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Wikipedia's Assault On Patent-Encumbered Codecs
An anonymous reader writes "The Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign today called Let's Get Video on Wikipedia, asking people to create and post videos to Wikipedia articles. (Good, encyclopedia-style videos only!) Because all video must be in patent-free codecs (theora for now), this will make Wikipedia by far the most likely site for an average internet user to have a truly free and open video experience. The campaign seeks to 'strike a blow for freedom' against a wave of h.264 adoption in otherwise open HTML5 video implementations."
Open video bitstream formats, like Theora, are simply not capable of being better than H.264 (yet). The best bet in that regard is Dirac by the BBC, but even that does not fare too well against H.264 as encoded by x264.
However, open video formats simply do not need to be better than the proprietary formats, they simply need to be "good-enough" and be ubiquitous on the web, and pretty soon all browsers (except IE, probably) will support them out of the box. Wikipedia going with theora is a good move in that direction.
Except H.264 isn't better. It's slow, unwieldy, CPU intensive, and tends to fall over and shit itself with even the tiniest bit of corruption. There's a reason I avoid the H264 files on animesuki nowadays and go for the (technically lower quality) XVID files -- at least XVID works.
This is a moot point anyway. It's just compression, how hard could it be? Lets get a sourceforge project going to make something better.