- From: Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 12:42:03 +1000
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>, Joe D Williams <joedwil@earthlink.net>, robert@ocallahan.org, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, David Singer <singer@apple.com>, public-html@w3.org
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Maciej Stachowiak<mjs@apple.com> wrote: > > I don't know of any codec that meets the other three requirements but not > this one. As far as I can tell, of the four stated requirements, Ogg Thora > only satisfies "is implementable without cost and distributable by anyone". > I think H.264 satisfies all the requirements except that one. So if we were > to take your principle that the one requirement that can't be met should be > dropped, that would argue in favor of dropping the royalty-free requirement. > But I don't think that argument is reasonable. The royalty-free requirement is the only one that applies to all W3C technology and can therefore not be dropped. All other requirements have been made up for the video and audio case. All but the HW requirement are increasingly met by Theora (see also http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020626.html): I say increasingly, because an increasing number of large sites are supporting Theora and the quality has increased through recent improvements to the reference encoder, examples of which compared well with H.264. The only requirement that Theora does not meet is the Hardware implementation requirement - and over on WHATWG there was an extensive discussion about this topic. Here are some points of interest: * Theora is simpler than H.264, so there are probably devices that work well with software-only Theora - hardware support for H.264 was only required because of its high complexity * trial implementations of Theora for HW exist, so it is not a fundamenal problem that Theora cannot be implemented on HW * HW vendors would kill themselves to be able to offer Theora on a chip to Apple should Apple need this * H.264 HW implementations did not exist before H.264 got standardised either and it was not an inhibiting factor for H.264 standardisation For more details, please refer to the archive of the WHATWG mailing list, thread at http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020658.html . > If all or a significant proportion of Web video goes Ogg-only, it will > deliver a second-rate experience on mobile devices for the foreseeable > future. Lack of hardware support means that this is not an easily solvable > problem. This is an assumption that has no proof. HW support will be created quickly if Web video goes Theora for baseline codec (btw: it will never go Ogg-only and that is not the intention). Further, I have seen Theora decoded on Symbian S60 devices 6 years ago in software and it was real-time decoding, so the need for HW support is not even proven. It is a requirement that makes sense for H.264, but not necessarily for Theora. Regards, Silvia.
Received on Friday, 3 July 2009 02:43:05 UTC