[LAU] theora and html5

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

On 02/16/2010 09:41 PM, hollunder wrote:
> Excerpts from Jörn Nettingsmeier's message of 2010-02-16 21:22:48 +0100:
>> (sticks a cardboard periscope on head, dances about and chants "i'm the
>> submarine patent threat")
>
> And one can get you with any format :)

that should be really obvious to you and me. not so in corporate droid 
brains...

> Most concerns seem to go into the quality and filesize direction, so if
> it got a lot better the information should be spread somehow.

well, it definitely got a lot better. it is still slightly inferior to 
almost every proprietary codec out there, but guess what: i don't care, 
because it's good enough for web content.
cpu is getting cheaper by second, bandwith even more so.

the trade-off between huge licensing costs for content creators, vendor 
lock-in and closed-source plugin hassles on the one hand ("oh, you're 
using $fooBSD? so sorry, we are not going to implement it, and we won't 
let you do it, either") and a couple of cycles here and a few kbits 
there doesn't really compute anymore.

many of the articles in wikipedia are demonstrably inferior to those in 
<your favourite encyclopedia here> - still, the whole concept is so 
immensely powerful that it has become my number one resource, while that 
16-tome dead-tree-pulp monster from the early nineties is gathering dust 
on my bookshelf.
to me, that same analogy holds for theora compared to <your favourite 
codec here>. it's important to know the limitations (theora sure as hell 
isn't going to replace blu-ray disks anytime soon), but for web, it 
would work like a charm.