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by zokier 5995 days ago
Problem is not that Theora isn't capable enough now that MozCo has poured money on it. The problem is that Google and every other video service has already their videos in h264, which is playable in Flash. So if YouTube were to support Theora they'd need to re-encode all their videos, and store them as duplicates.

Another problem with Theora is hardware. There is a lot of hardware h264 encoders and decoders, allowing even cellphones to play HD h264. AFAIK there is absolute no Theora hardware currently.
2 comments
Skriticos 5995 days ago
Sounds like a chicken and egg problem to me. If we collectively ignore ogv because there are no current hardware en/decoders, then why should anyone build it? These things are built when enough demand is present. For that, the push from the Mozilla foundation seems to be reasonable. Once there is more demand, the tech comes automatically. If we clinge to H264, nobody will ever build the right hardware. It's basically a demand based resource allocation problem, and Firefox is doing the demand part. Seems reasonable to me.
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metajack 5995 days ago
Mozilla has not poured any money into Theora that I know of. The primary developers are all working on it in their spare time or as part of their jobs with other companies. For example, Monty is employed at RedHat.

The fact that Theora is competitive to the best proprietary codecs without any real funding is a huge success. Imagine what would happen if Google or Mozilla put a little effort behind that?

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