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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."
Theora can be decoded on the cpus of all the devices you listed, at the applicable screen resolutions, in real time. Heck, the arm optimized version of theora can decode HD at a significant multiple of real time on a CPU slower than the one in the 3gs.
All of this craze and expectation of hardware acceleration comes from H.264 being an utter pig. They overestimated how much faster cpus and memory would become by now, and we're only coping by using lesser profiles or adding hardware acceleration.
h.264 video outnumbers Theora video on the web by many orders of magnitude. Perhaps you missed the memo, but YouTube, Apple and Hulu all use h.264 extensively. Asserting that h.264 has somehow lost is delusional.
As it stands, h.264 is the dominant web format for new video, only possibly outnumbered by legacy videos (which are very much *not* encoded with Theora).
Claiming that 1/4 of the desktops on the web can't view h.264 is rather amusing given that the vast majority of Firefox installs play h.264 just fine, as they almost universally have the Flash plug-in.
Nah... java applets, trust me, it will WORK! This time...
Reminds me of a comment on a dutch tech site, remarked how much smarter a dutch tv station was, for choosing silverlight over flash, because it was more widely supported, except that particular function just happens to only be available for windows.
Silverlight may or may not be good, but after ActiveX and COM and such, why do people keep building their business model on an MS product? You know that sooner or later they will pull a move that screws you.
It would be like putting a bet on Apple announcing a sensible, non-sexy, non-drool inducing, cheap and essential item. Or IBM doing anything interesting in the consumer market. I don't know about leopards, but I do know companies never change their spots.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.