YouTube Ogg Theora+Vorbis & H.263/H.264 comparison
On Jun 13th 2009 Chris DiBona of Google claimed on the WhatWG mailing list:
“If were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet.”
Everyone who has ever encoded a Ogg Theora/Vorbis file and in parallel encoded one with another codec will have to immediately protest. It is sad that even the best people fall for FUD spread by the un-enlightened or the ones who have their own agenda.
Fortunately, Gregory Maxwell from Wikipedia came to the rescue and did an actual “YouTube / Ogg/Theora comparison”. It’s a good read and a comparison on one video. He has put his instructions there, so anyone can repeat it for themselves. You will have to start with a pretty good quality video though to see such differences.
on June 15th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Well there is an issue with hardware decoding. For example my phone has mpeg4 decoding inbuilt ….. it doesn’t have theora…..
on June 16th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Dave
MPEG4 support in a phone means there is some software installed that provides that support. It is possible to implement such support for Ogg Theora/Vorbis, too. And future phones could have that software pre-installed or installable, too. In fact, there are already implementations for some mobile phone platforms. It’s not an unsurmountable challenge.
on June 17th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Maik Merten posted another comparison of H.264 on YouTube vs ffmpeg2theora with thusnelda – check it out here http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/youtube/
on August 22nd, 2009 at 3:25 am
I’m wondering if they might be basing this on what videos look like if you’ve transcoded from MPEG4. They *do* look terrible if you do that. But if you transcode from a good-quality original source (e.g. DVD, DV), they come out great.