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.