After years of ripping DVDs and occasionly trying out Theora, my conclusion is that Theora is crap. Definitely better than H263, but not even close to H264.
So with that in mind, I make the following points:
1. Greg Maxwell's comparison does invalidate You Tube's claim that quality would suffer. Theora is quite close to YouTube's encode, and H264's default deblocking actually makes me prefer Theora in some instances.
2. This does not at all show that Theora is better. It's not. YouTube's encoder has to be fast enough to encode all the video submitted to YouTube, something like an hour every minute. Comparing carefully encoded x264 with carefully encoded Theora would be a fair comparison.
And final, a suggestion.
3. H264 should the same thing Blender did and makes the codec copyright and patent free using the street performer protocol. I would certainly donate at least $100 to free H264.
Of course, the suggestion is probably bad business wise. I'd like to know how much money is being made of patent licensing each year.
Slashdot Mirror
After years of ripping DVDs and occasionly trying out Theora, my conclusion is that Theora is crap. Definitely better than H263, but not even close to H264.
So with that in mind, I make the following points:
1. Greg Maxwell's comparison does invalidate You Tube's claim that quality would suffer. Theora is quite close to YouTube's encode, and H264's default deblocking actually makes me prefer Theora in some instances.
2. This does not at all show that Theora is better. It's not. YouTube's encoder has to be fast enough to encode all the video submitted to YouTube, something like an hour every minute. Comparing carefully encoded x264 with carefully encoded Theora would be a fair comparison.
And final, a suggestion.
3. H264 should the same thing Blender did and makes the codec copyright and patent free using the street performer protocol. I would certainly donate at least $100 to free H264.
Of course, the suggestion is probably bad business wise. I'd like to know how much money is being made of patent licensing each year.