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H.264 vs. Theora — Fightin' Words About Patentability
An anonymous reader writes "Thom Holwerda from OS News has penned a rebuttal to claims from Daring Fireball's John Gruber that Theora is a greater patent risk than H.264. Holwerda writes, 'And so the H264/Theora debate concerning HTML5 video continues. The most recent entry into the discussion comes from John Gruber, who argues that Theora is more in danger of patent litigation than H264. He's wrong, and here's why.'"
And the lawsuit goes to...h.264!
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
If you want to get rid off patent risks abolish software patenting of technical standards, embrace open standards.
I'm starting to think that all the Hoopla over Patents, Copyright, and Trademarks is misplaced. Maybe we should all just work within the system?
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
how the they both be equal when MPEG-LA has already announced that they will seek all users, (end users, software distributors, and hardware people ) will each required to buy a license to view H.264 The current free period ends in 2016.
That sounds like a patent threat all buy itself.
that is how I took their announcement that they were extending their free licensing.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
So before someone starts the whole "which codec is better" flamewar again: someone at xiph thinks theora is better, ars thinks h264 is better, and this guy has a do it yourself kit in the form of a shell script.
Have fun arguing, as the past few articles have been quite fruitful in that area. Sadly few have realized (despite it being the main focus of most of those articles, but hey, who reads those) that quality will not be the merit to win this battle.
In the first part, he takes Gruber's working (submarine patents) too literally. Gruber didn't mean literally patents that are applied for earlier but not granted yet. Gruber misspoke himself. Instead, he means companies who have patents that are already granted and they later will decide applies to new situation and then sue. If Theora becomes successful, it will meet with plenty of these, just as any other software success does now.
In the second part, oddly, given that he rails against strawmen, the argument creates a strawman.
The quoted response veers rapidly from addressing facts (whether Theora is within patent guidelines) to making a prediction 'I predict that MPEG LA may counter that they know groups have been pressured into licensing patents in order to use Theora.' Then it shoots down the prediction and thus claims to counter the argument. But that prediction is just a prediction, it isn't the issue at hand. And countering prediction you made up yourself doesn't necessary counter the actual argument which is that H.264 has a patent defense pool and Theora doesn't.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
There. I said it. Why? Because he counters Gruber's arguments with identical retorts, completely failing to see beyond his own nose, failing to realize and admit that all he is doing is just pulling his end of the rope in this tug of war, instead of coming up with anything worthwhile to consider in the choice of h.264 v theora.
I love Free Software. I really do. I normally piss-off people with my fairly hard-line GNU/RMS attitude towards software. In most cases, I will drop features so I can run the Free version of something, and all of my code is GPL3.
But in this case, the so-called Free solution is the wrong choice to make. H.264 has won, and it won years ago. Now, an argument can be made that making a stand is important. But in this case, there is a pragmatic and strategic reason not to: taking a moral stand with Theora will damage other things, namely HTML5 and potentially Firefox itself.
PNG won out in the end over GIF, mostly, because it had better features. But what enabled that win was that they could both be used at the same time. If early Mozilla branches simply removed GIF support, the browser would have been dead in the water. Nobody would use it, because the images people already have were in GIF format. Only because both formats were supported could Mozilla be even considered by most people.
Today, people have data in H.264 format. A lot of data. A long list of hardware devices are made that support it directly. This data is not going to vanish, and people will want to play it. Firefox can choose to support that, or they can choose to become less relevant over time. Chrome is getting surprisingly strong uptake, and IE (ack) is getting much less offensive as time goes on. (aside: this competition is pretty awesome - browsers were starting to stagnate for a few years, and the rush for new features has been revived)
Playing people's data and being compatible with most modern and future hardware is the pragmatic reason to support H.264; the strategic reason is that the moral stand is not about video codecs! It's about removing Flash and related proprietary solutions. Playing the SAME video stream (a .mp4 in H.264 format) in flash or the <video> tag is neutral as far as codecs go, but it opens up the idea of a Free player.
The battle over codes needs to be left for another day.
As for how to actually implement it, Mozilla et al needs to take a cue from how distros handle MP3 and other patented codecs - foreign "non-free" repositories. The details on how you do that are highly flexible. Mozilla seems to like over-engineering things, so I'm sure they can come up with a Clever Codec Plugin Scheme to automate this, as long as the actual codec is 1) a separate project, and 2) developed outside the org.
Please - I love firefox, and this video issue is the one issue that could break them in the long-run. People like their YouTube.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
So this person thinks just because it, like any other technology, has the capacity to be sued by patent trolls makes it worse?
Look, it's plain and simple: web technologies should be open and free. H.264 is not, despite all claims of "people can use it" and "well, it's better". That means nothing. Ogg Theora is open and free, H.264 is not. End of discussion, period.
Anyone that disagrees either does not understand the importance of using open and free technologies to power the Internet (imagine what would happen if HTML was patent-encumbered as H.264 is!) or a simple troll that has a motivation for him and/or his company to control the web.
This is a simple, solved issue, but the problem is that the misinformed and the greedy people are dragging it out. End this, make a stand, Ogg Vorbis or you don't get to play. Period.
AC because mods on /. are largely the people I describe, and I don't want these people to drag my karma down just because they don't like the truth.
MPEG-LA never said they would go after END USERS. They CAN'T go after end users - there is no practical possibility in this. Really, wake up to reality. License fees connected to MPEG-4 technology, all of its levels, are always entirely free for END USERS who are just consuming video or audio built on said tech. Nothing else has ever been said, nothing else will ever be possible. Don't confuse end user's consuming commercial material of MPEG-4 format as being subject to licenses - the ones SELLING said material are the ones subject to the license.
None of what I just said should be taken as a reason to not use Theora in addition to H.264. Push the Free solution, of course, but in parallel like what happened with PNG.
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Is *everything* caught up in a patent fight and we cant do anything at all?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's all very well standing around hinting what a huge penis you have, but sooner or later you're going to have to pull down your pants.
We are talking about internet video here, what did you expect it would be used for?
You host HTML5 video encoded H.264 video on your own website.
That makes you a Content Provider in the eyes of MPEG-la and most of the "intellectual property" industry, not an End User, who is a passive consumer by definition.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
One of my fears here is that Firefox will be hit as hard by IE 9 as Netscape was with IE 4. Mozilla seems largely oblivious to how ambitious IE 9 is. A hardware-accelerated, multi-process, significantly more standards-compliant browser that supports H.264 out of the box would be just the thing for Microsoft to potentially stop Mozilla dead in its tracks on Firefox adoption.
"Today, people have data in H.264 format. A lot of data. "
And a lot of it totally useless. You see-- full h.264 is so gobsmackingly processor intensive that even a high end multi-core desktop with hardware assist can have a decently hard time of keeping up with it. More importantly some of the features in h.264 are incredibly hostile to fast hardware implementation: For example, the arithmetic coder is purely serial and can't be made to operate in parallel, so the only way to make it fast is to run it at a high clock speed and high clock speed means high power.
Because of this many "h.264" devices, like the iphone, only support an exceptionally watered down profile called baseline. Most of the technical features h264 has over theora are gone in baseline, b-frames and multiple references, the arithmetic coder, adaptive quantization, 8x8 transform, etc.
So when you have a "h.264" file you really have no clue when it will play... and if its a "well encoded" file it probably will not play in many places.
I'm sorry, but I just plain don't see it that way. It is simply substituting one proprietary format with another. In fact, using the "technically better is better, period" argument of the poster above you, because Flash includes more features than simple video, we should be striving against having a video tag and just continue using Flash.
The GIF argument just isn't applicable. When everyone standardized on GIF, there really wasn't a viable alternative that worked nearly as well. There is a viable alternative to H.264. Also, keep in mind that when GIF became a de facto standard, the legal environment surrounding patents was much different. It was a time when there was question over whether a compression algorithm could even be patented, and the chance that anyone would actually sue over it was virtually nil. Now, the sue 'em all strategy is actually a lucrative business model.
Come to think of it, didn't we go through many of these same arguments around 10 years after GIF became the de facto standard? Wasn't the questionability of the patent-encumbering of it a primary driver behind the development of the free PNG format? Didn't it take around like two friggin' decades for PNG to be as widely supported because we didn't really know better in making GIF the de facto format?
Don't you agree it's pretty damned stupid to repeat that exact mistake yet again under the whole "fool me once, fool me twice" tenet?
It's all very well standing around hinting what a huge penis you have, but sooner or later you're going to have to pull down your pants.
Can you please use that in a car analogy?
Defining every user of Facebook and MySpace as a non-End User will result in some issues. With Web 2.0, everyone is a producer and consumer at the same time.
Learn to love Alaska
how the they both be equal when MPEG-LA has already announced that they will seek all users, (end users, software distributors, and hardware people ) will each required to buy a license to view H.264
2016? 2016? By then there will be at least one - if not more - different video format that we'll be arguing about. Things are moving fast on the intertubes (except for the W3C) so I'm not worried about 2016. Technology will surpass itself given enough motive or profitability.
MP3 was invented in 1991. I imagine it will be the default standard for at least another decade. Such things tend to be in flux for short periods, then become entrenched for long periods, and I think we're in the period of settling for video. Actually, I think it probably already has.
When Thom Holwerda speaks, I LISTEN.
I had no idea you, um, he was related to E. F. Hutton. Thanks for the update.
Let me guess, you're viewing the videos with VLC?
I'm guessing there's some reason that you bring this up? I went through that comparison during the last H264 vs Theora story, and came to the same conclusion that the guy you're replying to did: the H264 version is way better. Right down to the compression artifacts around the text. (I also pointed out some time marks where artifacts were visible in other cases too, and I didn't really notice anything that bad during the H264 video.)
However, I did my comparison with VLC. Is there something about VLC that makes it an unfair vehicle for comparison? What would you suggest as software for Windows for viewing Theora at ideal quality?
They won't define every user of Facebook as a non-End User, as the average person is not hosting video content. The average person is getting Facebook (or youtube, or whomever) to host it for them, by contract.
With web 2.0, even fewer people actually pay for their own hosting, and instead use these Walled Garden services to do it for them.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
They said it will be free to end users and net streamers until 2016. They have not said what happens in 2016. Specifically, they did not say they will seek all users to buy a license in 2016.
The last time the free (end-user) license period ended was in 2010 and they extended it then. They could do the same again. Or maybe not. No one can be sure.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Fuck that shit. If I encode a movie with a (licensed) encoder, said movie is not "the codec". It is the result of applying the codec to a video stream. It's no more patented by them than a piece of wood drilled through by a patented drill bit is patented by the drill bit owner. They can claim otherwise all they want, but their claim won't survive the first time they try to enforce it against a big player... and trying to enforce it against small fry won't pay the bills.
That was a fairly piss-poor rebuttal, especially the opening paragraph, where he sidesteps the claims of outside patent holders. Submarine patents are still possible, they are just less effective. One could stall the application until infringing usage is found, then scurry it along to give grounds for suit. Personally, I don't care. From what I've seen/heard, Ogg Vorbis/Theora are wastes of CPU cycles. Can anyone name any formats that have had issues with patent encumbrances in the past? Oh wait, I can. MP3 and GIF (LZW not RLE). It's too bad that those were crushed by patent suits, they could have had some promise.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
According to the article here, MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn said this (emphasis mine):
In addition, no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free. Virtually all codecs are based on patented technology, and many of the essential patents may be the same as those that are essential to AVC/H.264. Therefore, users should be aware that a license and payment of applicable royalties is likely required to use these technologies developed by others, too.
When asked directly about the MPEG patent holders:
Ozer: It sounds like you are saying that some of your patent holders own patents that are used in Ogg. Is that correct?
Horn: We believe that there are patent holders who do.
Okay, Horn: Who are the patent holders and what the patent numbers?
Ozer: It sounds like you’ll be coming out and basically saying that to use Ogg, you need to license it from MPEG LA. Is that correct?
Horn: That is not what we said. We said no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free.
Ummmm... You're just spreading FUD and trying to be coy about it. But you just look like a smarmy used-car salesman. I call bullshit.
I have a good deal of respect for people like Monty who get this kind of shit thrown at them day-in and day-out from whatever weak-willed, money-over-morals, cardboard-cutout figurehead the MPEG-LA props up today to go and do their dirty work.
Mr. Horn, your arguments are hollow and your acts of fear-mongering are unbecoming of any man. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call your actions reprehensible had you not graduated from Yale and then gone on to get a J.D. from Columbia. I mean, honestly, is the quantity of cash they're throwing at you so large that you can pile it on top of your morals like steel weights in a flower press, keeping your inner sense of honor pressed down so it doesn't jump up and kick your ass for being a manipulative and deceitful businessman?
Show us the patents or shut up.
coding is life
And guess what: both of the lossless video codecs you mentioned have prior art. But explaining how would only serve to kill the joke.
If early Mozilla branches simply removed GIF support, the browser would have been dead in the water. Nobody would use it, because the images people already have were in GIF format.
It wouldn't have been necessary. The LZW patent under GIF was believed to apply only to encoding, not decoding. The editors of the H.264 patents were far more careful in this respect.
Today, there is even more data wrapped up by Flash.
True, OGV is an alternative to H.26x video in Flash containers. But what alternative to Flash do you offer for making vector animations like Badger Badger Badger and most of what's on Newgrounds? True, one can hack something together with JavaScript and SVG, but nobody has made authoring tools for that.
"Internet Protocol lawyering"? You didn't need to correct yourself because "intellectual property" is already not a specific area of law. Patent law is as different from trademark law as it is from real estate law.
Soon lossy compression will be irrelevant.
I demand full resolution video without lossy compression. Screw the compressors.
Bandwidth and storage capacity will soon make lossy irrelevant even at HD * N scales.
I want the FULL resolution that the cameras recorded.
If you don't then enjoy your pixalated movies.
Show us the patents or shut up.
I do agree it would be nice of the MPEG LA members who feel that their patents cover Theora would come out and talk about it, it is unlikely that Larry Horn has anything to do with this. MPEG LA only has to do with these patents in terms of licensing them for use with H.264. They almost certainly don't have any responsibilities (or freedom to talk about the situation) when it comes to Theora.
So it's really up to the individual patent holders to come out. I wish they would do so.
Also, "show us the patents" is probably off base too, because the patents are right here.
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.pdf
What you seem to mean is show us where the infringement lies.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
"show us the patents" is probably off base too, because the patents are right here. [link to MPEGLA]
While it's possible that one of the patents listed on the MPEG website is what Mr. Horn is talking about, note that he only said that they (which I read as an official stance of the MPEG-LA) believe that some patent holders (which may be one of the MPEG partner groups) hold patents that Ogg infringes:
Ozer: It sounds like you are saying that some of your patent holders own patents that are used in Ogg. Is that correct?
Horn: We believe that there are patent holders who do.
He was about as vague as possible there. Talk about FUDmongering.
They almost certainly don't have any responsibilities (or freedom to talk about the situation)
Sure, the constituent companies may keep him on a short leash, but he can't be stupid enough to believe that making vague statements about Ogg infringing patents isn't going to cast doubt on the use of Ogg, right?
I mean if he just said "I can't legally talk about Ogg," or "I won't talk about Ogg because I can only talk about some aspects but not others," then at least he'd have a leg to stand on. He would have drawn a line about what he would talk about so that he wasn't in a position of bashing "the other guy's formats."
But that's not what he did. He opened his mouth and made a comment about Ogg being infringing. And then later he (with the MPEG-LA) replied with "no comment". It just sounds like he's running away and hiding under the coattails of his organization.
coding is life
I think you misread his stance. This isn't like saying <cue italian mafia accent> "Hey, if you sell our competitors products, you *might* find some trouble..." His point is simply that in today's age, all software encroaches on some patent somewhere. He is right about that. Should it scare people away from Theora? Probably not. Theora is still going to be less patent-encumbered than h.264, but it probably isn't 100%.
There are key facts that pop out in the article:
* xiph sent letters and got no responses. They interpret the lack of response to mean a lack of violation. The real world doesn't work that way. Lawyers are deployed strategically, and it may not be in the patent holder's interest to respond to a letter.
* MPEG-LA's credibility is low, because they license patents. However, you could just as easily say that theora's credibility is just as low, because they have just as much incentive to denigrate the claims of the MPEG-LA.
* why the reference to Apple? It's like a gratuitous call-out to apple h8trs. The MPEG-LA is more than Apple. Is Apple really the new M$?
The validity of patents are determined in the courts. You can send all the letters you want, but it's in the courtroom where the rubber meets the road. Your belief, or lack of belief, has no bearing on the validity or lack of validity of a patent.
I see what you mean that he doesn't say it's MPEG LA people who say they have patents on Theora.
As to the 2nd part, I agree him opening his mouth is to line his pockets and MPEG LAs.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It's all well and good standing around hinting at what a huge compression ratio you have, but sooner or later, you're going to have to open up the throttle.
Happy?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
MP3's licensing is also not too draconian, and thus, there was no reason to innovate around it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If I encode a movie with a (licensed) encoder
Well, in your parentheses there lies the whole thing. It's the MPEG-LA who specify the license for the encoder, and they won't license an encoder to be used to produce material for distribution. I'm not sure whether that kind of restriction on use will fly, but it doesn't seem totally implausible, and it doesn't quite depend on them claiming some kind of patent rights over the data stream itself.
they only require fee's in the event your audence is greater then 100,000 people, and even then it's only $2,500pa. i'd suggest if you are distributing a video to over 100,000 people your making money out of it and your a moron if it's making you less then $2,500pa.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
as i am sure at least one person affiliated with osnews would be yelling the typical "h264 should/must be used, as its the codec that produces the best quality video"...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Hi guys, I've use this software qpsnr to measure PSNR/SSIM of different encodings.
I thought this could be good to share!
Cheers,
Luis Villa (lawyer who works for Mozilla) also wrote an important rebuttal to Thom's post: http://tieguy.org/blog/2010/03/26/more-patent-101-and-some-patent-licensing-201-advanced-class/
They know their subject, and they know it well
They used to know their subject. Over the past couple of years, they've posted a lot of uninformed drivel, mostly authored by Thom Holwerda. It used to be a site I'd check daily. Now I don't even bother with the RSS feed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, I'd expect the opposite. VLC doesn't seem to do a very good job of decoding H.264. If you grab some H.264 from iPlayer, for example, the BBC logo in the corner is crisp and clear with QuickTime but a blurry blob of white with VLC. It may be that VLC also fails to do some post processing with Theora. Theora relies a lot on post processing to get anything approaching good quality.
That said, in a lot of cases, Theora is good enough. If you watch a TV show on DVD that was filmed on video tape, you're lot losing anything from the DVD quality. Watch the same thing on BluRay and you won't see a difference: the source material is simply not good enough for it to make a difference. A huge amount of streamed content is recorded on cheap consumer-grade equipment and transcoded a couple of times. Both H.264 and Theora will give reasonable, but not great, quality for this kind of content because the bottleneck is not the CODEC.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Humm, does the patent really apply if you just distribute a H.264 encoded video but not decode it in any way?
- Raynet --> .
It's anyone shipping an encoder/decoder, not content in H.264. If you use iMovie, Apple's already paid for the H.264 encoder in Quicktime. If you shot the video with a camera that has an H.264 encoder chip, you're covered when that chip manufacture paid the license to produce H.264 on a chip.
The only case where this becomes a problem is if you are using a program like ffmpeg which has not paid for a license and then wish to ship out content in H.264. Same if you are using ffmpeg on the backend of a server to convert video for streaming without paying for a license. For the vast majority of users not on Linux, this is not going to be a problem. Any tool they are likely to be using will be using a H.264 licensed encoder/decoder.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
It does, though. Suppose I encode a movie and pass the encoded data stream on to someone else for distribution. What standing does MPEG-LA have to sue this other person, if they have no rights in the data stream itself?
IIRC, the MPEG patents DO in fact include claims to distributing the data streams. But like I said, I don't think those claims will hold up against a well-lawyered opponent.
That's silly. All the design work and running the simulations together winds up being more expensive that the mask in a lot of cases. (A large part of the expense of the first run of silicon is the lost time to market when you get it wrong.)
Also, you missed the part where I said the risk approached zero because the non-patentable prior art of the simulation showed that the expensive hardware was going to work.
You also missed the part where I said that you can put the exact same "code" (Verilog or VHDL RTL) into an FPGA (and you can buy general-purpose FPGA boards that can be reprogrammed over and over, just like computers can be programmed over and over with software) or into a hard coded chip. Using the FPGA is NOT a simulation; NOT pure math, because you can hook it up to other devices and make it do physical things. Now, you have three implementations -- simulation, implementation in an FPGA via a bitstream that looks just like software, and implementation in gates. (Oh, btw, the tiny little patented part is very small and could be implemented on a multi-chip shuttle run for a couple of thousand dollars in a non-bleeding edge technology.) Oh, and by the way, there is a fourth implementation. You can take either the RTL you are simulating in the computer, and actually hook the computer up to other parts of the final circuit, and now the computer itself (which may be very fast these days compared to the requirements for the hardware you are building) is an actual part of a physical process.
Now, which of these four implementations is or isn't patentable, and why?
i'd suggest if you are distributing a video to over 100,000 people your making money out of it
Not everyone who has uploaded a video to YouTube and got 100,000 views is making money from the video.
We'll come out when the money is good enough.
...and both codecs will be basically used to post on Youtube and Dailymotion:
recordings of dancing kittens, taken with camera-phone, and which have gone through several stage of destructive re-compression set at atrociously low quality levels.
To the point that the result is filled with artefacts. And MPEG-1 could have achieved a good-enough quality on similar bitrate.
In my opinion, the whole debate about codec quality is irrelevant given the current main usage of videos.
It will only become important once HD TV channels streaming HD contents on their websites get *really* widespread.
By then, I really, really hope that some newer, disruptively better and patent free codec emerges. Big supporters of open web such as Google have the technical and financial capability of making such thing happen. I'm still looking in the general direction of wavelets, but perhaps there are other better stuff.
Until then Theora is a good enough stop-gag measure, that will provide a nice alternative for the subset of the market which specifically needs a patent-free solution. Even if that means storing 2 copies of the video media (most websites actually store much more different versions). Even if the second Theora copy is actually at *lower bitrate* than the first "HQ H.264" copy.
Bad quality video (of dancing kittens) is better than no video at all or continued reliance on 3rd party closed software for the open-source crowd.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
As far as recommended tools: Firefox 3.5/3.6 is the best cross platform recommendation I've heard.
I don't care about cross platform, and I can't make either Firefox or Opera display the video full-screen, which means I can't fairly test it.
None of this is true:
H.264 can deliver watchable video in less than 1/2 the bitrate...
A fair comparison is more like 10-30% less, depending on the content. The comparisons which show 1/2 the bitrate are for an H.264 profile that most devices can't play (e.g iPhones), and that's not useful.
H.264 can deliver high quality video (at higher bitrates) that Theora can't match AT ANY RATE.
Where did you get that from? Of course it can. Unless you mean truncation artifacts? I'm guessing you didn't
H.264 can be decoded on innumerable devices.
So can Theora. You don't need hardware to decode a VGA 30fps Theora stream on modern smartphones. It'll manage it fine entirely in software.
There are numerous implementations of H.264, and just 1 of Theora.
Is this a point in favor or against? There is only one implementation of gcc. There is only one implementation of Vorbis (actually, I've written another myself). There is only one implementation of WebKit, but hey that powers a large fraction of browsers in the world. What is this supposed to demonstrate?
H.264 is developing and improving quickly, while Theora continues to stagnate.
The H.264 specification is set in stone and won't change. Implementations for both are being actively developed. The Theora spec could change (minor or major version upgrade) just like it could for H.264. This is surely just your opinion and not fact.