It certainly can be an issue on any system. My signature refers to the often claimed advantage of tight and seamless integration if you get your whole stack from Microsoft as opposed to a cobbled together GNU/Linux distro.
Thanks for ignoring the needs of content providers who aren't Google an Vimeo. You might only care about end users, Mozilla also cares about web developers who aren't comfortable with the 2016 deadline or who want to charge for content, but aren't big enough to pay MPEG LA for the privilege. If being used by Youtube is your definition of winning then H.264 has indeed won, but for many people finish line is default support in all common browsers, because we care about being able to publish our own videos more then playing Youtube's.
Ogg Theora is complete market failure that nobody actually uses for anything. End of discussion, period.
You can't end a discussion with false assertions, Theora isn't in widespread use. But it is used in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Wikipedia, Dailymotion, and a small number (for now) of comercial games. Thus the "nobody actually uses for anything" part is demonstratively wrong and you can go back under the bridge.
The trick here is improving on them without stepping onto the same patents that make H.264 so good. Why'd you think Theora still sucks in terms of quality/bitrate? Various techniques of getting it better (much better even) are widely known for quite some time. It's just that they're all patented.
It's much easier to do with encoder improvements, which is what parent meant. Thusnelda was a significant improvement over 1.0, Ptalarbvorm seems to have even more in the works. It's improving, and it doesn't really suck, it's just not as good. The Xiph guys know at least a few ways to easily improve the format without violating any patents, contrary to your claims, the real reason not to do it is compatibility.
He did, you just shifted the goalposts. Hardware support will come if there is demand, if HTML5 would have picked Theora for a baseline codec (I hope Apple chokes on their patent royalties) hardware support wouldn't have taken long. This is about creating demand not going with the patent stream.
In practice you want to claim both the incredible complexity of H.264 (there is room to grow!) and and the embedded capability (it just works on the iPhone!*)
* Only baseline profile witch doesn't have as much room to grow. Additional restrictions such as a maximum resolution of 640x480 may apply.
None of these technical features matter, as most people won't have any idea what you mean.
Well I'll be damned, I thought people who do know what the fuck is going on should decide how we should use HTML5, then again with all the absurd claims of H.264 being in the feature while Theora is in the stone age...
Well, sorry to say, but with that phrasing Xiph is closer to the thruth. Current H.264 encoders are better, but let's not forget that we are more or less constrained to Baseline Profile sue to mobile devices. No sane person is claiming order of magnitude differences. Both have room to grow. Few expect H.264 encoders to become orders of magnitudes better.
Therefore "horrid" and "light-years behind" are fanboy (don't ask me why there are codec fanboys) exaggerations.
It seems that just about anyone with enough free time can elect themselves to close bugs, request more irrelevant information, request you to re-reproduce the bug every time anything changes, no matter how unrelated and generally make reporting bugs against Ubuntu a pointless activity.
Ah, I see, that's the only outcome I passionately care for as well. If I can post videos without having to worry about either patents or playback problems then I have won. Of course strictly pushing for one option seems to be about the only way to possibly meet in the middle, so I'm not upset about Mozilla's approach to this one any more then about RMS.
Uhh, what do you think GStreamer is on most Linux distros??
Yet another library. It does not have the status of DirectShow or QT, if that's what you are alluding to.
Maintenance and debugging holds, sorry. I'm sure they have a bunch of experimental features floating in the trunk, so? And some third party gstreamer plugins that are wrapping yet other things? I do not want that in standard builds. Not because of ideological, but because there is more then enough blame flying around because Adobe can't get their shit together, yet more behind the scene crashes and what not? Stability matters.
You are thinking of JPEG2000, since JPEG doesn't have this stupid notion of profiles. There was some saber rattling with JPEG as well, but it never went anywhere.
What does Theora do that H.264 can't, aside from taking more bandwidth to get the same visual quality? Nothing.
That is not strictly true. It has one bitstream that all compatible decoders can understand. With H.264 you have to worry about profiles, and in practice that means that you might as well consider the baseline profile to be H.264 and forget about any advanced capabilities, interesting approach to a "standard".
There are patches for Firefox, but Mozilla refuses to use them because they want to make this a "Theora or nothing" battle, even though they'll never win.
The problem is that Quicktime and DirectShow don't support theora or vorbis by default, so hopefully Mozilla/Wikipedia/anyone else who cares can get them popular enough that Microsoft and Apple have to finally support some free codecs.
I'm not asking them to ship H.264. I'm asking them to support an open framework so that I can make the choice.
That is an implementation detail (even if it has legal consequences), you still want them to do X instead of Y.
Isn't FOSS supposed to be all about giving more choices to the user (sometimes, at the expense of the freedom of developer)?
Yes, in the sense that you have the source code and modify it to your hearts content. No, in the sense that the developers might not spend their energy on creating, maintaining and debugging your pet feature.
And this is even leaving aside the fact that using system codecs is a Good Thing for purely technical reasons [..]
Portability and ease of maintenance are technical reasons to use cross platform libraries, none of the cross platform browsers use OS provided codecs in Firefox uses libtheora, Chrome uses ffmpeg, Opera uses gstreamer, even Safari carries QT over to Windows. It's just that Firefox decided not to use a multi-backend library, probably because there it doesn't make much sense do so when you can only distribute (as in include with the browser) one backend that is suitable for internet video.
One could argue thats why we need wider support for Theora, DSP and GPU acceleration isn't handed down like the ten commandments, with a little extra manpower Theora could have both.
Right, because a software update can create a hardware Theora decoder *rolls his eyes*.
You must think you made a good argument... The reality is that the decoding doesn't happen in hardware, processor intensive parts of the decoding are accelerated in hardware, said operations are common across many codecs. Experimental hardware accelerated decoding for Theora has been done with existing hardware. It's not a roll-eyes-at problem, it's a manpower problem.
A lot of people just don't get the problem and constraints on mobile devices here - it isn't just that the codec is technically inferior, meaning that it requires more processing and decoding than h.264, it is the availability of hardware decoders.
Bullshit, you are just talking out of your ass. The often cited technical inferiority of Theora has nothing to do with higher processing requirements, its the lower complexity that hinders the encoding quality. Theora is considerably lighter then H.264, where, even with hardware acceleration, you have to fuck with low complexity profiles.
For most equipment, this isn't possible, it would require a new revision of the hardware, and all previous revisions wouldn't have access to the Theora content.
So which devices have H.264 decoding done in dedicated chips as opposed to using DSPs for acceleration?
If there is one thing I'm not forgetting, it's the install base of XP.
And Safari and Opera use the OSs facilities, as every sane design would.
Wrong and wrong. Safari uses QT, definitely not an OS facility on anything but OS X. Opera uses gstreamer, which might, or might not be part of a modern Linux distro, but is uncommon outside of free software circles.
In fact, if you are working cross platform, heavily using OS specific frameworks is not as sane as it might sound.
Now since H.264 is installed on EVERY Mac and modern Windows, only Firefox will be left out in the cold.
Now since H.264 is installed on EVERY Mac and modern Windows, only Firefox will be left out in the cold.
Firefox has a bigger install base then OS X, so all caps 'every' isn't that impressive. Modern Windows is still only part of Windows.
Serves them right for making it a holy war, and only supporting their “one true codec”.
I fail to see how Microsoft and Apple pushing their single codec (yay patent royalties) is any better.
Well, if I had to use a fallback I'd use stats from my site, not what you feel is right or wrong. My sites stats, weirdly enough, indicate that almost everyone has Java and about 80% have flash, I don't know if that's Flash blockers or a problem with the stat tracker, but either way I'm less likely to believe Adobe's numbers after that.
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It certainly can be an issue on any system. My signature refers to the often claimed advantage of tight and seamless integration if you get your whole stack from Microsoft as opposed to a cobbled together GNU/Linux distro.
Thanks for ignoring the needs of content providers who aren't Google an Vimeo. You might only care about end users, Mozilla also cares about web developers who aren't comfortable with the 2016 deadline or who want to charge for content, but aren't big enough to pay MPEG LA for the privilege. If being used by Youtube is your definition of winning then H.264 has indeed won, but for many people finish line is default support in all common browsers, because we care about being able to publish our own videos more then playing Youtube's.
You can't end a discussion with false assertions, Theora isn't in widespread use. But it is used in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Wikipedia, Dailymotion, and a small number (for now) of comercial games. Thus the "nobody actually uses for anything" part is demonstratively wrong and you can go back under the bridge.
It's much easier to do with encoder improvements, which is what parent meant. Thusnelda was a significant improvement over 1.0, Ptalarbvorm seems to have even more in the works. It's improving, and it doesn't really suck, it's just not as good. The Xiph guys know at least a few ways to easily improve the format without violating any patents, contrary to your claims, the real reason not to do it is compatibility.
He did, you just shifted the goalposts. Hardware support will come if there is demand, if HTML5 would have picked Theora for a baseline codec (I hope Apple chokes on their patent royalties) hardware support wouldn't have taken long. This is about creating demand not going with the patent stream.
In practice you want to claim both the incredible complexity of H.264 (there is room to grow!) and and the embedded capability (it just works on the iPhone!*)
* Only baseline profile witch doesn't have as much room to grow. Additional restrictions such as a maximum resolution of 640x480 may apply.
Well I'll be damned, I thought people who do know what the fuck is going on should decide how we should use HTML5, then again with all the absurd claims of H.264 being in the feature while Theora is in the stone age...
Hyperbole much? None of what you said there has any truth to it, why should we read the rest?
Well, sorry to say, but with that phrasing Xiph is closer to the thruth. Current H.264 encoders are better, but let's not forget that we are more or less constrained to Baseline Profile sue to mobile devices. No sane person is claiming order of magnitude differences. Both have room to grow. Few expect H.264 encoders to become orders of magnitudes better.
Therefore "horrid" and "light-years behind" are fanboy (don't ask me why there are codec fanboys) exaggerations.
If the something else actually does what you want, that is not a given.
It seems that just about anyone with enough free time can elect themselves to close bugs, request more irrelevant information, request you to re-reproduce the bug every time anything changes, no matter how unrelated and generally make reporting bugs against Ubuntu a pointless activity.
What does video storage have to do with a paperless office? Unless you are printing the individual frames on sheets of paper that is...
Ah, I see, that's the only outcome I passionately care for as well. If I can post videos without having to worry about either patents or playback problems then I have won. Of course strictly pushing for one option seems to be about the only way to possibly meet in the middle, so I'm not upset about Mozilla's approach to this one any more then about RMS.
Yet another library. It does not have the status of DirectShow or QT, if that's what you are alluding to.
Maintenance and debugging holds, sorry. I'm sure they have a bunch of experimental features floating in the trunk, so? And some third party gstreamer plugins that are wrapping yet other things? I do not want that in standard builds. Not because of ideological, but because there is more then enough blame flying around because Adobe can't get their shit together, yet more behind the scene crashes and what not? Stability matters.
You are thinking of JPEG2000, since JPEG doesn't have this stupid notion of profiles. There was some saber rattling with JPEG as well, but it never went anywhere.
I'm more worried about all browsers being able to play Theora, so I don't have to worry when I use video on my site.
Is that why YouTube encodes with shitty settings? I do believe they value CPU more then bandwith, otherwise they'd take advantage of the often cited superiority of H.264, instead of encoding at the same "horrible" quality that Theora provides.
That is not strictly true. It has one bitstream that all compatible decoders can understand. With H.264 you have to worry about profiles, and in practice that means that you might as well consider the baseline profile to be H.264 and forget about any advanced capabilities, interesting approach to a "standard".
They can't win, but hopefully they can?
That is an implementation detail (even if it has legal consequences), you still want them to do X instead of Y.
Yes, in the sense that you have the source code and modify it to your hearts content. No, in the sense that the developers might not spend their energy on creating, maintaining and debugging your pet feature.
Portability and ease of maintenance are technical reasons to use cross platform libraries, none of the cross platform browsers use OS provided codecs in Firefox uses libtheora, Chrome uses ffmpeg, Opera uses gstreamer, even Safari carries QT over to Windows. It's just that Firefox decided not to use a multi-backend library, probably because there it doesn't make much sense do so when you can only distribute (as in include with the browser) one backend that is suitable for internet video.
One could argue thats why we need wider support for Theora, DSP and GPU acceleration isn't handed down like the ten commandments, with a little extra manpower Theora could have both.
You must think you made a good argument... The reality is that the decoding doesn't happen in hardware, processor intensive parts of the decoding are accelerated in hardware, said operations are common across many codecs. Experimental hardware accelerated decoding for Theora has been done with existing hardware. It's not a roll-eyes-at problem, it's a manpower problem.
Bullshit, you are just talking out of your ass. The often cited technical inferiority of Theora has nothing to do with higher processing requirements, its the lower complexity that hinders the encoding quality. Theora is considerably lighter then H.264, where, even with hardware acceleration, you have to fuck with low complexity profiles.
So which devices have H.264 decoding done in dedicated chips as opposed to using DSPs for acceleration?
Fuck those eggs, we need chickens!
If there is one thing I'm not forgetting, it's the install base of XP.
Wrong and wrong. Safari uses QT, definitely not an OS facility on anything but OS X. Opera uses gstreamer, which might, or might not be part of a modern Linux distro, but is uncommon outside of free software circles.
In fact, if you are working cross platform, heavily using OS specific frameworks is not as sane as it might sound.
Now since H.264 is installed on EVERY Mac and modern Windows, only Firefox will be left out in the cold.
Firefox has a bigger install base then OS X, so all caps 'every' isn't that impressive. Modern Windows is still only part of Windows.
I fail to see how Microsoft and Apple pushing their single codec (yay patent royalties) is any better.
Well, if I had to use a fallback I'd use stats from my site, not what you feel is right or wrong. My sites stats, weirdly enough, indicate that almost everyone has Java and about 80% have flash, I don't know if that's Flash blockers or a problem with the stat tracker, but either way I'm less likely to believe Adobe's numbers after that.