The amount of intellectual dishonesty here is staggering.
On the quality side what we’ve been able to do at Mozilla, with the help of the rest of the Xiph community, is to show that even though Theora is based on older, royalty-free technology, it does at least as well as H.264 in practice (although not always in theory.) If you don’t believe me check our Firefox 3.6 introduction video which is available in both Theora and MP4 formats. The MP4 version of the file is 13 and the Theora version is 8.2MB – about 40% smaller. (We actually think the Theora video looks better, too.)
Not only did he intentionally encode the MP4 really badly, which might be theoretically excusable--the MP4 file has two hint tracks as big as the entire video and audio stream, doubling the size of the file. In short, he intentionally bloated the file with junk data to make it larger.
Lying apparently means nothing when you're trying to promote your pet file format. Why are we letting these people be the voice of the free software community?
It's not that I don't believe you, but it would be great if someone would properly encode that file as MP4 so we could see the quality and size for ourselves. I'd do it but I don't know shit about encoding video.
That works just as well, and it certainly proves you're right.
What I'm wondering is if this was done on purpose or not. If it was on purpose they're lying bastards, and if it wasn't on purpose, it seems they know jack shit about encoding, just like me, and should leave the technical discussion to those who know what they're talking about.
My guess is that the author wasn't the one who encoded either video, and the guy who did didn't know what hinting meant but enabled it anyway when exporting from QuickTime. (hinting is only ever used by Darwin Streaming Server, and only if you're doing live streaming from a pre-recorded file.)
The bad encoder comes from QuickTime having the lowest quality H.264 encoder out of any commercial encoder (and all of them being worse than x264.)
On the quality side what we’ve been able to do at Mozilla, with the help of the rest of the Xiph community, is to show that even though Theora is based on older, royalty-free technology, it does at least as well as H.264 in practice (although not always in theory.) If you don’t believe me check our Firefox 3.6 introduction video which is available in both Theora and MP4 formats. The MP4 version of the file is 13 and the Theora version is 8.2MB – about 40% smaller. (We actually think the Theora video looks better, too.)
Not only did he intentionally encode the MP4 really badly, which might be theoretically excusable--the MP4 file has two hint tracks as big as the entire video and audio stream, doubling the size of the file. In short, he intentionally bloated the file with junk data to make it larger.
Lying apparently means nothing when you're trying to promote your pet file format. Why are we letting these people be the voice of the free software community?