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Old 22nd June 2011, 04:34   #9  |  Link
tuqueque
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Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 26
How easy is to say things without knowing or at least doing some previous research... Do some reading people, please!

This is copied from a fairly recent comment from Gregory Maxwell in Xhip's Theora mailing lists:

Quote:
On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:22 PM, Daniel Hendrycks wrote:
> To my recollection, there hasn't been any talk about Ptalarbvorm. Is
> Ptalarbvorm development ditched? (I have noticed some commits for it every
> now and then, but nothing like the amount of commits last year)

As mentioned, the development was moved to mainline. However, it's
hasn't been super-active lately for a couple of reasons.

One of them being that the active developers have been focusing their
time lately on other projects, including some (e.g. the Opus codec)
which have externally imposed deadlines.

As of right now while the quality of the SVN code is significantly
better than 1.1 overall there are some annoying regressions that I
think we want to fix before a release— in particular our quality on
fades has gone down and our tendency to produce ringing on titles has
increased. The new faster speed level is somewhat broken (as a user
you probably wouldn't notice, but it's doing the analysis calculations
incorrectly— which is at least aesthetically bad if not a big
practical problem), and there are a lot of low hanging performance
fruit that would be nice to get in prior to a new release.

Of course, you can run the software today and report your findings.
Any such reports will help get out a new release…
Is true though that Theora is far behind VP8 in terms of quality. But in terms of encoding/decoding speed, Theora is probably the best out there!

As stated in the above quotation, there's still some work to be done, like the Temporal RDO development which will (directly and indirectly) improve very noticeably video quality, bringing it to the same quality of XviD... Which is a very widely used codec still. (if you want to read more about it, you can read the last demo from http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/theora/demo9.html

I use Theora in some of my work and I'm pleased with its quality... Although I'm starting to create some content with VP8 and soon I'll stop using Theora entirely.

So to sume up, no, Theora is NOT dead... But IMHO, after those pending Ptalarbvorm developments, Xiph people should stop Volcano's plan and join forces on VP8 developments.
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