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ogg theora encoder improvements

August 8, 2008 in Firefox, GNOME, Mozilla, OGG, Open Web, Video | 15 comments

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.

  1. You’s avatar

    You on August 8, 2008 at 2:57 pm

    Are there any comparisons available of this work against h.264?

  2. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on August 8, 2008 at 2:59 pm

    I think that Monty did some comparisons. I’ll poke him to see if he can post something on that topic.

  3. Fabian’s avatar

    Fabian on August 8, 2008 at 3:01 pm

    Wow. Amazing progress!

  4. Paul W. Frields’s avatar

    Paul W. Frields on August 8, 2008 at 4:15 pm

    It’s so weird that you happened to post this today — I shot some video with Monty last week at the office, in the hopes of producing a video to show off the tremendous work done on Theora of late. Hopefully we’ll have something to show soon, but I have to rely on someone else with more editing skills to do the cutting and splicing. :-)

  5. JRM’s avatar

    JRM on August 8, 2008 at 4:17 pm

    where does this image come from ? reminds me of an old french movie

  6. ethana2’s avatar

    ethana2 on August 8, 2008 at 4:30 pm

    Woohoo! Great work guys! Progress marches on!

  7. gabriel gunderson’s avatar

    gabriel gunderson on August 8, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    That is CRISP! Great shot to make the point.

  8. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on August 8, 2008 at 5:19 pm

    The image is from the Matrix clips that Monty posted.

  9. martin’s avatar

    martin on August 9, 2008 at 2:21 am

    This is the type of work that could really move free media formats forward. The quality is awesome!

  10. voracity’s avatar

    voracity on August 9, 2008 at 2:56 am

    That’s a remarkable improvement in quality between the two clips. Virtually all the noise and fuzz is gone.

  11. Benni’s avatar

    Benni on August 9, 2008 at 3:47 pm

    Will Mozilla devote some resources to theora development?

    Great improvements btw!

  13. Ken’s avatar

    Ken on August 29, 2008 at 1:59 pm

    This is incredible. I’d love to move some of my company’s web video to Ogg format, wonder when these encoder improvements will be available in the Quicktime Mac encoder components?

  14. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on August 29, 2008 at 2:03 pm

    Not sure! The new encoder should have an alpha pretty soon.