In the sort of world that we've occupied until now there is nobody who is going to sue you for making a cat video using a particular codec. But I notice that over time enforcement of licenses is becoming more strict, and perhaps eventually license enforcement will be automatic.
Using the H.264 standard for video on the internet seems like a dumb decision to me. It's not rocket science to choose some format which doesn't have potentially debilitating licensing issues associated with it.
Developers, and even device manufacturers, don't really have much of a say in this. The problem is that many applications these days are in processing power constrained devices - netbooks, smartphones, set top boxes.
For example, at the moment I'm working on a set top box. The processor is simply unable to handle 720p decoding. We need to rely on the decoder built into the chip to make it happen. And that decoder only does license-encumbered formats.
Because there are a lot of devices that fall into this category, content providers are pretty much constrained to generating content in the formats handled by hardware, which in turn reinforces the use of these formats in hardware.
Really, the only way out of this loop would be for the big-league device manufacturers - Apple, Sony, Samsung, etc to decide to change format. They don't seem to want to, so the rest of us are stuck with h264...
Unfortunately, Theora is just simply inferior in every technical aspect to h264. The decision comes down to quality vs price. Choosing quality for a higher price is definitely not a "dumb" decision, surely you too often buy a bit more expensive product that promises a better quality. On the other hand, choosing a cheaper, lower quality product is understandable as well if quality is not that important.
Vorbis, however is really in the league of mp3/aac/wmv, so in the case of audio, picking Vorbis is really a no-brainer.
In the web, with a lot of youtube-like sized videos, the quality of Theora is more than sufficient. Also, for vacation videos and the like, Theora provides a reasonably good quality.
In other words: Theora is already good enough for the "masses". It's not the technological inferiority of Theora that hinders its wide adoption.
I think it's that people use H.264 for everything and don't care about the licence and the alternatives. The only way to change that is to either (a) raise awareness of the legal issues with H.264 or (b) support Theora in every browser to make it the next video standard in the web. Then, sooner or later the "masses" will follow.
The article works on the former, although it's important to work on the latter, too.
So it's acceptable to deliver a product you know to be inferior to someone because their content isn't important enough to you? Would you not be insulted if someone said they didn't think your home movies were worth encoding with the best available technology?
That'll be why your vacation photos are in the lossless but patent encumbered JPEG-2000 format, rather than the less efficient, but patent royalty free JPEG?
Vorbis, however is really in the league of mp3/aac/wmv, so in the case of audio, picking Vorbis is really a no-brainer.
Maybe on desktops, but not on portables. For whatever reason (bad implementations?), Ogg Vorbis takes more processing to decode than mp3. Numerous portable players have shorter battery lives when playing Ogg.
I'm not sure your link supports your assertion. The negative reports seem 3-6 years old and perhaps based on 3rd party software vs the software they came with.
A more recent set of figures shows that implementation can have an impact, but that if you've got control of the software you'll probably do better with Vorbis. Note the test is on matching bitrates, but Vorbis is more efficient per bit.
It also shows that FLAC has longer battery runtimes which I'm guessing is because flash based players no longer need to spin up disks more for the larger filesizes.
Wild guess: The libvorbis, the "official" codec is using floating point numbers, hence the decreased performance on mobile devices that don't have native floating point support. There are integer-based codecs for MP3 (such as libmad) so it's not an issue with MP3.
I suppose the solution would be writing an integer-based codec for Vorbis as well.
There is an integer implimentation called tremor. I believe it is more to do with the fact that there is often a dedicated mp3 decoder in these portable devices, and it has to burn the cpu for decoding vorbis.
The current version of the official Theora encoder does allow you to achieve perceived visual quality comparable to that of the current h264 encoders at not that much higher bitrate in case of, at least, the typical "Internet Video" content.
Yes, to reach certain quality targets using Theora might mean increased bandwidth cost, but it will also be the only major cost left, for a moment leaving aside the question of adoption. That seem to be a much more predictable cost model than what MPEG LA offers. It might, as well, turn out to be a more affordable model for smaller companies not reaching the MPEG license fee caps.
Paying more for a better product? I'd chose the, possibly higher, price of pushing Theora adoption and Theora-encoded bits now to get a promise of a better "quality", in more aspects than just the visual appearance, down the road.
but you make a decision of quality vs price when you buy something.
Here we are deciding.. will there be the the "free" video the masses of people can post/cut/encode/decode/do-what-ever-they-want with it on the web or not.
Would it make sense for a whole web to pay for the better CSS format?
Sigh. I've recently been doing a lot of Theora encoding as I experiment with HTML5. I agree that Theora is immediately noticeable as worse quality than h264, and it's not a subtle difference. Even when the situation should have tricked me into thinking it was not Theora - for example, I was testing on Mac Safari and it should have been playing h264 but accepted the Theora because Perian was installed - I instantly noticed the unexpected codec because the quality was so inferior. Those people claiming the two are of comparable quality should get their eyes checked.
I hear a lot of talk about how it's "good enough" but quite frankly it's not. If my videos look bad, I look bad. It matters, to me at least.
Frankly at this point I wish the governments of the world would just hand the licensees $100m and annul all the patents for the public good. The cost of worrying about the damn licenses seems likely to eclipse the economic contribution of the IP itself.
Are you sure you're using Theora 1.1 (aka Thusnelda)? Version 1.1 might be consider "inefficient" but 1.0 was simply "broken" for many uses.
You mention Macs and I'm not sure if there's been an official 1.1 release of the XiphQT Quicktime plugin yet, which would affect you if you're using Mac tools to generate the video.
Also, does Perian play Theora now? I'm guessing you meant the XiphQT plugin which enables Safari support.
Ah, you are probably right about the playback. I have both installed - if you say it's XiphQT that enables Safari to use Theora, you're probably right.
As for the encoding, I was using ffmpeg2theora 0.25, which according to the release notes bundles libtheora 1.1. Whether or not I'm using it optimally, though, I can't say. I was loosely following the instructions for batch encoding here:
I was actually hopeful that Perian had started supporting it, I'd guess their installed base would be much higher than XiphQT which would mean, e.g., Wikipedia content just working for many Safari users.
But I checked the site, they only do vorbis in mkv.
Using the H.264 standard for video on the internet seems like a dumb decision to me. It's not rocket science to choose some format which doesn't have potentially debilitating licensing issues associated with it.