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.
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.