Endless Paradigm

Xiph, the guys behind OGG (Vorbis, FLAC etc) have been developing Theora for a while.  These codecs are "open" codecs in the sense that these can be freely used (ie no royalty fees required).  In contrast, formats such as MP3, AAC and AVC are protected by various patents and often require royalty fees to be used.

Theora has mostly been a fairly poor format due to the developers having to try and find ways to work around various patents, so seeing it beat today's de-facto video codec, H.264 in something, is interesting.

There are various issues with this still, eg:

Quote:Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Thusnelda pulling *ahead* of x264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It's important to note that PSNR is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it's clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantianlly before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.

So I wouldn't see many animes/movies encoded in this any time soon, but the possibility of a "popular" non-patented format for video (ie Theora + Vorbis + Matroska) is an interesting one.


Sources:
http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/05/ma...n-the-way/

Theora's been around for a while now. It's not anything new.

found this...



i don't see much of a difference... except the trees in the theora look a little less clears...

Based on the two images up, this a some way to go..

feinicks Wrote:Based on the two images up, this a some way to go..

In that picture, the h264 encode is superior. Sharper = should take more bitrate. Take the same = superior.

Assassinator Wrote:Theora's been around for a while now. It's not anything new.

The results are.  Theora has been way behind any modern codec for ages.  Still not superior, but it's quite an improvement.