Tag Archives: comparison

YouTube Ogg Theora+Vorbis & H.263/H.264 comparison

Digital Media, FOMS, LCA, open codecs, Open Source, , , ,

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.

New Theora encoder further improved

Digital Media, open codecs, Open Source, , , , , , ,

After posting only a month ago about the new Thusnelda release, there continues to be good news from the open codec front.

Monty posted last week about further improvements and this time there are actual statistics thanks to Greg Maxwell. Looking at the PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) measure, the further improved Thusdnelda outstrips even the X.264 implementation of H.264.

Don’t get me wrong: PSNR is only one measure, it is an objective measure and the statistics were only calculated on one particular piece. Further analysis are needed, though these are very encouraging statistics.

This is important not just because it shows that open codecs can be as good in quality as proprietary ones. What is more important though is that Ogg Theora is royalty free and implementable in both proprietary and free software browsers.

H.264’s licensing terms, however, will really kick in in 2010, so that may well encourage more people to actually use Ogg Theora/Vorbis (or another open codec like Ogg Dirac/Vorbis) with the new HTML5 video element.