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| Theora vs. h.264 |
| By Eugenia Loli on 2007-12-12 05:56:52 |
| A lot was said lately about the Vorbis/Theora vs h.264/AAC situation on the draft of the HTML5. As some of you know, video is my main hobby these days (I care not about operating systems anymore), so I have gain some experience on the field lately, and at the same time this has made me more demanding about video quality. Read on for a head to head test: OGG Theora/Vorbis vs MP4 h.264/AAC. Yup, with videos. And pictures. |
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| Not practical |
| By Square on 2007-12-12 06:34:27 |
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I can understand why they would want an open standard for video on the web. However things change way too much. Today the most common formats are wmv and flash for streaming and divx for downloading. A few years ago it was .wmv and .mov for streaming and divx for download Ten years ago it was .mov and .rm for streaming and .mpg for download Setting a standard no one uses is just going to end up a joke in a few years when people are wondering why Firefox 5.0 is installing Theora codecs just to have full HTML 5.0 support when only a hand full of websites used the codec |
 - Score: 3 |
| RE: Not practical |
| By mckill on 2007-12-12 06:42:27 |
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to clear it up, the flash players can/are using h264, the current wmv was microsoft's attempt at mp4, but h264 beat it, of course microsoft didnt embrace it and are doing a good job and messing up the media distribution online. also theora as i understand was another competing codec that lost to h264 and only opened up after. anyways, i don't even really understand why there is debate for an official codec or object wrapper for HTML5, but i'd prefer it would be something standard instead of some obsolete and technically inferior codec that lost the mp4 race. |
| - Score: 3 |
| how dare you imply that I have a tenage brother! |
| By sc3252 on 2007-12-12 07:01:25 |
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Sadly you are right... Its nice to see some constructive criticism, maybe they can improve on the things that annoyed you. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: Not practical |
| By Wintermute on 2007-12-12 07:10:50 |
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Although MPEG 4 ASP is by the far the most popular format for 'downloading'. I dare say this is going to change soon and MPEG 4 ASP as whole has past is past its peak. If you look at any of the HD content on the web today it will all be in H264. Even SD DVD rips are starting to use H264. P.S. Doesn't .mov also use H264? |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[2]: Not practical |
| By Eugenia on 2007-12-12 07:11:48 |
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Depends how you export. You can put a lot of different formats on .mov, but h.264 is one of them, yes. Apple is pushing h.264. MPEG4-SP/ASP has indeed passed its peak. Even the XDiV team is currently working on MPEG4-Part10 (which is nothing but another name for h.264), and the DivX Corp *purchased* MainConcept who have an h.264 implementation. As you understand, the main MPEG4-SP/ASP providers are moving to an h.264-like implementation too. Microsoft's WMV and VC-1 are h.264-like in many ways too. Even on the mobile space, Nokia now has h.264 support on their Symbian S60 3.1 phones, while in the past they would only use h.263 or MPEG4-SP. Edited 2007-12-12 07:16 |
| - Score: 1 |
| Patent-free alternatives (not there yet) |
| By Luis on 2007-12-12 07:27:59 |
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Yes, h264 is superior to Theora. No doubt about it. The patent-free alternatives to h264 would be Dirac (as mentioned in the article) or Snow, but they are not ready yet. Snow had a very promising start, but then it stalled. Dirac is progressing slowly. Currently it works, and has good quality, but it used way too much CPU the last time I tried it (a few months ago). It needs to be optimized before it's really usable. For anyone wanting to try Dirac there are gstreamer plugins for a Dirac implementation called Schrödinger: http://schrodinger.sourceforge.n... ##EDIT## There was a SoC project this year to implement a Dirac encoder and decoder for ffmpeg. The decoder is done and the encoder is on its way, so hopefully they will be merged soon. Edited 2007-12-12 07:39 |
| - Score: 7 |
| x264 |
| By Luminair on 2007-12-12 07:32:45 |
| x264 is genius, everyone should be using it for everything with enough decoding power |
| - Score: 2 |
| I don't get it |
| By RIchard James13 on 2007-12-12 08:12:48 |
| Why does the HTML 5 standard say you must use this Codec or that Codec? Won't the web in say 10 or 15 years be forced into using an old standard? Why can't they just say this is a video stream and let the page author choose the Codec just like currently you can choose the embedded picture type? |
| - Score: 3 |
| FFMPEG? |
| By Carewolf on 2007-12-12 08:31:33 |
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Does this guy even know what he is doing? FFMPEG is a really unstable and rather random project, it is great for playing absolutely any format in the world, but for quality? and especially encoding which it is very rarely used for? Sounds wrong, very wrong. That said, sure MPEG-4 is going to win no matter what, it is a newer generation of codec, but also a much more expensive one. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: FFMPEG? |
| By Eugenia on 2007-12-12 08:36:54 |
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This "guy" knows what she's doing. FFmpeg is used by MANY (and I mean, MOST) GUI front-ends out there. Just because PSP3Video9 or PSPVideo9 or SUPER or WinFF or FFmpegX or VisualHub have nice GUIs, it does not mean they don't use ffmpeg underneath, because they DO. FFmpeg, stable or unstable, random or not random, it is the *most used* utility for conversions. Even more than mencoder, I would say. Even vimeo.com, uses ffmpeg to decode the files its users upload on the site. |
| - Score: 2 |
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