- From: Mike Shaver <mike.shaver@gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2009 10:28:54 -0400
On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 10:08 AM, Chris DiBona<cdibona at gmail.com> wrote: > No, but it is what I worry about. How agressive will mpeg.la be in > their interpretation of the direction that theora is going? I don't > think that is a reason to stop the current development direction (or > the funding of it) but I thought that Dirac, with the BBC connection, > might make a better opponent politically than Theora. I have reason to hope that Mozilla would be a good opponent politically as well; that was certainly one piece that we were glad to bring to the table. Not that I have anything against Dirac, and would love to see support for it as well, but I think it's farther from being web-practical due to bandwidth minimums than Theora is. > It is client compatibility first, and global/edge bandwidth restricted > as well. I'd prefer to ship with the reference libraries and have told > the team as much. I would certainly like to understand the reasons for Chrome shipping with H.264 support, but this thread has confused me a little. As I understand it, you have to have it because, per your analogy with plugins, there is a lot of legacy content with H.264 that will be made available via the <video> tag so you're forced to provide support or risk market irrelevance... ...but that legacy content is virtually *all* from Google properties... ...but Google can't provide Theora video because of... a) client compatibility limits (circular with the above, though Firefox will provide ~25% of the web with Theora support, vastly larger than I think even the most optimistic projections of Chrome+Safari with H.264 when Chrome ships <video>, so maybe we can out-egg that chicken) b) bandwidth concerns (but even if Theora took _double_ the bandwidth, and _all_ the content was converted overnight, that's still only a 25% increase in bandwidth, plus a few percent for Chrome when it ships <video> as well) So if we can remove the bandwidth spectre -- and I really believe we can do that, if it hasn't already been done with the state of the art encoders -- it sounds like it unwinds to client compatibility, which happily Mozilla and Google have some significant influence over! Mike
Received on Saturday, 13 June 2009 07:28:54 UTC