Theora 1.1 Thusnelda Is Released

[some-guy]

I am not saying that Theora is better then H.264.. there is no way that Theora will ever beat H.264 in a fair comparison.

Why?

Theora doesn't have hardware accelerated decoding, so performance can't be compared.

There will never be a fair comparison until theora get hw accelerated decoding

[drag]

I really like Theora and what it stands for, but putting h264 and Theora in the same test isn't really fair, for one reason: you'll draw a comparison to x264, quite possibly the best h264 encoder available.

The most recent comparison I've seen is the animation encoding test here: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102
Once you've read the introductory text, check the graph to see the results of the test.

The graph is worthless.

The problem is this:

For testing, I?ve chosen SSIM as the quality metric, since subjective testing is a nightmare and rarely gives solid numerical results anyways.

The guy does not get what matters when comparing results. The problem is that numerical results are immaterial. When looking at lossy video and audio the ONLY thing that matters is subjective testing. Lossy compression is psychotropic (not sure if it is the right word) in nature, meaning that they are purposely destroying or removing information that is not relevant to a human's perception.

That is it is entirely and 100% possible to win on a numerical result and be a inferior codec. Things like PSNR (or SSIM) are useful for programmers tuning a codec by comparing successive runs of a encoder, but that is about it.

Since your dealing with how humans perceive visually the only valid and scientific way to compare results is by a double blind study.


But since that is excessively expensive and difficult for this sort of thing your mostly going to have to make do with your own subjective judgement. The guy you linked to should of just stopped with the clips. He did a good job there. The SSIM analysis and graphs are misleading and, frankly, a waste of time.

Although it is interesting on a purely trivia level.

I am not saying that Theora is better then H.264.. there is no way that Theora will ever beat H.264 in a fair comparison.

[whizse]

That (animated cartoons) looks like a very good example of what Theora still has problems with, "flat color surfaces and gentle gradients tend to disintegrate into an obvious/noticable pattern of flickering square blocks, even at high bitrates":

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html

[dashcloud]

Excellent! Free multimedia FTW! Now would be nice to see some unbiased tests comparing h.264, xvid, divx and theora thusnelda.

BTW for Theora videos the preferred container is actually ogv and ogg is for audio because it's well always been so no point to confuse peole and change it for example to oga. They're both technically same it's just for distinction.

I really like Theora and what it stands for, but putting h264 and Theora in the same test isn't really fair, for one reason: you'll draw a comparison to x264, quite possibly the best h264 encoder available.

The most recent comparison I've seen is the animation encoding test here: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102
Once you've read the introductory text, check the graph to see the results of the test.

[L33F3R]

No. Google wanted h.264 for HTML5 fot it's awesome quality/size and hardware acceleration availability.

i did not mean google's use of it. I should have removed that part of the quote.

[blindfrog]

Is the container different for Theora and Vorbis? Did you mean the preferred file extension?

Same container different name.

[Apopas]

Errr... Only h.264, really. Flash is a container. You can junk whatever you want inside it, I think.

Yes Flash Video is a container. I just mean that with Theora implementation in youtube, you don't need flash player to play the videos in firefox since they are supported out of the box.

[V!NCENT]

if thats for real, theora has about matched 264.

No. Google wanted h.264 for HTML5 fot it's awesome quality/size and hardware acceleration availability.

[Louise]

What is more important is what Google will do with on2, once the purchase is finalized.

http://www.on2.com/blog/2009/08/google-and-on2-to-improve-video-quality-on-the-web/

Very likely Google will make the VP codec open source, so VP can be the video codec for HTML5.


VP7 is used in Flash.

[whizse]

Don't know about matched, but it's certainly getting closer:

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html

and it has already surpassed 263:

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html