Since we’ve announced ogg theora support for the next version of Firefox I thought it might be worth it to point out that there has been a lot of recent work to improve the state of the theora video encoder. We’re only including a decoder, which just displays the video stream that is handed to it. Real improvements in the quality of video often happen in the encoder, which is what this post is about.
Monty (don’t call him Chris) has put up a post explaining some of the work that he’s been doing with samples of much-improved ogg theora video. Note that these samples actually played very poorly in the Quicktime plugin that I have for ogg theora on my mac but worked great on my Linux box. Figures.
Chris has been calling his work “Thusnelda” because he clearly likes words that are hard to pronounce. Either that or all the good names are now taken, I’m not sure.
Anyway, If you really want to see the difference between them you only need to watch the first 10 seconds of each video. Note the pixelization in the back of the silver chair as it moves across the screen in the old video. Then watch it in the new video. The difference is really something you can see. I’ve uploaded pictures here. I suggest that you click through to both of the below images in different tabs and flip between them. (The links will open in new windows/tabs.) The difference is pretty amazing.
