Linked by Kroc Camen on Fri 1st Jan 2010 15:36 UTC
HTML5 Video is coming to Opera 10.5. Yesterday (or technically, last year--happy new year readers!) Opera released a new alpha build containing a preview of their HTML5 Video support. There's a number of details to note, not least that this is still an early alpha...
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Member since:2006-03-01
what's with this craze about Theora? it's not like it' s able to give such a better visual quality than other codecs, and it' not the only open and royalty free one, either (at least Dirac comes to mind)
so why force one particular format onto the web, instead of letting content distributors choose whether "transmitting" in a recognized industry standard format (and pay the royalties), or going the free and open route (but forcing viewers to transcode in order to see the same content -people often uses content grabbers like Orbit, you know- on their standalone player -many a players fully support H264, they don't do theora instead)
after all, it's them who will actually be the one charged for the aforementioned royalties, not those surfing the web...
Edited 2010-01-02 12:17 UTC
Member since:2009-08-20
Member since:2007-02-17
what's with this craze about Theora? it's not like it' s able to give such a better visual quality than other codecs, and it' not the only open and royalty free one, either (at least Dirac comes to mind)
Theora 1.1 has performance roughly equivalent to h264. No other open and royalty free codec comes close.
so why force one particular format onto the web, instead of letting content distributors choose whether "transmitting" in a recognized industry standard format (and pay the royalties), or going the free and open route (but forcing viewers to transcode in order to see the same content -people often uses content grabbers like Orbit, you know- on their standalone player -many a players fully support H264, they don't do theora instead)
after all, it's them who will actually be the one charged for the aforementioned royalties, not those surfing the web...
after all, it's them who will actually be the one charged for the aforementioned royalties, not those surfing the web...
No other public access transmission standard (such as TV or radio) has a choice of standards. There is just one mandated standard for transmissions, it is open and royalty free, and all comers may implement it and compete in the market for making both transmitters and receivers.
Why should video over the web be different?
Edited 2010-01-02 14:27 UTC
Member since:2006-01-02
I did not know that. Well, screw H.264, then. I rather think the way Fraunhofer did MP3 was awfully good, and promoted wide use. Royalties per transmission will be a good way to choke it off, and doing so after it's been out and become popular will foster only the best PR.
I think it's insane that we have IP law systems that will even allow that sort of licensing, too. A cost for an encoder and/or decoder, if you're out to sell it to somebody, is entirely fair. A cost for that, and for making content and/or using it? No. Participation costs BAD. It is not analogous to something like TV, where there is ongoing content creation, and service maintenance, that basically doesn't exist on the side of the video format guys.
Edited 2010-01-02 19:44 UTC
Member since:2006-01-02
"Theora 1.1 (previously codenamed Thusnelda) achieves virtually the same performance as h264, but it is utterly free to use by anyone, anytime, for encoding, decoding or streaming, forever."
This, though, is still a bit of an issue, and will remain one. That statement is 100% false. Any modern nVidia card can even show that to be false under Linux+X with common software (AMD as well, in Windows). I'm not sure how that hurdle will be handled, in the future (GPGPU decoder programs?).
Member since:2007-02-17
"Theora 1.1 (previously codenamed Thusnelda) achieves virtually the same performance as h264, but it is utterly free to use by anyone, anytime, for encoding, decoding or streaming, forever."
This, though, is still a bit of an issue, and will remain one. That statement is 100% false. Any modern nVidia card can even show that to be false under Linux+X with common software (AMD as well, in Windows). I'm not sure how that hurdle will be handled, in the future (GPGPU decoder programs?).
This, though, is still a bit of an issue, and will remain one. That statement is 100% false. Any modern nVidia card can even show that to be false under Linux+X with common software (AMD as well, in Windows). I'm not sure how that hurdle will be handled, in the future (GPGPU decoder programs?).
It is not false. It used to be the case that h264 was well ahead of Theora in performance, but recent advances in Theora have seen it catch up.
This is why I specifically mentioned Theora 1.1. H264 is well ahead of Theora 1.0 or earlier, but it is only marginally different in performance to Theora 1.1.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/06/14/1649237/YouTube-HTML5-and-C...
Check it out for yourself here:
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
Same bitrate, same filesize, imperceptible difference in quality.
As for video cards playing the videos ... there are several stages in video rendering. Decoding the data stream is merely the first step. It takes perhaps two or three seconds for a CPU to decode a minutes worth of video data, so the codec decoding function is NOT the determining factor in replay performance.
Even if a given video card does not have a hardware decoder for a particular codec, once the bitstream is decoded from the codec format by the CPU, the rest of the video rendering functions can still be handed over to the video card hardware.
Edited 2010-01-03 07:41 UTC
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Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
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Member since:
2007-02-17
Why would you hope for h264? I think it is next year (2011) when the patent owners of h264 have said they will start charging everyone for each "transmission" (their word) of data encoded using a h264 encoder. The intent is apparently for a charge to be applicable not just each time someone uses the h264 codec to compress a video stream ... but rather every time someone "transmits" a h264-encoded stream!
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what...
...
So the most likely result will be a yearly fee per broadcast market, which may be the internet as a whole, but, logically, it could also be applied on a per-country basis. In the case of my multinational equipment manufacturer client, which has more than 25 international subsidiaries, each with its own website, the potential royalty charge exceeded $250,000. When I outlined my findings with the client, it was clear that this would be a major factor in its decision to change over to H.264.
Theora 1.1 (previously codenamed Thusnelda) achieves virtually the same performance as h264, but it is utterly free to use by anyone, anytime, for encoding, decoding or streaming, forever.
http://www.theora.org/news/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/theora-1-1-released/
Edited 2010-01-02 11:25 UTC