Submitted by Fantastic expose about Flash and HTML5 video by lead x264 developer Jason Garrett-Glaser. “The internet has been filled for quite some time with an enormous number of blog posts complaining about how Flash sucks – so much that it’s sounding as if the entire internet is crying wolf. But, of course, despite the incessant complaining, they’re right: Flash has terrible performance on anything other than Windows x86 and Adobe doesn’t seem to care at all. But rather than repeat this ad nauseum, let’s be a bit more intellectual and try to figure out what happened.”
Really hits it on the head with this paragraph:
Sums up my experience with 99% of open source software for “the desktop”; MOST of it is like a trip in the wayback machine to windows 3.1 in terms of functionality. (see most every *nix WM)
… and it’s also a common problem with ‘alternatives’ to the big successful software packages people constantly rag on just because it seems everyone loves a loser and will not tolerate a winner. I’m sure G.S. Patton Jr. is rolling over in his grave over that one…
See ‘Realplayer’ bitching about WMP, or Opera’s incessant whining about IE. Quite frankly, even just meeting the same functionality isn’t enough since it provides no incentive to switch.
Hell, look at what Microsoft did that put Netscape 4.x in the ground back during the “browser wars” – they not only made the most standards compliant browser to date with IE 5.x (fact, it WAS the most standards compliant of it’s time apart from Amaya, and who the **** uses Amaya?) They added compatibility with most all of Netscapes made up proprietary stuff which wasn’t even part of any specification at the time in a “hey, all those ‘best viewed in netscape’ pages? They work in IE5 too” approach. (part of why these jackasses doing the ‘best viewed in firefox’ nonsense because they are too inept to write cross-browser code torques my nuts. What is this 1997?)
Were that one of todays alternative browser makers took the same approach – they HAVE better specification support and quite often better/cleaner functionality – now if you were to support all those pages that only work in IE (without “switching renderers” or the vulnerabilities of IE) there would be a legitimate reason to switch.
But instead they’d rather piss and moan to the government that their crap products can’t compete – can’t compete on product, litigate. Great approach there.
Of course that we’re talking HTML5 and video brings us to the bullshit that is HTML5 – a great idea of ‘simplifying’ that was hijacked by people who wanted a billion new tags – THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what STRICT was supposed to bring us.
HTML 4 STRICT – Let’s get rid of IMG, APPLET, and the non-specification vendor specific “EMBED” and just use OBJECT for all of them. Something we could do if Microsoft hadn’t dragged it’s heels on implementing OBJECT properly.
HTML 5 – Less tags? NO, we need to make EMBED officially part of the specification, and then make it completely pointless by adding two new tags – Audio and video. Great, welcome to HTML 3.2… How about instead of adding all sorts of new tags you instead ride Microsoft’s case about OBJECT (Oh wait, it finally works properly in 8) and put all those nice new javascript hooks on it instead?
After all, there’s a reason I hate what HTML 5 has become.
http://my.opera.com/deathshadow/blog/2010/01/09/why-i-hate-html5
Edited 2010-02-23 18:35 UTC
Your points are right, but unfortunately your language and long rant will make them inaccessible to people.
It seems like there was a battle for HTML’s direction, between cleanliness of XHTML, and practical use of HTML5’s lots of features.
I’d have preferred a simpler, more strict XHTML/CSS/JavaScript world, but we’re minority.
“As for the types of comments I make – Sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence.” — General George S. Patton Jr.
Whenever I get a complain about length, I always want to kneejerk into saying “Literacy, TRY IT”… But then I’m generally pissed at the overall state of literacy (or lack therin)… See the pamphlets your average publisher has the brass cojones to call a novel nowadays…. Much less these dipshit ‘articles’ you’ll see on many sites that are barely a paragraph or two per page broken up over ten pages; Each one using 50k or more markup to deliver 2k or less content.
Needless to say, one line “me too” posts usually just piss me off.
Edited 2010-02-23 23:25 UTC
There is something to be said for the art of diplomacy and what has been referred to as “E.Q.”, or “emotional quotient”.
I get comments on the length of my posts, too, throughout the Internet. But I think it’s still worthwhile to adjust the tone and content of my writing in the hope that more will understand my intent.
Something that comes across like “you should just learn better how to understand the robustness of my writing, you moron” isn’t exactly the stuff of a Dale Carnegie seminar, i.e. “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
It’s progress. Which is better than anything that happened after IE5.5 was released.
The Internet, and the technology landscape is a mess, always has been a mess and will continue to be a mess. Live with it.
Ptalarbvorm? What on earth is Ptalarbvorm, you may well ask.
First, you need to know about “Theora”, and then you need to know about “Thusnelda”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora
So Ptalarbvorm is the new Thusnelda.
http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/48207.html
Ptalarbvorm is a new kid on the block, perhaps looking to really upset the apple cart.
PS: Theora is based on VP3, which has an inherent advantage over VP8 in that VP3 is much older. Patents on VP3 pre-date those on h264, which in turn pre-date those on VP8.
In a legal context, older patents trump newer ones.
Edited 2010-02-24 01:36 UTC
Good find, thanks. If I understand it correctly, Ptalarbvorm—like Thusnelda—is an update to the encoder, not the decoder, and is not a new codec entirely. It merely improves the quality of the encoder. In my basic tests I’ve found Thusnelda—when I can get it to work—to be almost equal to, and in rare circumstances, better than H.264. It’s at least good enough for video on the web.
Here are some results from an experimental build of Ptalarbvorm. Open the following two images in a separate new tab, then flick between the tabs to compare the images.
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/bbb_theora-ptalarbvorm…
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/bbb_youtube_h264_499kb…
These are screen grabs (stills) of the same frame of a video (the ogv file is encoded with no audio). The first picture is theora-ptalarbvorm at 376 kbit/s and the second picture is the same frame encoded by YouTube h264 at 499 kbit/s.
I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of trouble seeing any real difference.
The two video files (ogv with no audio) are here:
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/bbb_theora-ptalarbvorm…
http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org:8080/~gmaxwell/ytcompare/bbb_youtube…
You are correct about Ptalarbvorm being an update to the encoder, because current versions of Firefox, VLC and SMPlayer can all play the .ogv video file.
Interesting, isn’t it?
Edited 2010-02-24 09:04 UTC
That’s really impressive for that low bit-rate. Now if only they’d update the QuickTime component.
It is a while off yet, this is still very much experimental code. Maybe in a few months or so …
You do realise that it is only going to be Xiph that ever make a Quicktime component for you. Don’t expect one from Apple.
Yes, I _do_ realise that Xiph release the QuickTime component, and it’s a year out of date already making it very difficult to use Thusnelda on my Mac. They are not doing themselves any favours by making it so awkward for people to produce OGG files.
Quicktime is not a Xiph.org product. It is an Apple product.
Xiph.org produce reference code so that any software vendor may make Xiph codecs. They have in the past produced some versions for specific platforms, but that is not their actual “thing”. Xiph.org does design and research.
http://xiph.org/
It is Apple who are limiting your experience using Quicktime, not Xiph.
In case you doubt this, have a look a this product:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=video
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html
Theora is supported by VLC on all platforms, even on OSX. Xiph.org do not supply a codec to VLC, but rather, VLC implements Xiph.org’s Theora codec design.
VLC will easily produce an Ogg file on a Mac OSX machine for you, BTW. So will handbrake.
http://handbrake.fr/
http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php
Edited 2010-02-24 12:13 UTC
Xiph write a QuickTime plugin so that developers can use OGG in any app that uses QuickTime. http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/ That plugin is out of date and making it needlessly difficult for Mac users to produce OGG videos.
Video producers do _not_ want to use VLC or Handbrake to produce OGG files, they want to export OGG directly from iMovie / FCP and AfterEffects.
Edited 2010-02-24 12:26 UTC
Because Xiph went out of their way to help Mac users in the past does not mean that Quicktime suddenly becomes a Xiph.org product. Apple make Quicktime. If Apple mean for Quicktime to support Theora, then it is up to Apple to make it so, not Xiph.org. This is exactly the same deal for any other multimedia software product, such as VLC … it is simply not up to Xiph.org to write a codec for VLC. Neither is it up to Xiph.org to write a codec for MPlayer. Neither is it up to Xiph.org to write a codec for Firefox.
Etc, etc. I’m sure you get the idea.
Get over it, already.
Talk to Apple, because it seems that iMovie / FCP and AfterEffects are deficient products. If Photoshop could save as JPEG format but not PNG, you would have no problem recognising that as a deficiency of Photoshop, and not a deficiency of the PNG format itself. Why are you confused about Theora?
If Apple won’t listen to your feature request for export to OGG (as I fully suspect they won’t), then you should really be asking yourself why you are using deficient Apple products.
This has nothing to do with Xiph.org.
Edited 2010-02-24 13:17 UTC
Do you not understand that anybody is allowed to write a _plugin_ for QuickTime. QuickTime is Apple’s product, but if I wanted I could invent a codec and write a plugin so that QuickTime understands it.
Why are you having a go at me, when you don’t understand a simple concept that codecs are plugins.
I _can_ export OGG in Apple products because Xiph themselves wrote a plugin so that I can. The point, before you missed it, was that Xiph haven’t updated that plugin in over a year.
I haven’t missed that point at all. I understand perfectly what a plugin is.
The point that you keep missing is that it is not up to Xiph to support media players or infrastructure. They haven’t got the resources. Xiph do research on codecs, that is what they do. Not write plugins (despite the fact that they have gone out of their way in the past to help certain users).
As I said before … if you do want an up to date Theora pluugin for Quicktime, you are simply going to have to ask the authors of Quicktime for it. Very likely, Xiph.org won’t do it. They just don’t have the resources.
That shouldn’t be a problem. The authors of other multimedia products, such as VLC, MPlayer, Firefox, Chrome, Amarok, Juk, Rythmbox, handbrake, ffmpeg, gstreamer, etc, etc, etc will be all over any new version of Theora immediately. They will all be falling over themselves to incorporate improvements in Theora, as soon as Xiph release them.
So, if the vendor of software that you happen to be using doesn’t do the same, you should be asking yourself “why am I still using this dud product”?
It’s OGG that’s the duff product if Xiph decide it’s not worth their resources to make their codec available to one of the most popular video editing platforms. Where is that cash injection from Mozilla going? Paying for cups of tea, whilst they slack off?
You’re calling Apple duff, but I think you’re failing to see how badly Xiph are neglecting _basic_ duties when it comes to getting a codec accepted and used.
You keep saying it, but absolutely nothing can somehow magically make Quicktime support a responsibility of Xiph.
It would be like saying that MPEG LA must write the h264 codec software for Adobe Flash, and not Adobe.
It … just … isn’t … so !!!
Understand?
In the case of the BBB, the Ptalarbvorm improvements are subtle but significant. If I were to rewrite my Youtube vs Theora analysis ( http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html ) with that file, I’m pretty confident that I’d conclude that the Theora output were superior.
On other clips the efficiency difference is more obvious. Theora has historically had a hard time on the parkrun clip: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ptalarbvorm/parkrun_a_thusnelda…. Ptalarbvorm” rel=”nofollow”>http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ptalarbvorm/parkrun_a_ptalarbvor… . (http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ptalarbvorm/“>full )
It would appear to me that HTML5/Canvas/SVG/ECMAScript are quite capable of the same feats as Flash.
Here are just a few examples:
http://html5demos.com/
http://htmlfive.appspot.com/