I guess they could always add "radical and incompatible" changes to the format as newer "profiles" of that format. While only newer versions of decoders would be able to deal with them, requiring updating of ones plug-ins isn't a new concept by any means.
One thing for sure, hardware accel for Theora will only come after (if) there is wide adoption of the format.
The only likely caveat to this that I can see would be Theora decode via OpenCL produced by the community.
You may have a point with respect to some portable devices, but I would think that with it comes to editing of video by studios, etc. any lossy format wouldn't be what they'd want to be using until after there finished, and then render the results to various formats.
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Way to miss the point completely and turn it into an anti-Linux rant.
I guess they could always add "radical and incompatible" changes to the format as newer "profiles" of that format. While only newer versions of decoders would be able to deal with them, requiring updating of ones plug-ins isn't a new concept by any means.
With any luck, the findings pointed to by http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo8.html may lead to better quality/bit-rate ratios in the future.
One thing for sure, hardware accel for Theora will only come after (if) there is wide adoption of the format. The only likely caveat to this that I can see would be Theora decode via OpenCL produced by the community.
You may have a point with respect to some portable devices, but I would think that with it comes to editing of video by studios, etc. any lossy format wouldn't be what they'd want to be using until after there finished, and then render the results to various formats.
You don't think the optimizations for h.264 will reach the point of diminishing returns before Theora?