Truthiness refers to a specific kind of lie-- a lie that sounds true, and that a large segment of people really want to be true. The kind of thing that's close enough to true for AM radio talk show hosts.
And now... I'll get off your damned lawn. Don't forget to take your teeth out before falling asleep.
The low latency makes more interactive applications possible. By way of illustration, the total algorithmic delay of an Opus or CELT stream is approximately equivalent to the time it takes sound to travel from you to someone standing five feet away.
As a Theora developer, this is news to me. Would you mind mentioning who this buddy is so I can go back through my mail queue and verify that you're just making shit up?
I know you're lying, as regardless of what our response would have been it most certainly would _not_ have been, "ssshhh don't tell anyone".
This whole thing is really about bad blood between Xiph and the mplayer folks. Once, long ago, I made disparaging remarks about a particular mplayer developer's extensive collection of ass hats, and they declared war. This stopped being about facts or reason years ago. Here's the last blog thread that got completely hijacked by the anti-Ogg container wingnuts. It's a hell of a read:
So, rehashing this yet again: The Anti-Ogg bullet points [Not going to bother with complete sentences, because I've wasted too much typing on this recently]:
1) A few of the mplayer/x264 hackers are right pissed that Ogg and Theora are getting all this attention when x264 is so obviously superior. That simply cannot stand. Since only America has patents and there are no computers there anyway, nobody should have to worry about them. Stick it to The Man! (How very ironic, Xiph being considered 'The Man' by folks contributing to an h264 encoder).
2) Xiph should immediately drop Ogg for [insert container here], breaking millions of hardware decoders and hundreds of millions of software decoders:
a) the [patented] mp4/MOV container is one suggestion they actually make seriously. Never mind adding 'willful infringement' to breaking the entire installed software/hardware base, this choice would totally redeem Xiph in their eyes. The benefit: by their own figures, it would reduce container overhead from.7% to.3%.
(Except that number is wrong. I found later that DonDiego screwed up his mp4 overhead figures at the link above; I had simply assumed he got his container numbers right. The mp4 file in his example has almost identical container overhead to the Ogg, a shade under 1%. His demultiplexed mpeg audio and video had framing in them, so it made it appear the mp4 container overhead was much smaller when he subtracted their file sizes.)
b) OK, mp4 is patented and no better, fine, Xiph should have just used Matroska from the beginning. Despite the fact that Ogg and Vorbis predated it by about five years (also mkv's not been able to interleave until just recently, which == no streaming). This is not to say you can't put Theora and Vorbis in Matroska. It's even a good idea! I've come to like MKV. But for streaming, Ogg is still much easier to deal with. Ogg was designed to stream, mkv was not.
c) OK, so, mp4 and Matroska are right out for streaming, Xiph should use Nut, which is the system they designed. Nut came ten years after Ogg was already widespread. And looks almost exactly like Ogg. Which is not to say there aren't things about it I like that improved on the Ogg approach. Eg, the packet length encoding is better. It has a conditional checksum coverage feature I had never considered, etc. At some point we'll make those changes when that wouldn't mean completely abandoning any chance we have at adoption just to save a fraction of a percent and add... no new features.
d) but.. but.. even FLV is better! OK, at this point I can't even entertain the arguement.
3) OK, maybe not adopt another container, but Xiph should immediately improve/change Ogg for, breaking millions of hardware decoders and hundreds of millions of software decoders for a 'better' implementation that won't actually give users any features they don't have now. FOSS need _tools_, not us wasting time overoptimizing something they couldn't care less about.
3) 64 bit timestamp! OMG, waste! Wait, mov/mp4 uses 64 bit stamps... Also, plenty of things in Ogg use a full byte instead of one bit because the container assumes octet alignment. Alignment makes it much faster/easier to deal with (you don't need a bitpacker to read pages, and you don't have to repack packet data to embed it into the page). Remember, all the completely unacc
I'm not worried about there being a ton of later comparisons as Theora continues to improve:-)
In general, we recommend people not use non-default settings with our codecs. Unlike many other projects, we put effort into making sure the defaults are correct.
That said, this is one case where the Theora default was suboptimal because it was the wrong use case. We need to reword the way these options are specified. For bitrate manged modes, there's two common ways to use them: Very tightly constrained rate for a fixed-rate channel (like ISDN or low-rate DSL) and a more relaxed management that is simply trying to hit some size over the space of the whole movie (usually a two-pass mode, fit-a-DVD-on-a-CD type use). Right now, the Theora tools all do the first and that's how your test was performed. The h264 was encoded with the second. So that's a penalty to the constrained encoder.
VBR vs VBR is a more accurate direct test of encoder capability. Don't get me wrong, x264 is going to win that test too, just not by as much.
Only one point I wanted to mention (since the article and comments have all been--- oddly balanced for Slashdot)
The article points out that current Thusnelda is not as high quality as the best available h264 encoder at high bitrate video and unlimited encoding time. No argument there, it's true. Thusnelda still has a ways to go, despite the distance it's come; the current alpha still has no Adaptive Quant whatsoever, which will go in before final release.
However, the vast majority of users are not using x264. If you look at the h264 YouTube encoder, which has been designed for speed rather than 'work as long as you like to optimize the output', suddenly Theora is exactly on-par. In short--- Theora is every bit as good as the way that the real world is going to end up using h264 for the forseeable future. And the users of that 'inferior' h264 encoder seem pretty happy with it.
Anyway, this isn't disagreeing with anything you've said, it's simply a practical way to look at the difference.
"Ogg" is actually a term from an early internet game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogging
Theora is named after Theora Jones, a secondary heroine character from the movie 'Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future' about a dystopian future where video media is overwhelming, centralized, oppressive, dangerous, and an off switch on a television is illegal:
"Xiph" is actually from the Greek ξÎÏÎÏ (sword) by way of 'Xiphophorus' (sword-bearing, pseudolatin?) from the genus name of a fish (Xiphophorus helleri). Which is where I picked it up in middle school. I'd been using it for my software projects since I was 14 or so and by the time Xiph.Org was a real thing [many many years later] I wanted to change the name to something less silly and my co-founders voted me down. They liked Xiph. It became the precedent-setting silly name.
Vorbis is from Terry Pratchett's _Small Gods_ and I dearly hope Mr. Pratchett considers it a compliment. It was meant as tribute to my favorite fictional villain, Archdeacon Vorbis. "A mind like a steel marble"
Well, one tester (and Greg's graph was generated to rebut his graph) was converting each output frame to PNG and then feeding them into one of a number of PSNR tools one by one to get a PSNR result. The conversion from YCb'Cr' to RGB is lossy, but apparently this particular author didn't know that.
He was also using multiple PSNR tools because some were mysteriously not working with some video inputs. Given that there's no one standardized way to calculate PSNR, that led to additional data lulz.
And for x264, he apparently didn't generate his own numbers, he just used someone else's published numbers.
Anyhow, He reported that x264 was 30-ishdB (!) better than Theora. Wha? If every Theora frame was black, that still wouldn't account for that much difference. YUV12 is only 40-45dB deep!
In other words, the whole point of the graph was originally to illustrate and rebut these errors, and it turned out to be a nice regression test too.
Also, for the record, the x264 curve is not perfectly smooth, but that it's as smooth as it is attests to the fact that it's a nicely tuned codec. That Theora is lumpier is one indication it still has more tuning to be done.
Also, Greg's response below is way more levelheaded than mine. He actually collected the data himself (so has more detailed, accurate and first-hand knowledge) and he also probably hasn't been drinking whiskey all night.
Uh, this article here on Slashdot is about *brand new* improvements to Theora, how it is vastly better from original Theora of even one year ago, and also about how a really old broken version of ffmpeg was also causing really terrible quality problems....
So you post several year old screenshots made with an old, unknown [but definitely broken due to age] version of ffmpeg.
You have to measure the PSNR of each codec with the same tool, silly (and avoid doing colorspace conversions which are lossy in the interchange. Keep the output in YCb'Cr' format). If you're using the x264 encoder's reported PSNR *cough*ahem* it's known to be wrong. It always reports way higher than other tools, like it's forgetting chroma is subsampled or its log-space algebra is just wrong or something.
Let me check myself with the clip linked in the article....mmmm lessee.... yep! that's what you're doing. So, BZZZT, no gold star, try again.
How is that any different than a company selling a physical product deeply discounted or below cost for an initial period of time in order to gain market share?
That practice is called 'dumping' and is illegal for most goods and services, at least in the United States.
Why would either Slashdot or Streisand apply here? Just wondering. Slashdot traffic isn't exactly likely to bother MITnet much, and I'm hardly likely to censor my own post or have MIT remove it.
I *had* been thinking of adding some gradient improvement screencap examples though.
"That didn't come across so well in the presentation. That is the qualification wasn't apparent - it sounded like you were saying it was bad, period."
That document was an internal identification of weak areas. It was intended to be 100% critical. We don't need to keep telling ourselves within Xiph and RedHat etc what's good about it.
"But the legal teams of every major corporation that wants to use it [MPEG]? I imagine Sony's given it a look or two along the way. Just as an example."
Sony is a bad example as they've attempted to undermine MPEG with a number of spectacularly ineffective market fragmentation tactics. However, the major supporters of MPEG tend to be MPEG themselves. Those who use MPEG want to avoid Microsoft. Real is widely perceived to be dying. We're considered a risk, mainly because MPEG says so. There are no other options left.
"Honestly, I wish you well - we're on the same side!"
np. I just don't deal in weasel-words is all...
"but I respectfully disagree that Theora's ready to be standardized right now today."
Not true. It's been mature/ready for a very long time. VP3 is actually slightly older than Vorbis. It fills its niche perfectly ; its theoretical performance, which we're closing in on, is very good compared to how much more 'modern' (but much heavier) codecs perform today, and it does it at a fraction of the complexity. It's perfect for lightweight implementations and ideal for the tag.
Hi. I'm the 'inventor' (not really, On2 originally wrote vp3 and we're riffing from there. I'm the hacker working on it now).
1) That is in comparison to h264. And I call it 'embarrassing' because Theora *could* easily be just as good, but it isn't right now. That document is a call to arms and because of it, a new encoder is rapidly taking shape. Its improvements are already making it back to mainline. We'll catch up rapidly.
2) "It's safe to say that MPEG4 and it's codecs have been more thoroughly researched than Theora" Bullshit. MPEG is simultaneously inefficient and narrow in their focus. MPEG-4 / h.264 is a decades old chassis with a few recent research papers tacked on. _Several of the items I identified as 'embarrassing' and 'obsolete' ironically apply to MPEG-4 too_.
3) "I absolutely, positively promise you that Youtube serves more video than Wikipedia, and they don't stream Theora." Irrelevant. This is an argument against Google (Altavista dwarfed them), Microsoft (IBM and even Apple dwarfed them), Toyota (GM dwarfed them), etc.
"As much as I like the idea of Theora, I'm glad we don't have to be saddled with the reality of it."
Why does everyone here think this is a battle of individuals? These are huge multinationals and your puny insignificant selves don't even appear on their radars. Sure, the public will indeedy benefit from a standard multimedia codec set with no proprietary/encumbered strings attached, but that is entirely irrelevant in the process of making money. They're *for profit corporations* doing what for-profit corporations do. Making money. And that is entirely orthogonal to morals, public good, or even competent engineering. They don't have any interest whatsoever in what you think.
Although we're a non-profit (and exist on behalf of the common good), our argument in this battle happens to concern rallying all the sub-$100M companies that will be frozen out by the very biggest players getting their way. When big companies win, little companies generally lose. Although the little compaines greatly out-mass the big companies, they tend to be fragmented. If we can get them all together to fight for a uniform technology recommendation, way more people win.
But you might want to run for cover, 'cause Godzilla has his squishin' boots on.
The difference is that no Ogg codec has never involved in litigation, submarine patent or otherwise. MPEG *has* been the victim of submarine patents. Several times. As well as patent squabbles among the MPEG LA members. Several times. As well as patent squabbles between patent holders inside and outside the LA. Several times.
Securing a patent license from the LA does not protect the licensee against patent claims, as Gateway Computer just learned when Lucent sued [and won] for MPEG patent infringement despite the fact that Gateway had licensed MPEG from the LA...
I wrote that in the context of the frankest possible assessment of Theora toward bringing it up to 'best-in-class' status. Have a look at the development resources being put into it right now, especially the 'theora-exp' and 'theora-thusnelda' branches. Thusnelda is the most active, and has just moved from the 'remove all the dodge' phase into 'rebuild from the good' phase. Theora-exp is a complete implementation directly from spec with no relationship to the original VP3 code (Thusnelda is a hybrid of pieces of the original VP3 code, pieces of theora-exp, and my own optimization work). The improvements realized in exp and thusnelda are already moving into the mainline.
We fully intend to bring Theora's performance up to par with the current state of the art while maintaining a much lower complexity requirement. That's one piece missing from the discussion so far; Theora is a much simpler codec that h264 or MPEG4, yet we expect it to stay competetive for a number of years yet. You'd think that would be important to mobile manufacturers. It is certainly important to OLPC. You can encode and decode Theora HD video entirely in C; the others require aggressive assembly to acheive realtime.
Anyway, the link you provide is an unflinching, critical identification of inadequacies and we're knocking off those inadequacies one by one (several of those 'inadequacies' exist in other codecs, BTW, including MPEG4 and h264). Theora has followed an arc very similar to Mozilla after it was cast off by the dying netscape. We've just reached the point where it's picking up development speed because people realize, oh shit, we actually need this...
> thing is, we demand bigger and better and the power requirements are getting higher and higher.
I've designed and built switching PSUs. There's nothing unreasonable about the power demands we're asking of the basic designs. The only real stress is the 'How cheap can we make it?' question.
For about the past twenty years, the typical PC PSU is about 400W and the typical server PSU is 800-1000W. That hasn't really changed. The power supplies themselves have gotten alot more efficient. Ooodles and oodles better. Today's designs are way ahead of 20 years ago.
I have a few RAIDs built of consumer drives... If you lost 20% of your hard drives under warranty, you were doing better than I'd expect. All my boxes are overcooled and on-drive temp readings are in the low thirties Celcius... and I still lose 20-30% of the hard drives within two months of usage (depending on batch; the worst recent case was a 9-drive RAID5 built from Samsung Spinpoint drives, that one had four of nine die first month, then about half of the RMAs failed. Of the drives that did not fail, no errors after three years).
That's not exactly true; that's a guaranteed 7 years at a given temperature extreme and max-rated-spec usage pattern. Essentially, in a situation where the cap is being abused at the very limits of its ratings 24/7, it is rated to last seven years. The specific criteria of the test are far in excess of what the cap will see in real usage. Good engineers spec caps that are overkill for any given use.
Slashdot Mirror
Truthiness refers to a specific kind of lie-- a lie that sounds true, and that a large segment of people really want to be true. The kind of thing that's close enough to true for AM radio talk show hosts.
And now... I'll get off your damned lawn. Don't forget to take your teeth out before falling asleep.
...is at the top of the first Opus/CELT demo page:
http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/celt/demo.html
The low latency makes more interactive applications possible. By way of illustration, the total algorithmic delay of an Opus or CELT stream is approximately equivalent to the time it takes sound to travel from you to someone standing five feet away.
As a Theora developer, this is news to me. Would you mind mentioning who this buddy is so I can go back through my mail queue and verify that you're just making shit up?
I know you're lying, as regardless of what our response would have been it most certainly would _not_ have been, "ssshhh don't tell anyone".
This whole thing is really about bad blood between Xiph and the mplayer folks. Once, long ago, I made disparaging remarks about a particular mplayer developer's extensive collection of ass hats, and they declared war. This stopped being about facts or reason years ago. Here's the last blog thread that got completely hijacked by the anti-Ogg container wingnuts. It's a hell of a read:
http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/02/20/googles-challenges-of-freeing-vp8/
So, rehashing this yet again: The Anti-Ogg bullet points [Not going to bother with complete sentences, because I've wasted too much typing on this recently]:
1) A few of the mplayer/x264 hackers are right pissed that Ogg and Theora are getting all this attention when x264 is so obviously superior. That simply cannot stand. Since only America has patents and there are no computers there anyway, nobody should have to worry about them. Stick it to The Man! (How very ironic, Xiph being considered 'The Man' by folks contributing to an h264 encoder).
2) Xiph should immediately drop Ogg for [insert container here], breaking millions of hardware decoders and hundreds of millions of software decoders:
a) the [patented] mp4/MOV container is one suggestion they actually make seriously. Never mind adding 'willful infringement' to breaking the entire installed software/hardware base, this choice would totally redeem Xiph in their eyes. The benefit: by their own figures, it would reduce container overhead from .7% to .3%.
(Except that number is wrong. I found later that DonDiego screwed up his mp4 overhead figures at the link above; I had simply assumed he got his container numbers right. The mp4 file in his example has almost identical container overhead to the Ogg, a shade under 1%. His demultiplexed mpeg audio and video had framing in them, so it made it appear the mp4 container overhead was much smaller when he subtracted their file sizes.)
b) OK, mp4 is patented and no better, fine, Xiph should have just used Matroska from the beginning. Despite the fact that Ogg and Vorbis predated it by about five years (also mkv's not been able to interleave until just recently, which == no streaming). This is not to say you can't put Theora and Vorbis in Matroska. It's even a good idea! I've come to like MKV. But for streaming, Ogg is still much easier to deal with. Ogg was designed to stream, mkv was not.
c) OK, so, mp4 and Matroska are right out for streaming, Xiph should use Nut, which is the system they designed. Nut came ten years after Ogg was already widespread. And looks almost exactly like Ogg. Which is not to say there aren't things about it I like that improved on the Ogg approach. Eg, the packet length encoding is better. It has a conditional checksum coverage feature I had never considered, etc. At some point we'll make those changes when that wouldn't mean completely abandoning any chance we have at adoption just to save a fraction of a percent and add... no new features.
d) but.. but.. even FLV is better! OK, at this point I can't even entertain the arguement.
3) OK, maybe not adopt another container, but Xiph should immediately improve/change Ogg for, breaking millions of hardware decoders and hundreds of millions of software decoders for a 'better' implementation that won't actually give users any features they don't have now. FOSS need _tools_, not us wasting time overoptimizing something they couldn't care less about.
3) 64 bit timestamp! OMG, waste! Wait, mov/mp4 uses 64 bit stamps... Also, plenty of things in Ogg use a full byte instead of one bit because the container assumes octet alignment. Alignment makes it much faster/easier to deal with (you don't need a bitpacker to read pages, and you don't have to repack packet data to embed it into the page). Remember, all the completely unacc
I'm not worried about there being a ton of later comparisons as Theora continues to improve :-)
In general, we recommend people not use non-default settings with our codecs. Unlike many other projects, we put effort into making sure the defaults are correct.
That said, this is one case where the Theora default was suboptimal because it was the wrong use case. We need to reword the way these options are specified. For bitrate manged modes, there's two common ways to use them: Very tightly constrained rate for a fixed-rate channel (like ISDN or low-rate DSL) and a more relaxed management that is simply trying to hit some size over the space of the whole movie (usually a two-pass mode, fit-a-DVD-on-a-CD type use). Right now, the Theora tools all do the first and that's how your test was performed. The h264 was encoded with the second. So that's a penalty to the constrained encoder.
VBR vs VBR is a more accurate direct test of encoder capability. Don't get me wrong, x264 is going to win that test too, just not by as much.
Only one point I wanted to mention (since the article and comments have all been--- oddly balanced for Slashdot)
The article points out that current Thusnelda is not as high quality as the best available h264 encoder at high bitrate video and unlimited encoding time. No argument there, it's true. Thusnelda still has a ways to go, despite the distance it's come; the current alpha still has no Adaptive Quant whatsoever, which will go in before final release.
However, the vast majority of users are not using x264. If you look at the h264 YouTube encoder, which has been designed for speed rather than 'work as long as you like to optimize the output', suddenly Theora is exactly on-par. In short--- Theora is every bit as good as the way that the real world is going to end up using h264 for the forseeable future. And the users of that 'inferior' h264 encoder seem pretty happy with it.
Anyway, this isn't disagreeing with anything you've said, it's simply a practical way to look at the difference.
Monty
Now, if you want some screenshots of the "new and improved" Theora failing, here:
http://saintdevelopment.com/media/ [saintdevelopment.com]
Uh, that version is also six months old. We're talking about *new*, remember? Not last thanksgiving before any version of Thusnelda was even released.
"Ogg" is actually a term from an early internet game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogging
Theora is named after Theora Jones, a secondary heroine character from the movie 'Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future' about a dystopian future where video media is overwhelming, centralized, oppressive, dangerous, and an off switch on a television is illegal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora_Jones#Theora_Jones
"Xiph" is actually from the Greek ξÎÏÎÏ (sword) by way of 'Xiphophorus' (sword-bearing, pseudolatin?) from the genus name of a fish (Xiphophorus helleri). Which is where I picked it up in middle school. I'd been using it for my software projects since I was 14 or so and by the time Xiph.Org was a real thing [many many years later] I wanted to change the name to something less silly and my co-founders voted me down. They liked Xiph. It became the precedent-setting silly name.
Vorbis is from Terry Pratchett's _Small Gods_ and I dearly hope Mr. Pratchett considers it a compliment. It was meant as tribute to my favorite fictional villain, Archdeacon Vorbis. "A mind like a steel marble"
Well, one tester (and Greg's graph was generated to rebut his graph) was converting each output frame to PNG and then feeding them into one of a number of PSNR tools one by one to get a PSNR result. The conversion from YCb'Cr' to RGB is lossy, but apparently this particular author didn't know that.
He was also using multiple PSNR tools because some were mysteriously not working with some video inputs. Given that there's no one standardized way to calculate PSNR, that led to additional data lulz.
And for x264, he apparently didn't generate his own numbers, he just used someone else's published numbers.
Anyhow, He reported that x264 was 30-ishdB (!) better than Theora. Wha? If every Theora frame was black, that still wouldn't account for that much difference. YUV12 is only 40-45dB deep!
In other words, the whole point of the graph was originally to illustrate and rebut these errors, and it turned out to be a nice regression test too.
Also, for the record, the x264 curve is not perfectly smooth, but that it's as smooth as it is attests to the fact that it's a nicely tuned codec. That Theora is lumpier is one indication it still has more tuning to be done.
Also, Greg's response below is way more levelheaded than mine. He actually collected the data himself (so has more detailed, accurate and first-hand knowledge) and he also probably hasn't been drinking whiskey all night.
Uh, this article here on Slashdot is about *brand new* improvements to Theora, how it is vastly better from original Theora of even one year ago, and also about how a really old broken version of ffmpeg was also causing really terrible quality problems....
So you post several year old screenshots made with an old, unknown [but definitely broken due to age] version of ffmpeg.
BRILLIANT. Seriously, dude, fewer bonghits.
You have to measure the PSNR of each codec with the same tool, silly (and avoid doing colorspace conversions which are lossy in the interchange. Keep the output in YCb'Cr' format). If you're using the x264 encoder's reported PSNR *cough*ahem* it's known to be wrong. It always reports way higher than other tools, like it's forgetting chroma is subsampled or its log-space algebra is just wrong or something.
Let me check myself with the clip linked in the article....mmmm lessee.... yep! that's what you're doing. So, BZZZT, no gold star, try again.
To be fair, the whole thing is part of 'the Ogg Project'. Saying 'Theora is Ogg' is not actually incorrect, and it might get you laid at parties.
No need to be such a stickler, here have a beer.
How is that any different than a company selling a physical product deeply discounted or below cost for an initial period of time in order to gain market share?
That practice is called 'dumping' and is illegal for most goods and services, at least in the United States.
Why would either Slashdot or Streisand apply here? Just wondering. Slashdot traffic isn't exactly likely to bother MITnet much, and I'm hardly likely to censor my own post or have MIT remove it.
I *had* been thinking of adding some gradient improvement screencap examples though.
And following Thusnelda will be Snuppflog. They're just internal project names.
Intel chooses boring internal codenames like towns, we choose silly things that our incredulous detractors dare us to use. But only if we like them.
The most important question unasked
Cheers,
Monty
Xiph.Org
"That didn't come across so well in the presentation. That is the qualification wasn't apparent - it sounded like you were saying it was bad, period."
That document was an internal identification of weak areas. It was intended to be 100% critical. We don't need to keep telling ourselves within Xiph and RedHat etc what's good about it.
"But the legal teams of every major corporation that wants to use it [MPEG]? I imagine Sony's given it a look or two along the way. Just as an example."
Sony is a bad example as they've attempted to undermine MPEG with a number of spectacularly ineffective market fragmentation tactics. However, the major supporters of MPEG tend to be MPEG themselves. Those who use MPEG want to avoid Microsoft. Real is widely perceived to be dying. We're considered a risk, mainly because MPEG says so. There are no other options left.
"Honestly, I wish you well - we're on the same side!"
np. I just don't deal in weasel-words is all...
"but I respectfully disagree that Theora's ready to be standardized right now today."
Not true. It's been mature/ready for a very long time. VP3 is actually slightly older than Vorbis. It fills its niche perfectly ; its theoretical performance, which we're closing in on, is very good compared to how much more 'modern' (but much heavier) codecs perform today, and it does it at a fraction of the complexity. It's perfect for lightweight implementations and ideal for the tag.
Hi. I'm the 'inventor' (not really, On2 originally wrote vp3 and we're riffing from there. I'm the hacker working on it now).
1) That is in comparison to h264. And I call it 'embarrassing' because Theora *could* easily be just as good, but it isn't right now. That document is a call to arms and because of it, a new encoder is rapidly taking shape. Its improvements are already making it back to mainline. We'll catch up rapidly.
2) "It's safe to say that MPEG4 and it's codecs have been more thoroughly researched than Theora" Bullshit. MPEG is simultaneously inefficient and narrow in their focus. MPEG-4 / h.264 is a decades old chassis with a few recent research papers tacked on. _Several of the items I identified as 'embarrassing' and 'obsolete' ironically apply to MPEG-4 too_.
3) "I absolutely, positively promise you that Youtube serves more video than Wikipedia, and they don't stream Theora." Irrelevant. This is an argument against Google (Altavista dwarfed them), Microsoft (IBM and even Apple dwarfed them), Toyota (GM dwarfed them), etc.
"As much as I like the idea of Theora, I'm glad we don't have to be saddled with the reality of it."
Why does everyone here think this is a battle of individuals? These are huge multinationals and your puny insignificant selves don't even appear on their radars. Sure, the public will indeedy benefit from a standard multimedia codec set with no proprietary/encumbered strings attached, but that is entirely irrelevant in the process of making money. They're *for profit corporations* doing what for-profit corporations do. Making money. And that is entirely orthogonal to morals, public good, or even competent engineering. They don't have any interest whatsoever in what you think.
Although we're a non-profit (and exist on behalf of the common good), our argument in this battle happens to concern rallying all the sub-$100M companies that will be frozen out by the very biggest players getting their way. When big companies win, little companies generally lose. Although the little compaines greatly out-mass the big companies, they tend to be fragmented. If we can get them all together to fight for a uniform technology recommendation, way more people win.
But you might want to run for cover, 'cause Godzilla has his squishin' boots on.
This is true. And it's also true of MPEG.
The difference is that no Ogg codec has never involved in litigation, submarine patent or otherwise. MPEG *has* been the victim of submarine patents. Several times. As well as patent squabbles among the MPEG LA members. Several times. As well as patent squabbles between patent holders inside and outside the LA. Several times.
Securing a patent license from the LA does not protect the licensee against patent claims, as Gateway Computer just learned when Lucent sued [and won] for MPEG patent infringement despite the fact that Gateway had licensed MPEG from the LA...
I wrote that in the context of the frankest possible assessment of Theora toward bringing it up to 'best-in-class' status. Have a look at the development resources being put into it right now, especially the 'theora-exp' and 'theora-thusnelda' branches. Thusnelda is the most active, and has just moved from the 'remove all the dodge' phase into 'rebuild from the good' phase. Theora-exp is a complete implementation directly from spec with no relationship to the original VP3 code (Thusnelda is a hybrid of pieces of the original VP3 code, pieces of theora-exp, and my own optimization work). The improvements realized in exp and thusnelda are already moving into the mainline.
We fully intend to bring Theora's performance up to par with the current state of the art while maintaining a much lower complexity requirement. That's one piece missing from the discussion so far; Theora is a much simpler codec that h264 or MPEG4, yet we expect it to stay competetive for a number of years yet. You'd think that would be important to mobile manufacturers. It is certainly important to OLPC. You can encode and decode Theora HD video entirely in C; the others require aggressive assembly to acheive realtime.
Anyway, the link you provide is an unflinching, critical identification of inadequacies and we're knocking off those inadequacies one by one (several of those 'inadequacies' exist in other codecs, BTW, including MPEG4 and h264). Theora has followed an arc very similar to Mozilla after it was cast off by the dying netscape. We've just reached the point where it's picking up development speed because people realize, oh shit, we actually need this...
> thing is, we demand bigger and better and the power requirements are getting higher and higher.
I've designed and built switching PSUs. There's nothing unreasonable about the power demands we're asking of the basic designs. The only real stress is the 'How cheap can we make it?' question.
For about the past twenty years, the typical PC PSU is about 400W and the typical server PSU is 800-1000W. That hasn't really changed. The power supplies themselves have gotten alot more efficient. Ooodles and oodles better. Today's designs are way ahead of 20 years ago.
Monty
I have a few RAIDs built of consumer drives... If you lost 20% of your hard drives under warranty, you were doing better than I'd expect. All my boxes are overcooled and on-drive temp readings are in the low thirties Celcius... and I still lose 20-30% of the hard drives within two months of usage (depending on batch; the worst recent case was a 9-drive RAID5 built from Samsung Spinpoint drives, that one had four of nine die first month, then about half of the RMAs failed. Of the drives that did not fail, no errors after three years).
Monty
"Not enough information"
Both manufacturers have sold mobos with bad caps. That said, I've owned a few of both and none of those ever developed the problem.
Monty
That's not exactly true; that's a guaranteed 7 years at a given temperature extreme and max-rated-spec usage pattern. Essentially, in a situation where the cap is being abused at the very limits of its ratings 24/7, it is rated to last seven years. The specific criteria of the test are far in excess of what the cap will see in real usage. Good engineers spec caps that are overkill for any given use.
Monty
OOPS. Complete idiot braino on my part! Argh, of course Han shoots first.
I need to go crawl under my rock^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hget back to work now.
Monty