I have just got an email was trying to source videos for theora test media here is the message: "Intrinsically H.264 properly encoded should be about 30% more efficient than Theora." is this FUD or not? tom_a_sparks
Tom Sparks wrote:> I have just got an email was trying to source videos for theora test media > > here is the message: > "Intrinsically H.264 properly encoded should be about 30% more efficient than Theora." > > is this FUD or not?I don't see any Fear, Uncertainty, or Doubt spread by that sentence. Personally, I think it's a fairly reasonable sentence, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's "true". --Ben -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 198 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature Url : http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/attachments/20100323/651ea33a/attachment.pgp
"Intrinsically H.264 is 100% more likely to funnel mountains of money into the hands of those who haven't earned it than Theora." On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Tom Sparks <tom_a_sparks at yahoo.com.au> wrote:> I have just got an email was trying to source videos for theora test media > > here is the message: > "Intrinsically H.264 properly encoded should be about 30% more efficient than Theora." > > is this FUD or not? > > tom_a_sparks > > > > _______________________________________________ > theora mailing list > theora at xiph.org > http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/theora >
On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 03:37, Tom Sparks <tom_a_sparks at yahoo.com.au> wrote:> I have just got an email was trying to source videos for theora test media > > here is the message: > "Intrinsically H.264 properly encoded should be about 30% more efficient than Theora." > > is this FUD or not?It's completely wrong. 4 years, 2 months, 7 days and 3 hours from now, the perfect H.264 and Theora encoders will be invented. It will turn out that the H.264 encoder will perform exactly 8.47% worse than the Theora encoder. What's even more interesting, is that this exact number is calculated for all videos! ;) -- Remco
> On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 03:37, Tom Sparks <tom_a_sparks at yahoo.com.au> > wrote:> > here is the message: > > "Intrinsically H.264 properly encoded should be about 30% more > > efficient than Theora."i have a rather stupid question: is there an agreed interpretation of what people generally mean when they say a codec is more "efficient" then others? does this mean: a) the resulting file (in same quality) of one encoder is smaller then the others? b) the encoding process is quicker? startx
On 24.03.2010 03:37, Tom Sparks wrote:> I have just got an email was trying to source videos for theora test media > > here is the message: > "Intrinsically H.264 properly encoded should be about 30% more efficient than Theora." > > is this FUD or not?That's not exactly FUD, but a bit oversimplified. It is true that H.264 is a more advanced format (it is one codec-generation younger than Theora), but the exact performance characteristics very much depend on the H.264 profile used (H.264 is subdivided into several profiles, each defining a different subset of encoding techniques allowed). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Profiles for an overview. Mobile devices usually don't support the most efficient H.264 profiles - the iPod e.g. only allows the "Baseline" profile and e.g. cell phones have similar restrictions. The set of coding features that works on a reasonably wide range of devices is somewhat narrow, so its is difficult to harvest the whole power of the H.264 format if one tries to target as many devices as possible (as is usually true for web video). So is the "30%" figure accurate? Well, the exact number is of course subject of the selected H.264 profile. Of course things also depend on the actual encoder used (a format is useless without an encoder) - and there are "good" encoders (those may e.g. be slow, some very well-tuned H.264 encoders exist) and "less good" encoders (those may e.g. be much faster; some GPU accelerated encoders aren't producing the same quality as their CPU-based counterparts - but at least they have usable speed). My personal guess is that Theora fits somewhere into that spectrum, meaning depending on the selected H.264 profile and the actual encoder used one may get similar results with a good Theora encoder. Maik