OStatic

Theora Encoder's Recent Update Yields Visible Improvements

Chris Blizzard kindly drew my attention to an update on the improvements being made on the Theora encoder. Though the details given about the advances made are very technical, the end result is visible in the examples shown on the update page.

Blizzard nicely sums up the essence of these updates: Overall, regardless of bitrate, the Theora encoder is showing significant improvement, and is even creating higher quality streams than those encoded with H.264 at numerous bitrates. It's also become evident that at least some of the previous testing that showed Theora lacking were performed with utilities that didn't necessarily mesh well with Theora in the first place (ffmpeg2theora, when linked with a recent version offfmpeg, did not produce the same issues).

This is good to hear. The idea of a fully open video format is wildly appealing, but producing quality video files is paramount. While certain display sizes, bitrates, and circumstances might not require beautifully rendered video, it would seem that for any file format to become standard -- open or proprietary -- it needs to stand up more than reasonably well in a variety of situations. It seems as though Theora is well on its way to achieving that goal.

With Mozilla recently throwing its support behind the Theora project, these progressive (and impressive) improvements, and Blizzard's comment that Firefox 3.5 will be able to decode and play video created with the new Theora encoder, the open video format's time to shine may be fast upon us.

• video
• ogg
• ffmpeg
• Theora
• Xiph.org
• codec
• encoder
• decoder
• ffmpeg2theora

by Matt Kingsley on May. 10, 2009

The challenge is to find players that play files encoded with different codecs. Right now, I use VLC, WMV Player and Quicktime on my Mac. If new codecs are not easy to plug in, getting adoption can prove to be challenging. Firefox's support is encouraging, though.

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