun!". Is it legal? Nope. Do folks give a crap that it isn't legal? Not so much. Hell I've had cops in the past ask me if I couldn't just "find" them one of those XP copies that don't need activation. So I really don't think the average Joe gives a flying fart about license as long as he can find a GUI based tool to convert to whatever he wants, legal or not. Or do you honestly think all those copies of Photoshop and XP floating out there are actually legal copies?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Firefox (one word: addons).
LaTeX
R
Python
Ogg-Vorbis
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
Nah, I'm using Gentoo.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
You make a fair enough point, but the fact of the matter is: I was right; you knew it, I knew it, the moderators knew it, and he probably even knew it, yet he continue to argue by claiming he knew what "normal" people think.
Re-read my second post... why would anyone argue with that, except to be an ass? I even clarified what "downward pressure" is, in case he was one of the supposedly "normal" people who apparently think nothing can go up if something exerts a downward pressure on it. With his response, I basically concluded that he's either trolling or irrational and subsequent "reasonable" discussion was not likely.
Look, I may occasionally act like an ass when somebody wears my patience thin by continuing to argue an obviously wrong point, but at least I try to admit it when I'm the one who's wrong.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Of course they don't care. But Mozilla, for example, has to. And it certainly affects what they can build into their browser. It affects what assumptions a developer can make about who has what.
Do you think the "average folks" care about .doc versus .odt? No, but that doesn't mean it isn't important to have an open standard.
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.
This is why many games today use Vorbis for sound. To not pay MP3 patent royalties.
Easy.....
When it comes to terminal based there are plenty but I'll mention some GUI based...
Notepad++ beats Notepad
Pidgin beats Trillian
SMPlayer beats Windows Media Player
Filezilla beats Cuteftp
And there are also some extraordinary open source software which doesn't have proprietary counterparts(at least not that I know of).
Synaptic Packet manager for easy installation and maintenance of software.
Synfig Vector animation studio.
Gobby a collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session.
I have looked at some clips posted with both VLC and Media Player Classic using CCCP. Theora sucks versus H.264. The amount of noise in the captions and images, it is like the difference between looking at an extremely compressed and noisy JPEG, and a slightly blurred PNG. So what gives? Does my player suck, or is this really the best its supposed to do? Sure it looks better than the blocky H.263, but that isn't saying much.
I'm amazed someone wouldn't understand that right off, but ok, let's assume you're serious.
Let's say you want to write an encoder or player. Maybe you're selling PVRs. Maybe you're creating the next youtube. Whatever.
With Theora, you can Just Do It. That's it.
With MPEG's stuff, you seek permission, make a deal, and then somehow pay the patent holders, along with paying for the accounting overhead of keeping track of those payments. If you're distributing your product or content for free, then you are losing money on every copy.
Or, with MPEG's stuff, you don't do those things, but you open yourself to liabilities. Hope that you are never too successful that you get noticed by the patent holders. Live in fear. On top of that, if you get caught, then you need to either do your very best to look like an idiot (unwittingly infringed) or pay treble damages (willfully infringed), and hope you don't come out looking like a fool and a crook.
Using open standards is the easiest and most profitable thing to do.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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!
Strike two. Popularity != Quality. McDonalds has sold billions of hamburgers, but I don't ever see them on a list of best burgers.
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.
You go far to prove your own point there don't you.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
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.
You mean that mysql is such the bees knees that a major Unix vendor decided to buy it?
How is that supposed to undermine my point?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
How can you do a legal test of the claim that nobody can sue you over Theora? Nobody has been sued! What more proof do you think can be provided?
Proving a negative is always very difficult, often impossible. Try to prove that the Invisible Pink Unicorn doesn't exist.
So either provide the patent number, or be ready to be accused of spreading FUD.
And don't even start with submarine patents: this is a technical term for a questionable practice of the USPTO that can hide a patent for at most two or three years, Theora is based on VP3 which is more than ten years old.
no intensive review of the possible areas of infringement by a patent attorney.
So you are trolling: Firefox, Opera and Chrome will all ship with Theora support later this year. Mozilla and Opera have publicly stated that their lawyers have verified that Theora is clear from hostile patents (and this can be tested: patents are by their very nature public). I don't know about Google, but you can't possibly suggest that a company worth $ 31 billion would ship a video codec without extensive legal checks.
And, BTW, there's proof that the alternative, H.264, is heavily patented: you need to pay for the encoding, the decoding and for every download of a video from your site. The pay-for-each-download part is only true for videos longer than 12 minutes, but they can change the patent licensing terms any time they want.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
People have long forgotten the gif debacle my friend (or mp3 for that matter). They need to learn the lesson again...
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Wow, I just had to comment on this. The article itself is of course nice and intriguing (and the video-clip chosen is an excellent clip to give the codec a hard-time. The grass, and medium-mask net in the background, wow.)
The problem with the article is that it really compares pears with apples, and is not too specific about what pears and what apples. The main problem here is that is uses different suites for conversion, in one hand ffmpeg with some probably well-tuned defaults for x264 (-vpre hq), and on the other hand ffmpeg2theora, that may be tuned for different defaults and different coding-settings. Especially, there are two parameters not covered by the article that may have a huge impact. Multipass-encoding, and keyframe-density.
Multipass-encoding is a technique where you let the encoder skim the content several times, gatherings statistics on progressive levels. Multipass encoding has huge benefits, and can sometimes cut the mbit/quality in half, or more.
Keyframes are special frames in the video-stream where the content can be synced. Between those frames only progressive frames happen, so you can't skip to those frames. Keyframes usually take up a lot more space than the frames in between so you want as few as possible of those, but if you make them too few, you will be limiting seeking severly, and for live content, the zap-time will increase.
Then there's the issues of whether different processing filters were used between the sets, and of course exactly WHICH versions of the codecs were used. "June-something" isn't really a good spec.
To make it a bit more equal comparison, and also with known versions, I tried redoing it myself, using a gstreamer-pipeline and the same source-material used in the article. The pipelines used were:
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=soccer_4cif.y4m ! decodebin ! x264enc bitrate=1000 ! avimux ! filesink location=soccer_4cif.y4m.avi
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=soccer_4cif.y4m ! decodebin ! theoraenc bitrate=1000 ! oggmux ! filesink location=soccer_4cif.y4m.ogv
Unfortunately, I don't have much time, or hosting space to share the encoded results, but trust me, it was NOT in favor of x264 with these settings. On the bright side, you can try it out for yourself, and fiddle with different settings, all versions are directly from updated Ubuntu Jaunty repositories, as of today. Just install gst-tools, and all gst-plugins even from multiverse.
Happy encoding!
Hu? I don't see any restrictions of what can be piped around in a gnome-terminal (well, actually its bash or tcsh that's used to pipe things around. )
Actually the license has really no effect at all for the end user in either of these cases.
Not true at all. Someone needs some basic business classes.
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.
Like all other business models, if the provider of a service has a cost associated, that cost is always passed on. In this case, that cost will ultimately be passed on to you and me (*). Period. This is basic business people. If the cost of doing business is less, we all pay less.
It boils down to a simple equation. Do you want to pay more for video and audio on the web? Or do you want to pay less? If you want to pay more, jump on any non-free license and/or codecs with royalties associated.
* Cost can be indirectly passed on via advertising which in turn is then passed on to associated products. We all pay for product advertisements. No profitable company does business any other way. This is first and foremost why many generic products cost 1/3 to 1/2 as much, or less, as a name brand - advertising.
This post was written on a Mac, a product from a company PROUDLY providing closed source innovation since the dawn of the modern computer era!
Oh, please remove everything that's based on free software from your OS X and let us see how you boot without the Darwin kernel.
sudo apt-get install lame works fine in Ubuntu
You do have to go out of your way to enable the multiverse. And it's not in Debian at all.
OUT OF THE BOX
Linux Mint.
http://www.linuxmint.com/about.php
Obviously you've never used Oracle.
Inkscape is kickass, but it still isn't as good as Adobe Illustrator.
On the flip side though, there are a TON of commercial apps that are complete crap and won't get better because of the small number of users the company has to cater to. The equivalent type (they are specific purpose, so there usually isn't a linux equivalent) in linux tends to be much higher quality.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
That's a bit of an exaggeration.
Yeh open source sucks so much that Apple built OS X from it.
Unix was proprietary, and built by AT&T. Unix.
Nextstep used parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD, sure, but that was just the cheap path to Unix.
If you accept the GP's premis, his point is still valid.
Nice try though, kthxbye.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Synaptic isn't necessary on Windows or Mac, because installing programs is significantly simpler on these platforms(.msi and .dmg). Synaptic also only works on a subset of Linux boxes.
The propietary counterpart to Synfig is Flash, and it is significantly more feature rich than Synfig.
Gobby is designed after SubEthaEdit, which is Mac based closed-source. It was once free, but they eventually had to go commercial because too few people used it. UNA was built from the ground up by N-Brain as a collab software design environment. For these I couldn't say which is better. :P
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Does anyone remember it? The author screwed up and coded parts of it on university time so had to revoke the GPL license since they could not prove which parts were or were not university property.
I spent a month compressing a highly scaled video clip and was able to put about 20 seconds on a floppy. I could compress a complex jpeg with the static compressor into 4 - 20k.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4367
Bandwidth wise it's marvelous, it's the number crunching to compress it that's the killer. I'm not a coder and his paper is marginally comprehensible but there is no way I could recreate the codec.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Actually, there is a difference, Powershell pipes serialized objects and you can call methods on the output of powershell commands. bash and co. are just pushing characters.
WTF ?
So when I pipe the output of curl (a video stream) into ffmpeg for conversion into swf and then to ffserver for streaming I'm really just "pushing characters around" ?
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.
The rendering engine used by Chrome and Safari (webkit) wasn't made by any company. In fact, its origins are KHTML. the rendering engine used by KDE.
99% of what started as KHTML/KJS is gone. The rest is all WebKit. Let's put it in perspective. The updates to KHTML/KJS are from WebKit being folded back into Kdelibs.
Is that only in the US, or in other countries too? I run a video service hosted in Germany, the organisation is based in Australia, people from all over the world view the video, and am starting to get worried what happens next year. Where does jurisdiction for this start and end? How do software patents fit into the picture? We will be moving to theora, but will need a fallback for IE and Safari, which h.264 seems a natural fit, but now have to re-think...
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
Yes, you are. All curl is doing is writting a stream of bytes to stdout and ffmpeg is reading a stream of bytes from stdin et cetera and so forth. On the other hand. Pretend that I wanted to kill 5 instances of iexplorer that have stopped responding but leave the other 2 alone. I could write something like:
Get-Process iexplorer | Where-Object { !$_.Responding } | Foreach-Object { $_.Kill() }
I'm actually accessing properties/calling methods on objects that are flowing through the pipeline. And I think that is cool. Obviously, sometimes you get strings that are flowing through the pipeline, but you can even call methods on those to perform formatting.
But the argument was that being open was a selling point. I just pointed out it actually doesn't change a damned thing. The big boys like Google and Mozilla can throw them some money, the home users will simply ignore the license, and everything stays just as it is.
For me until I have a nice GUI based tool that cranks out Theora just as easy as H.264, and my Radeon H4650 comes with hardware Theora acceleration it is a non starter. For the home users the H.264 guys can say every performance should cost you one billion dollars! for all anyone cares, as they are gonna ignore the shit out of it and do whatever they want anyway. Just look at MP3, you can't get more license encumbered than that. Does any consumer give a flying fart? Nope, they just rip to MP3 or take a trip to TPB and ignore the hell out of those pesky copyright and patent issues. It is just human nature.
Folks get really pissed off if you keep them from doing what they want, especially if it is because of something they think is stupid like those legalese EULAs. That is why they never read them, because they intend to ignore the hell out of it anyway so why waste time reading what you're not gonna follow anyway? As for Moz and Google, they can afford to shell out some cash if they want support, or they can point the "Non US citizens" to a link which everybody will use because nobody gives a crap. That is just how the world works.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
where is my Large AnonymousCowardon Collider?
You're posting on it.
Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
Most major linux distribution are descended from either Slackware or Debian.
It is great to fully utilise hardware that you have now, but H.264, DivX, and WMV hardware acceleration is not the future. Why lockdown hardware to accelerate a specific video coding format that will change in the future? Instead, if the engineering effort is spent making the CPU & video operations faster (and smaller die size, more cores, lower power requirements) then all applications benefit, not just H.264, DivX, and WMV video playback. The hardware industry is taking this concept further, investing heavily in CPU & video on the one chip.
Because dedicated hardware will use only a small fraction of the power programmable hardware will use. For example, H.264 HD high profile can be decoded in dedicated hardware that's running at 200MHz. A CPU (plus GPU assistance) is surely going to need several GHz to do the same job.
Anyway, the silicon cost of dedicated hardware is small and, if it's not being used it can be switched off entirely. Furthermore, if programmable hardware CPU/GPU is being used to do video decode then it will slow down the CPU etc for other tasks it may be required for.
Nextstep used parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD, sure, but that was just the cheap path to Unix.
Not quite. NeXT used parts of 4BSD on top of Mach (both were open source, one from UCB, one from CMU, neither containing any AT&T code). Apple incorporated parts of NetBSD for the Rhapsody Developer Previews and parts of FreeBSD into the released versions of OS X. Although 4BSD did contain some AT&T code, these parts were not used in the creation of the NeXTSTEP kernel and had been long-since replaced in *BSD by the time OS X was released (there under a dozen files at the time of the AT&T Vs UCB lawsuit and they were all replaced in 1992).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
OUT OF THE BOX, I'd want my OS to be able to play a DVD
So Windows isn't usable for the average person either? OS X comes with the DVD Player app, but last time I ran Windows the built-in DVD player required a third-party CODEC to be installed. You needed to install something like PowerDVD/WinDVD which provided the DirectShow filters for DVD playback for it to work. Without it, Windows could not play DVDs. Alternatively, you can do the same thing I do on OS X and FreeBSD; install VLC and use that for DVD playback.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I accept you main point about the cost of including MPEG4 AVC (H.264) decoders due to the patent license cost.
However I have read the licenses from the MPEG-LA and they are pure patent licenses for payment. There is no requirement on DRM at all! That part of your post is completely wrong.
Germany is safe, not sure about Australia. You only need a license for the patents on the algorithms used[1] for an implementation of any of the MPEG standards. If you are in a jurisdiction that does not regard software patents as legal, then you do not need a license.
If you're going to use Theora, then you have a few other options for IE and Safari. You can suggest that your users install the QuickTime / DirectShow decoders for Theora. This is not ideal, because it's not seamless, but once they are installed then the user will be able to view Theora content anywhere. Alternatively, there is a Java applet that can play back Theora / Vorbis, which you could use instead. This will be slower, but will work in any browser with working Java. My suggestion would be that you put the Theora video in a <video> tags, then have some JavaScript that replaces these with the Java applet if they don't work and, if the applet is being used, put up a link to the CODECs as an 'optional, but will make this site better' link.
[1] Sometimes, anyway. PsyTEL, for example, produced an AAC encoder that used different algorithms to create a compatible bytestream and so didn't have to pay Dolby for the patent license.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You can contact MPEG-LA for the license contract and list of patents.
However in the near future you can expect everyone to have an H.264 (MPEG4 part 10) (AVC) decoder installed so I wouldn't worry too much.
Not coincidentally, most IT shops never consider Linux for anything outside of webserving.
Huh ?
Or :
including
All of those I've seen deployed everywhere.
I don't know what shops you've been to.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Because it will cost firefox 5 million + to have h.264 included per year....
Only because their corporate headquarters happen to be in a country that recognises software patents. Move the company elsewhere, no license fee. I've said this before and I'll say it again, the problem here is not the codec, it's the American patent system (and that of a couple of other places) that is the problem. Not only do the vast majority of users not care about whether they have the correct license, the vast majority of users don't need to care.
Listen to my latest album here
No you don't
Try getting a license.....
At the very least there are bunch of non transferable clauses. ie you would not be able to bundle FF with h.264 in your favorite distribution, since thats redistribution...
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
I am in the EU. I got legal advice. Basically I was told that while you don't make money you will *probably* be left alone. But if you sell your software for money, we don't want to be your lawyers anymore.
Software patents in the EU is not clear and could be enforceable. Thats why EU issues software patents....
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Firefox is much better than Internet Explorer.
God is imaginary
Despite my moniker I don't totally agree with you. Clearly there are probably specific features in F/OSS applications that are better than their closed source "equivalents".
What I find unfortunate about F/OSS is that despite the fact that the developers don't have legacy issues and don't have to worry about Wall Street's short-time thinking, most of their applications are still "me too" types. Why not create new OS's that don't bow down to UNIX or Windows or anything else? Why not create new standards that really support web apps and aren't afraid of ditching HTML and HTTP?
What good is "freedom" if you just do the same old same old?
Like BSDs and Linux, OS X owes more to ATT&T than any other entity. They only exist because AT&T bungled their rights to UNIX.
Who are you quoting? I can simply point to my dpkg -l listing, from at to zsh (alsa sucks and the others before at are kind of support packages). Free software which uses the traditional Unix user interfaces is usually superior to anything proprietary, if it even exists.
Try getting a license.....
Fill in form on MPEGLA website. Receive license sign license, send cheques.
At the very least there are bunch of non transferable clauses. ie you would not be able to bundle FF with h.264 in your favorite distribution, since thats redistribution...
Fair point.
Safari shows adverts?
Where?
(mine has a plugin to block them and it works flawlessly, just in case your browser lacks a "detect sarcasm" plugin).
Thanks; I guess the issue is to make the playback as seamless and easy to the user as possible. We've looked at using cortado (the java theora app you speak of), but would need to investigate its speed etc and also penetration of java compared to flash.
The javascript shouldn't really necessary; the browser should gracefully drop _inside_ the video tag if it can't render the video, so by putting a java (or flash) object inside the video tag, other browsers should handle this well. Hopefully this also holds if the browser handles the video tag but not the particular video codec provided.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
According to a flawed test, perhaps. In reality, Firefox still has a lot of memory issues to deal with.
Clever signature text goes here.
Hopefully this also holds if the browser handles the video tag but not the particular video codec provided
Make sure you test that thoroughly. If you don't use the video tag, and just embed the media as an object, both Windows Media Player and QuickTime will try to open it if they recognise the container format, even if they don't understand the bitstream format. They then sit there with an icon, rather than the media file.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There's essentially no difference between these two situations. Let me annotate your text a bit to point out the similarities:
All curl is doing is writting a stream of bytes to stdout and ffmpeg is reading a stream of bytes from stdin that it then interprets as a video and plays.
And all Powershell is doing is writing a stream of bytes to stdout, and then reading a stream of bytes from stdin that it then interprets as an object and calls methods on.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
The approach is still that the same objects and methods/interpretations are available to every element in the powershell pipeline because the "interpretation" is inherent to the data being passed. When piping video around, the individual program has to have knowledge of the data type. In powershell, it is conceivable that someone could write an object for a video frame object and suddenly, all elements of the pipeline can perform actions on the video instead of simple those which inherently know how to interpret a byte stream as video data.
Even if all they are doing is the same thing (which I'm not entirely convinced they are), I still think the syntactic niceties of powershell make it more intuitive.
Linux owes barely anything to AT&T. Non-UNIX-like systems are implemented on it - Syllable and (initially) AROS. the OS is more than the kernel.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.