Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 2nd Jul 2009 18:51 UTC, submitted by snydeq
We here at OSNews have taken somewhat of an interest in the new HTML5 video and audio tags, which should - some day - make embedding audio and video material into web pages as easy and straightforward as embedding images, allowing the web to finally remove the shackles of dreadful Flash video. Sadly, the problem with these new tags are the codecs; as it turns out, browser makers have not reached an agreement about what codecs to choose for video, with mostly Apple throwing a spanner in the works, and Microsoft shining in absence.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
H.264 is clearly superior at this moment. No question about it. But why doesn't Google pour the money into the Ogg project they would have otherwise spent on paying royalties? This would definitely improve their reputation and it doesn't cost them a lot of money. This might close the quality gap at least a bit, depending on the current state of Ogg Theora.
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But I don't really think this debate matters that much. Whatever Google (youtube) will choose will be supported by all browsers except maybe in Debian
As for audio: I'm a huge proponent of HE-AAC.
http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/tech/tech3324.pdf:
The MPEG AAC codec operating at 320 kbit/s shows an “Excellent” quality level on average, however it performs less well for “applause” (i.e. “Good”). Unfortunately, AAC could not be tested at 448 kbit/s, therefore a direct comparison with Dolby Digital and Windows Media is not possible at that bitrate.
Nevertheless, HE AAC codec gives really remarkable results. For bitrates equal and higher than 160 kbit/s, the average of all ten test items was found to be in the region of "Excellent". This means that the mean value of HE AAC is similar to the mean value of the above mentioned codecs operating at almost 3 times higher bitrate! On the downside, HE AAC gives a rather unbalanced behaviour, as "applause" is always in “Fair” region, independently of the selected bitrate.
Equally remarkable is the quality performance of HE AAC at 128 kbit/s. In spite of extremely low bitrate (for multichannel audio!), it scores systematically between “Good” and “Excellent”, with the exception of "applause" which is again in the “Fair” region only.
It can be concluded that, at the moment, the MPEG HE-AAC seems to be the most favourable choice for a broadcaster requiring a good scalability of bitrate versus quality, down to relatively low bit rates. In addition, the AAC-based codec family offers excellent audio quality at higher bitrates, e.g. at 320 kbit/s (with the exception of "applause"). Our study shows that excellent quality (on average) can be achieved even at half the bitrate, i.e. 160 kbit/s, or even less, for all test items except for the most critical items.
Note that this is about multichannel 5.1 audio, so when comparing to stereo divide by 3! So only 160/3=53kbit/s would be required to make sure a stereo audio file encoded as HE-AAC would still sound "Excellent".
I believe AAC only requires a royalty if you develop a binary codec, ie a encoder and a decoder. Distribution of content is entirely royalty free. Everybody wins!