This is an old comparison from November, the Theora people are complaining, I hope it is redone with latest and using "best case" encoding parameters from developers. I still want to see a comparison using real video with film grain. What worries me is, MPEG4/H264 is an international standard (yes, patent encumbered), but there has been massive software and hardware investment in it. It performs particularly well, and does good on mobile devices at low battery (like iPhone 3GS). The push for open-web video to support Theora and *only* Theora with no provision to even dynamically link to OS supported codecs worries me and seems politically and ideologically motivated in denial of reality. - Ray Cromwell

Moreover, the idea of supporting something that may have inferior performance, and brushing aside concerns with "well, most people won't notice!" seems contrary to the usual spirit of developer meritocracy on the internet. I've heard this argument before with HDTV "ordinary people can't even tell the difference!" and against antialiasing in 3D hardware "come on, with high enough resolution, no one can even tell", when it seems blatantly obvious to me when you have something higher quality for a long time, and then drop back to something inferior. Someone who has never seen HD video may not be able to notice the difference at first, but if they watch say, BluRay everyday, and then go back to upscaled DVD a year later, many will. - Ray Cromwell

I just don't understand why it's such a big deal philosophically to punt to the OS/device and encourage vendors/manufacturers to find some way to decode H.264. As you say, the reality is that it works well, is implemented in hardware in many cases, and is widely deployed in one form or another. Then if you want to have a philosophically pure open-source-no-patents-or-whatever box that doesn't include the codec, fine. But don't saddle the rest of us with crappy video (or even worse, no video at all on mobile devices where it's unrealistic to just run a software codec). - Joel Webber

Me neither. I like Chrome's approach. Keep Theora as a baseline, but punt to OS otherwise. The Mozilla folks are fighting a war they can't win, it's over. H.264 is in cable TV and Satellite receivers, video game consoles, mobile phones, in some TVs, in some PVRs, all over the web in digital downloads, on iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, in operating systems, built into top Video Cards/GPUs. It IS a globally agreed upon open standard. Why fight it? Can't Theora co-exist with it without trying to use politics to fight it? I hate software patents and I'm all for openness, but I prefer the BSD approach to the GPL "freedom = restricting your choices" approach. - Ray Cromwell

I think mobile is only one issue. I doubt Apple & Microsoft are going to invest into Theora *again* after implementing & pushing h.264. Perhaps it would be easier & more practical to push for an open h.264 instead. - Lars Trieloff

Maybe Google should buy up the H264 patents and then offer them to the public. :) I'm not a codec expert, but can Theora even be fixed? There's talk of it getting better, but it's based on really old tech. I mean, in recent years, MPEG-2 codecs have gotten *really good*, but there's a limit to how good they can be made, and they'll never rival VC-1 or H.264. - Ray Cromwell

Hell, how long is it until the H264 patents expire? Probably still a way off, but it's probably on the same order of magnitude of time it's going to take to get this mess sorted out under present circumstances. - Joel Webber

This reminds me of the GIF patent discussions we had ten years ago. Hell, I am getting old, remembering ten year-old discussions... - Lars Trieloff