No, I made the point I wanted to make. [LWN.net]

No, I made the point I wanted to make.

Posted Feb 5, 2010 0:53 UTC (Fri) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141)
In reply to: No, I made the point I wanted to make. by gmaxwell
Parent article: Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web

I'm afraid your intuitions about container overhead are quite far off from reality. Let's see:

17307153 bbb_theora_486kbit.ogv
15009926 bbb_theora_486kbit.theora
 2107404 bbb_theora_486kbit.vorbis
--------
  189823

17753616 bbb_youtube_h264_499kbit.mp4
13898515 bbb_youtube_h264_499kbit.h264
 3796188 bbb_youtube_h264_499kbit.aac
--------
   58913

Ogg has more than 300% the overhead of MP4 here. You wanted to talk about the Youtube case, so there is no escaping that number here.

I made a listening test of both audio streams myself. To my ears the waterfall in the beginning really sounds like water for the AAC stream, the Vorbis stream is much more washed out.

I'm happy to see your latest encoder branch make further progress. I'll be even more happy to see it perform in a straight comparison with x264 and various FFmpeg encoders. If you want to have credibility, perform a fair test.

Can you concede that, for the purpose of this test, that the quality/bitrate is basically there?

No. My whole point is that this test is worthless because it avoids the most sticky points. You should pitch Theora against the best H.264 encoders, not against an encoding pipeline which obviously has huge room for improvement. You should also take future developments into account. 1080p should be the benchmark, not the horrible quality Youtube currently offers.

FFmpeg's Ogg muxer produces high overhead because Ogg is a deeply flawed container format and so far nobody has been willing to go out of their way to work around its deficiencies. We continue to have the fastest Vorbis decoder around and our Theora decoder has seen considerable speeups recently. David Conrad has a branch with some serious tweaks that is on its way to getting merged. It should at least match libtheora 1.1 in speed and eventually surpass it when further tweaks get applied. We clearly have no world-class support yet, but it's slowly improving. Also, we accept patches, yours are welcome as well.

There is the "encumbered" world, the "unencumbered" world and the real world. In the real world people try to listen to music and watch movies. FFmpeg, VLC, MPlayer, x264 and the rest of the bunch enable people to do just that. Without them free software desktop market share would be orders of magnitude smaller and decreasing. You seem to think this is worth sacrificing in order to avoid a patent threat that some day might affect some person in some part of the world. I wholeheartedly disagree.

I'll stop wondering about submarine patents the moment you guys earn my trust by publishing your findings. And yes, I'm wagging my finger at you. You act exactly as if you had something to hide. "There is no toxic waste drop here. We have made a study and come to the conclusion that this water is safe. We cannot show you the study, but you can *trust* us!" Trust is not something that is handed out for free, you have to earn it through integrity and transparency. I just wanted to say something about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, but I'll shut up before I dig myself in deeper ;-)

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No, I made the point I wanted to make.

Posted Feb 5, 2010 14:13 UTC (Fri) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]

I wasn't giving you an intuition, I was giving you a format maximum: You can put about 64k of payload in an Ogg page or up to 255 packets. For that file that using maximum size pages would give an ogg overhead of 82887 bytes. Had I used larger page sizes in my comparison I would have no longer been using default settings, which was one of my goals. I'm not sure how you're writing out those files for your mp4 comparison, I'm guessing they still have some container headers, but reading the samplesizes directly from the mp4 dump brings me to 86245 bytes of container overhead, which is pretty similar.

not the horrible quality Youtube currently offers

Well, what can I say? I wrote a clearly described specific comparison about YT because of an outrageous goggler quote. Now you're running around the internet calling my statements fraudulent because they weren't a comparison with something else.

Without them free software desktop market share would be orders of magnitude smaller and decreasing.

I fail to see how advancing the state of the art in the best encumbered format encoders does much of anything to preserve free desktops by helping people "listen to music and watch movies". But to each his own. There are perfectly viable ways to get legally licensed encoders for your desktop even if tools like ffmpeg didn't exist, but its existence wasn't something that I was protesting.

I'll stop wondering about submarine patents the moment you guys earn my trust by publishing your findings.

You could at least get the terminology right. A "submarine patent" isn't what you should be worried about, submarine patents are an old technique for making effectively secret patents that could last for decades, scary indeed. This loophole was closed in the mid-90s. All the submarines were forced to surface.

The way the patent system is setup you are very strongly discouraged from disclosing your research: The parties suing for infringement have the stronger position and making them aware of your position allows them to avoid arguing particular things. For example "my own work is prior art for that claim" and "I don't practice that technique" are mutually exclusive defences. If the attacker knows how you will defend they can make the legal battle much longer and more expensive to win. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

The whole purpose of Xiph is to produce/promote unencumbered formats. We expend a fair amount of additional effort, and accept considerable limits because of what techniques we're not permitted to practice. Knowingly allowing something encumbered would be self-defeating in the most enormous way. Of course, mistakes could be made.

What I can give point to you is a decade of shipment, by a large number of parties (some with decently deep pockets) with no publicly known litigation related the formats, which is better than you can say for many mpeg standards. I can also point you to shipments by large organizations who had their own legal teams look at it. I'm sorry if thats not enough for you, but as far as I can tell nothing would be.

What you were doing by slinging a bunch of irrelevant patent numbers was pure FUDing, in a particularly vile way. I think it speaks a lot to your motivation and character, and it's a warning about the futility of engaging with you which I should have heeded.

Cheers.

No, I made the point I wanted to make.

Posted Feb 7, 2010 21:21 UTC (Sun) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link]

I used 'mplayer -dumpaudio' and 'mplayer -dumpvideo' to extract the audio and video streams.

> Well, what can I say? I wrote a clearly described specific comparison about YT because of an outrageous goggler quote. Now you're running around the internet calling my statements fraudulent because they weren't a comparison with something else.

Your comparison is constantly being presented to me and others as proof that Theora is as good as H.264. If that was not your intention, fine. It does not change the fact that your comparison is being misread all the time. And sorry, but you are not exactly going out of your way to prevent this.

> > Without them free software desktop market share would be orders of magnitude smaller and decreasing.

> I fail to see how advancing the state of the art in the best encumbered format encoders does much of anything to preserve free desktops by helping people "listen to music and watch movies".

Simple. People use their computers to listen to music and watch movies. There are popular formats to make music and movies available in digital form. If no free software is available to handle these formats, people will use something else to get at their movies and songs. Free software loses, badly.

> But to each his own. There are perfectly viable ways to get legally'licensed encoders for your desktop even if tools like ffmpeg didn't exist, but its existence wasn't something that I was protesting.

Fluendo is much more recent than FFmpeg or MPlayer. But if Fluendo is an alternative option for you, then you don't value free software. I'm not such a person.

Container conundrum

Posted Mar 9, 2010 20:59 UTC (Tue) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]

So, I'm reasonably confident that your claimed mp4 overhead is simply incorrect. I don't know why.

I measured it as 86245 using one method (segment sizes from mp4dump). A friend who has implemented the mp4 demux checked the file and also calculated 86245 using his own method. My guess was that mplayer must be including packet length data in the dump output, but I just repeated your method and got 13871183 bytes video, 3796188 bytes audio. Resulting in 86245. Exactly the same figure calculated by two other distinct methods.

Perhaps you could explain why I'm getting a different figure using exactly the same method as you? I'm using Mplayer SVN-r29800-4.4.2.

I remuxed the above Theora file we were discussing for minimum overhead using a copy of libogg with the default 4k page size target removed:

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/bbb_theora_4...

This file has 84604 bytes of container overhead.

This is somewhat lower overhead than your mp4 file. Now that I understand a bit more about the mp4 format I find it actually somewhat surprising Ogg provides a lot of properties that MP4 does not. Like being incrementally written in a complete form.

I hope this update convinces you to discontinue spreading these mistaken claims.

Cheers.

No, I made the point I wanted to make.

Posted Feb 7, 2010 21:34 UTC (Sun) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link]

> > I'll stop wondering about submarine patents the moment you guys earn my trust by publishing your findings.

> You could at least get the terminology right. A "submarine patent" isn't what you should be worried about, submarine patents are an old technique for making effectively secret patents that could last for decades, scary indeed.

I'm not a native speaker and was indeed unfamiliar with the meaning you connect to the term "submarine patent". Note however, that this very same confusion exists between the German and English Wikipedia entries.