Codec comparson -- a bit offtopic

Codec comparson -- a bit offtopic

Posted Apr 13, 2006 21:39 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413)
In reply to: First "Firefox Flicks" released by moxfyre
Parent article: First "Firefox Flicks" released

I agree, Theora is pretty darn good. It's superior in terms of quality per size and absolute quality achievable as compared to MPEG1/2 and similar generation technologies. It's comparable to XVID/DIVX, and perhaps could get better with development of the in-stream codebooks.

It will never be as good or better than H.264 MPEG4 video, and the difference in quality is perceivable by normal humans on normal video files, unlike the subtle differences in relatively high quality audio codecs. H.264 simply has a large number of features which are not available in a Theora style codec such as specifying a large number of subsections of the screen, referring to a much larger number of previous frames, and so on.

The trade-off of course is that Theora is easily playable by nearly all computers out in the field at reasonable resolutions and framerates. A 300mhz pentium will play a reasonable theora download without much of a problem. H.264 can peg the processor on a 2ghz machine easily. I actually have to manually transcode such files into another format to watch them, a multi-hour process. The rapid adoption of H.264 is thus a huge annoyance to me because of a real insurmountable unplayability of the format, as well as the various legal problems it represents.

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