Comments on: Why open video matters, and what we are trying to do about it

By: canvasprint

canvasprint — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:29:39 +0000

Dirac is a great service already. Any improvement to that would be a great success IMO.

By: Tolmi

Tolmi — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:14:58 +0000

@cromwellian: That’s going to be hard as Theora uses DCT and Dirac uses wavelet compression (and many more differences). This would mean they design a new codec which obviously will not be “Theora”. I don’t think they’re willing to design one anyway.

By: cromwellian

cromwellian — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:27:02 +0000

IMHO, people are used to the quality of HD codecs in Flash now, and any open video codec with noticeable visual degradation compared to what you already see on YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, etc won’t get much traction. Maybe the $100k to Ogg will result in them just copying the improvements in Dirac (since they’re open) and integrating them in Theora 2.0, but it doesn’t seem like the path of least resistance.

By: AndiSkater

AndiSkater — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:10:50 +0000

The Dirac codec looks promising, but I don’t think Mozilla will support it. They have just donated $100.000 to Ogg. Dirac would have been the better choice, interesting why they didn’t choose it.

By: cromwellian

cromwellian — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:22:51 +0000

Wow, that Dirac codec is interesting. I’d like to see a newer Doom9 shootout with it, but it would be interesting to see Mozilla jump on this.

By: Tolmi

Tolmi — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:48:41 +0000

I’m really curious why nobody seems to notice Dirac which is royalty-free and open besides giving the same (or better) quality than H.264 with lower bandwith usage.

By: AndiSkater

AndiSkater — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:44:26 +0000

Ogg Thorea won’t reach the quality of of H.264, but there is still room for improvement: http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html
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I think developing a new video codec with almost the same quality as H.264 without violating any patents is becoming increasingly difficult. You will probably spend most time of development with working around stupid software patents.
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The problem with Ogg Thoera is that it will almost likely never be available for Internet Explorer and Safari by default (Microsoft will never support an open source codec and Apple only supports MPEG stuff…).

By: cromwellian

cromwellian — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:13:00 +0000

I’m all for this, but I’m a videophile nut, and I’m not willing to sacrifice video quality or bandwidth to use anything substantially inferior to H.264 or VC-1, so that means the open community has the task of inventing a new video codec, not encumbered by patents, that can stand up to today’s HD video codecs, and that seems like a tall order.

By: ThomasHansen

ThomasHansen — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:11:59 +0000

Great article :))))
Regarding; “What would you like to see happen?”
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YouTube switch to video tag when FF, Safari, Chrome and Opera have stable implementations of video tag and force IE completely out in the cold… ;)
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But I guess wikipedia is a great number 2 on my priority list … ;)