Linked by Eugenia Loli on Wed 12th Dec 2007 05:56 UTC
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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Member since:
2005-07-06
Just an FYI: The AVC Patent licensing terms are available here: http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf .
A quick read of that would indicate that MozCorp would have to put up 4.25 -5 million dollars per year (and this would likely continue to go up for 2011+) to be able to ship an AVC decoder integrated into the browser. And that wouldn't even cover the linux distros that ship their own build of Firefox.
Also, AAC isn't covered by this either The costs for that run .20 per channel per decoder shipped (so a stereo decoder would run $0.40 each) when shipping over 1,000,000 decoders.
Now my opinion on the matter is that since encoding tech moves at an incredibly fast pace, HTML 5 should not specify a specific codec for a standard that will be around for probably another 10 years. But there should be a mechanism for ensuring that the codecs used are available on a patent royalty free basis. Theora is outdated, there is no doubt of that, but there is no reason that snow or dirac development can't be picked up and moved ahead.