A lot was said lately about the Vorbis/Theora vs h.264/AAC situation on the draft of the HTML5. As some of you know, video is my main hobby these days (I care not about operating systems anymore), so I have gain some experience on the field lately, and at the same time this has made me more demanding about video quality. Read on for a head to head test: OGG Theora/Vorbis vs MP4 h.264/AAC. Yup, with videos. And pictures.
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Yes, h264 is superior to Theora. No doubt about it.
The patent-free alternatives to h264 would be Dirac (as mentioned in the article) or Snow, but they are not ready yet. Snow had a very promising start, but then it stalled. Dirac is progressing slowly. Currently it works, and has good quality, but it used way too much CPU the last time I tried it (a few months ago). It needs to be optimized before it's really usable.
For anyone wanting to try Dirac there are gstreamer plugins for a Dirac implementation called Schrödinger:
There was a SoC project this year to implement a Dirac encoder and decoder for ffmpeg. The decoder is done and the encoder is on its way, so hopefully they will be merged soon.
Member since:
2006-04-28
Yes, h264 is superior to Theora. No doubt about it.
The patent-free alternatives to h264 would be Dirac (as mentioned in the article) or Snow, but they are not ready yet. Snow had a very promising start, but then it stalled. Dirac is progressing slowly. Currently it works, and has good quality, but it used way too much CPU the last time I tried it (a few months ago). It needs to be optimized before it's really usable.
For anyone wanting to try Dirac there are gstreamer plugins for a Dirac implementation called Schrödinger:
http://schrodinger.sourceforge.net/
##EDIT##
There was a SoC project this year to implement a Dirac encoder and decoder for ffmpeg. The decoder is done and the encoder is on its way, so hopefully they will be merged soon.
Edited 2007-12-12 07:39