[whatwg] H.264-in-<video> vs plugin APIs

[Chris DiBona]

> On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 8:00 AM, Chris DiBona<cdibona at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Comparing Daily Motion to Youtube is disingenuous.
>
> Much less so than comparing "promotion of H.264-in-<video> via
> Google's sites and client" to "support for legacy proprietary content
> via plugin APIs", I would say.  But also, I didn't compare DailyMotion

And I would agree, as I was stacking a disengenious chain on top of
Robert original one.

> to YouTube!  I used it as an example of converting content at scale,
> to speak to the relative impact of a codec change vs. API changes in
> terms of effort.
> I don't think the bandwidth delta is very much with recent (and
> format-compatible) improvements to the Theora encoders, if it's even
> in H.264's favour any more, but I'd rather get data than share
> suppositions.  Can you send me a link to raw video for the clip at
> http://www.youtube.com/demo/google_main.mp4?2 so I can get it
> converted with the state of the art encoder and we can compare
> numbers?

I'll see if I can get the numbers/video for you on that (and I'll do
it off list, for th sake of the whatwg mailing list :-) . The trick is
starting from the raw upload.

> That's great news -- I wasn't able to be at Google I/O, and I can't
> find any mention of Youtube providing Theora for consumption anywhere.
> Can you clue me in with a link?  (It does seem that Youtube accepts
> Theora at upload, but it seems like it gets transcoded to Flash or
> whatever at that point, so it's converting from unencumbered to
> encumbered!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roE4bmOSURk is one example
> that I'm pretty sure was uploaded in Theora format.)

Ugh, I made a mistake, the google i/o demo was more a demo of the
video tag, I think the embedded video is 264 in that one. I'll find
some of the theora examples and send them to you. They are just
examples, yt is held back by client compatibility.

>> I will say that the best thing that can
>> happen to Theora recently was firefox's support of it, though, but
>> even better would be substantive codec improvements
>
> That's indeed a big part of what we've been funding, and the results
> have been great already.  I'd like to demonstate them to you, because
> I suspect that you'd be a better-armed advocate within Google for
> unencumbered video if you could see what it's really capable of now.
> (Separate from the Wikimedia grant we also just started funding work
> to port Theora to some DSPs, so that we will be able to do off-CPU
> decode/yuv2rbg/scale on some devices.)

I tried funding dirac a while back, to some good end, and we provide
students, but here's the challenge: Can theora move forward without
infringing on the other video compression patents?

> Mike
>



-- 
Open Source Programs Manager, Google Inc.
Google's Open Source program can be found at http://code.google.com
Personal Weblog: http://dibona.com