Theora 1.1 alpha 1 released Options

[jensend]

Xiph.org has released Theora 1.1 alpha 1. This is the first release to include the rewritten and much improved "Thusnelda" encoder. See Xiph's press release for details; this mailing list post links to binaries.

[HotshotGG]

Tusnelda might be much improved compared to the original (vp3-based?) encoder but the quality is still way below MPEG-4 (SP, ASP, AVC). Xiph really missed the boat on this one. In 2002 they got an agreement with On2 and it took Xiph foundation until the end of 2008 to get a 1.0 release. Six long years and no significant quality improvement. I have the greatest respect for the Xiph coders but in my opinion Theora is a huge failure and to be honest I don't even know why they bother with this severely outdated codec... I know I won't, maybe someone else will?

SP and ASP? Those are still a joke to me. It might be below AVC in terms of being able to scale to HD. Monty did a side by side comparison with H.264 and Thusnelda looked somewhat improved in terms of overall picture quality. I don't know that much about video so I really can't say I know for sure what was improved in the source code. I just know that macro block artifacts are nasty and not very pleasant on the eyes. The problem is only Monty is working on Theora with a small team of independent developers. I am not going to speculate on what Theora can fully achieve or what can be squeezed out the codec. It's not exactly a "huge failure". If it was Mozilla wouldn't be wasting $100,000 to fund development efforts for it.

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html

Monty mentions a "better" alternative similiar to what he had planned to do with Tarkin, but it would require breaking the specs.

This post has been edited by HotshotGG: Apr 1 2009, 13:33

[Kef]

Tusnelda might be much improved compared to the original (vp3-based?) encoder but the quality is still way below MPEG-4 (SP, ASP, AVC). Xiph really missed the boat on this one. In 2002 they got an agreement with On2 and it took Xiph foundation until the end of 2008 to get a 1.0 release. Six long years and no significant quality improvement. I have the greatest respect for the Xiph coders but in my opinion Theora is a huge failure and to be honest I don't even know why they bother with this severely outdated codec... I know I won't, maybe someone else will?

SP and ASP? Those are still a joke to me. It might be below AVC in terms of being able to scale to HD. Monty did a side by side comparison with H.264 and Thusnelda looked somewhat improved in terms of overall picture quality. I don't know that much about video so I really can't say I know for sure what was improved in the source code. I just know that macro block artifacts are nasty and not very pleasant on the eyes. The problem is only Monty is working on Theora with a small team of independent developers. I am not going to speculate on what Theora can fully achieve or what can be squeezed out the codec. It's not exactly a "huge failure". If it was Mozilla wouldn't be wasting $100,000 to fund development efforts for it.

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html

Monty mentions a "better" alternative similiar to what he had planned to do with Tarkin, but it would require breaking the specs.

As we all know, quality is subjective. I based my judgement on my own tests. Did you try out the new Tusnelda encoder? I did some testing and compared with both xvid and H.264. Needless to say, I got so depressed by the poor quality (even at really high bit-rates!) that I just stopped testing after 3-4 different video clips.

I've seen Monty's blog and progress reports and I was really looking forward to this release. I absolutely wish Theora would become an alternative to other codecs because I believe in open source, but from what I've seen it will probably never get there..

I know the small team hurts and not having any funding (besides some smaller donations here and there) is of course not good. I ask myself, where are all the Linux distributors? Where are Ubuntu, Novell & Red Hat? Where are all the companies who would benefit from a kick ass patent-free open source codec???

[bawjaws]

As we all know, quality is subjective. I based my judgement on my own tests. Did you try out the new Tusnelda encoder? I did some testing and compared with both xvid and H.264. Needless to say, I got so depressed by the poor quality (even at really high bit-rates!) that I just stopped testing after 3-4 different video clips.

You mention really high bit-rates but apparently Theora is not designed for really high bitrates. It seems it gives up visual 'transparency' in order to be an efficient low bitrate encoder.

I'm not an expert in either audio or video compression but I believe there may be an analogy to AAC+ which is designed for lower bitrates than standard AAC and the techniques it uses would be counterproductive at the high end.

You don't mention what sizes or uses you were encoding for, was it Blu-ray or more like Youtube web sized video?

[IgorC]

I'm not an expert in either audio or video compression but I believe there may be an analogy to AAC+ which is designed for lower bitrates than standard AAC and the techniques it uses would be counterproductive at the high end.

Now talking about Theora and other codecs. In this moment Theora has very unstable quality at high motion it makes this codec totally unusable. Yes, theora hasn't to be on par with H.264 but it's even worse than old ASP (Xvid). In two years when theora maybe will have acceptable quality for SD, but it will be already HD period and H.264_HQ_optimizied/H.265. Theora wil become useless again.

This post has been edited by IgorC: Apr 3 2009, 19:23

[DOS386]

Xiph.org has released Theora 1.1 alpha 1. This is the first release to include the rewritten and much improved "Thusnelda" encoder. See Xiph's press release for details; this mailing list post links to binaries.

COOL.

Tusnelda might be much improved compared to the original (vp3-based?) encoder but the quality is still way below MPEG-4 (SP, ASP, AVC). Xiph really missed the boat on this one. In 2002 they got an agreement with On2 and it took Xiph foundation until the end of 2008 to get a 1.0 release. Six long years and no significant quality improvement. I have the greatest respect for the Xiph coders but in my opinion Theora is a huge failure and to be honest I don't even know why they bother with this severely outdated codec...

Feel free to suggest some better codecs

In two years when theora maybe will have acceptable quality for SD, but it will be already HD period and H.264_HQ_optimizied/H.265. Theora wil become useless again.

Again

The problem is that Theora has just 1 or 2 developers at best ... and a very low priority for the FFMPEG/MPLAYER/MENCODER/VLC/other video developers, while not only decoding but also encoding of proprietary codecs has much more support, it took years until FFMPEG got Theora support included (see also: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=626231), and MENCODER still can't encode Theora at all.

A lot of people often forget, but there is also "Dirac" too which is a wavelet based codec designed with HD in mind!

Nice, but extremely slow, so not really a drop-in replacement for Theora. Also, the "upgrade" from a research codec to a useful codec is far away from done nowadays.

This post has been edited by DOS386: Apr 7 2009, 02:26