continued theora improvements

by Christopher Blizzard

Monty posted another update on the work that’s been going on to improve the Theora encoder. It’s worth re-posting here because I think that it includes some compelling images and graphs that show you improvements. So I would suggest that people wander over and have a look at his update.

The headlines include:

1.  They have made substantial improvements to Theora’s encoder.  The images which I include below really show off the improvements in sharpness at the same bitrate.

2. That the encoder is now creating higher-quality streams than H.264 at many bitrates. The data includes some comparison with x264 without ffmpeg bugs which show on this test that x264 does do better than Theora in this particular test. However, there’s an important side note worth reading on this topic.

3. That the original tests that gave Theora such a bad name were done with incredibly bad tools.  See the squiggly line on the graph in monty’s post for evidence of that.

Anyway, a picture speaks a thousand words so I’ll include them here.  Open them up in two tabs and switch between them for the full effect.

Theora 1.0:



Theora.next:



Monty points out that this was largely other people’s work and they should get most of the credit. So Greg, Tim and many others – thanks. Keep up the great work.