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Oh, What a Lovely Standards War
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "You know something big must be afoot when people start to get worked up over video compression standards. Basically, the issue is whether the current de facto standard, H.264, will continue to dominate this field, and if not, what might take over."
Related, reader eihab writes "Nuanti, a company that develops Web browsing technologies, has produced a high-performance Ogg Theora decoder for Microsoft's Silverlight browser plugin. Nuanti's Highgate Media Suite will enable support for standards-based HTML5 video streaming with Theora in browsers that have Silverlight. It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."
I wish there was a way to mod the original press release as +5, Epic Troll, because that's what it is with respect to Slashdot - it's going to be way more entertaining than the usual (and already somewhat tiresome) Google vs "do no evil" stories. But Microsoft's Silverlight used to enable support for Theora in pretty much all Windows browsers (and specifically IE of all things), while both Google and Apple stand by H.264 - oh my!
Hold on a second, I've got to fetch the popcorn...
The problem is there is exactly zipola when it comes to hardware acceleration for Theora, and you can't just "use moar power!" when we are talking cell phones, netbooks, and mini-tablets. I have gotten nothing but grief for pointing this out, but if Theora is to have a chance it needs hardware acceleration by the big three-Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, and it needs it yesterday.
My GPU cost a grand total of $35 and came with H.26x, WMV 7-9, MPG 2 and 4, all accelerated out of the box. Even the cheapest onboard GPUs nowadays usually will give you H.26x, WMV, and MP4 acceleration out of the box. And building PCs I can tell you it does make a difference, even on powerful machines the playback is smoother and allows for more multitasking without video stutter.
So I would be suggesting to the FOSS community if they want Theora to get anywhere they better look at the specs AMD and Intel have released and start on hardware Theora decoding ASAP. If they get it going for those two Nvidia won't allow themselves to be left out and will get Theora acceleration if for no other reason to have a "me too!" bullet point on the GPUs. Then you will have hardware acceleration covered for most desktops and netbooks, which in turn will hopefully make the cell phone and other small Internet devices stand up and start to take notice.
But just saying Theora runs okay without hardware acceleration on your desktop won't cut it, when so much of the Internet is moving away from simply sitting at a desk all day. Both AMD and Intel have released specs on their GPUs, and isn't that what the developers have always asked for? Give us the specs and we'll take care of the rest? Well here is your chance, we need Theora acceleration if H.264 isn't to become the dominant format.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Firefox is taking an ethical stand by not allowing a situation like Unisys / GIFs to happen where you have to get sign contacts and pay license fees to host some video on your sites. Also Firefox would effectively be closed source if it adopted H.264, just like Chrome is. (Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on, DOES NOT support H.264).