- From: Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 21:55:20 +1000
On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Chris DiBona<cdibona at gmail.com> wrote: > Thinking out loud: One thing that was mentioned in an earlier post: > Vorbis. I am also of the mind that Vorbis is of higher quality/mb/sec > and statically than is mp3. The only real problem is that people don't > pirate with it, so the demand isn't there, but I think it is a > superior codec. For video, I worry that for theora to become 'better' > than h264, it will need to infringe on the same patents it is designed > to avoid. I think you may be underestimating the potential that is still in Theora. As Monty described in this May update http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html, there are still many improvements to be made on the encoder, but Thusnelda has already improved heaps without using h264 techniques. I wouldn't give up on Theora and quality video yet. In particular when most people will not really notice the difference on a well encoded video using Theora in comparison to H.264 - and I say that from anecdotal evidence rather than actual research. In fact, I disagree with the whole notion that the lack of uptake on Theora is caused by its lesser quality. I think the real issue that a user has with Theora is that it doesn't yet have the same kind of tool support as other codecs, e.g. H.264. However, that was also true of H.264 not a long time ago - increasing vendor support on h.264 made all the difference. It would for Theora, too. So, vendor support - and that includes browser vendors, but also video editors, transcoders, hosting providers, video players etc - is the real issue. Lack of vendor support in turn has nothing to do with the slightly lesser quality of a codec. It's all about costs and returns: about return on investment on past expenditure on other codecs, about new cost on the codec (beyond the sheer implementation cost which should be minimal with Theora), about perceived risk of expenditure on legals around it (including patents), and about money the new codec support could bring. A new codec doesn't bring the vendor new income unless it promises something special to the user and thus creates a market need. Only if the market is asking for it and the vendor will not be able to sell his tools without supporting the codec will he be forced to provide support. We are in a chicken-and-egg situation. H.264 broke this chicken-and-egg situation by promising a amazing new quality of picture, which was communicated through marketing and thus created the market need. This obviously won't work on a codec that is of equal or slightly lesser quality. Being royalty-free, unencumbered, and easier to innovate around could and should be the message for Theora. That married with it being written into HTML5 as baseline codec would definitely break that chicken-and-egg situation and create the market need that is required for Theora to gain vendor support. Amazing demos of capabilities of HTML5 video available in all browsers because they all support Theora would blow users away and make them ask for Theora support. I think we are starting to see this happening: the content published at Archive.org, Wikipedia and Dailymotion in Theora will have impact, the native support of Theora decoding in Firefox, Chrome, and possibly Opera will have impact, and the DirectShow filters, QuickTime components, encoding and decoding plugins, etc will have impact. Whether it will be enough to get the all browser vendors on board and therefore Theora written into the HTML5 spec as a baseline codec, I don't know. I fear we are on the same path again that we were on with image codecs and it will take a long time until the new, open and unencumbered "PNG" (umm: theora) codec is accepted in all browsers. I'm not even sure that writing it into the standard would make vendors actually support it, for the reasons above. If everyone had only the best interest of Web users on mind, it might happen, but that is now how the world works. I can only hope that it won't take as long as PNG took, which was introduced in 1996 and got browser support by all mainstream browsers only in 1999, fully bug-free only in 2008. Regards, Silvia.
Received on Monday, 8 June 2009 04:55:20 UTC