[whatwg] The truth about Nokias claims

Charles schrieb:
> AVC is a standard under both the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG)
> and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).

Right, but of course neither VCEG nor ISO/IEC have a monopoly on setting
standards.

> 
> Also, AVC is a de-facto standard. Every iPod supports it. Every PSP
> supports it. Every HD-DVD and Blu-Ray player supports it. The mobile
> ecosystem has long since adopted MPEG-4, and most video services either
> use AVC now or are on track to. Even Adobe, who?s had lots of success to
> this point with proprietary formats, has finally adopted it a
> replacement of VP6.

AVC *is* successful in its field. The Ogg codecs are successful in their
field (royality free codecs). Both are pretty "standard" depending on
what point of view one has.

> Comparing apples-to-apples, Ogg Theora isn?t a standard. It /was/ a
> proprietary On2 video codec, and it didn?t become a standard just
> because On2 gave everyone a royalty-free license, so you can see how
> some people might still think of it as proprietary. The fact that it?s
> open-source isn?t relevant, since of course there are open-source
> implementations of AVC as well.

It's a standard because it has a public spec and because an organization
issues those spec. A neutral non-profit organization I should say, which
may not mean much to a corporate environment but is adding to the
acceptance level in other environments.


> It was already old technology when On2
> gave it away, so it?s MPEG-1-like inefficiency makes it retro (to put it
> kindly) on the PC, and completely unsuitable for typicaly 3G mobile
> throughput.

Putting the Theora bitstream into the same efficiency class as MPEG-1 is
pretty questionable and I'm inclined to say your statement is wrong. I
also doubt the "completely unsuitable" for 3G throughput statement as
you don't even give specific requirements. Having said that even H.264
can be considered "old technology", albeit it *is* more sophisticated
than Theora, albeit I'd assume that e.g. on profiles used on mobile
phones it wouldn't even be able to take advantage of all of its coding
schemes.

Maik

Received on Thursday, 13 December 2007 11:44:17 UTC