Google Funds Ogg Theora For Mobile

An anonymous reader writes "Google has decided to fund the development of Theora optimized for ARM processors. The article on the Open Source at Google blog notes the importance of having a universal baseline video codec for the Web: 'What is clear though, is that we need a baseline to work from — one standard format that (if all else fails) everything can fall back to. This doesn't need to be the most complex format, or the most advertised format, or even the format with the most companies involved in its creation. All it needs to do is to be available, everywhere. The codec in the frame for this is Ogg Theora, a spin off of the VP3 codec released into the wild by On2 a couple of years ago.'"

Comments

Re:Dirac

[TheRaven64]

CPU load. Theora is based on VP3, which is old. It was open sourced in 2004, but VP3 first shipped in 2000. Back in 2000, I had a 450MHz K6-2, and a lot of people I knew had slower machines. Now, a typical handheld is faster than that machine. Theora, like VP3, relies a lot on postprocessing passes for quality. This has the advantage that you can just not bother on slower machines, and get a slightly worse picture but with a lower CPU requirement.

Dirac, in contrast, needs at least a 2GHz CPU to play back. It's patent free and looks great, but the CPU load is huge. There have been efforts to offload a lot of it onto the GPU, which is nice for the desktop but doesn't help older machines and handhelds (except the latest generation). The BBC is working with vendors to get Dirac implemented in hardware, but it won't be ubiquitous for quite a few years.

Dirac also doesn't perform as well as Theora at low bitrates. This is very important for web streaming. Dirac is great for situations where bandwidth and CPU power are plentiful, but Theora makes more sense as a lowest common denominator solution. Ideally, you'd see both supported; Dirac for high quality, Theora for fallback.

Re:OGG newbie question

[nxtw]

How does OGG compare to MPEG4?

Theora is perhaps better than H.263 and MPEG-2 (from the mid 90s), but does not come close to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC or VC-1. (The frozen Theora bitstream format is lacking many features found in H.264 and VC-1.) Results might be similar to H.263+/MPEG-4 ASP.

The Ogg container also has some documented flaws.

Note that there are many sites which perform misleading or flawed comparisons of the two; for example, they might compare the result from YouTube's H.264 encoder with a lossy source (which optimizes for encoding speed) to a locally ran Theora encode with a lossless source.

Since OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 come with H.264 decoding, and Windows 7 supports H.264 hardware decoding with compatible hardware from any source, I recommend sticking with H.264. (OS X 10.6's H.264 hardware decoding support appears to be limited to videos played in QuickTime X from MPEG4 or QuickTime container files on systems with nVidia 9400M GPUs or newer, even though Macs with capable GPUs started appearing in 2007.)