http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora

do you realize that VP8 is soon to be debuted?
just asking, since ON2 has not been mentioned here at all, and I find that strange to say the least.

There are some very subtle but noticeable differences in these test cases that I think place Theora/Vorbis better than H.263/MP3. It seems to have better color at times or a much sharper contrast. Also, some really high detailed areas tend to be sharper where they were blurry on the H.263. Another key difference i picked up on was the gradients in the sky: H.263 had some serious “color banding/ macro blocking” where theora was a nice smooth color transformation. The 1.1a2 really cleans up theora’s “Short falls”

Basically, if one day all YouTube videos were suddenly in the Theora/Vorbis format, I think the general consensus among viewers would be “not different or slightly better” in all or most cases. Theora is great candidate for open web video.

Jacob: Well, that depends on the video. Not everybody has Java installed, but for the people who di it could detect it and ask if they want to re-encode it locally or let YouTube do it.
I assume that most people won’t do it themselves unless there’s a “HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!”-option as default option, with a text underneath that “too much quality” would be lost otherwise if everything had to be encoded by the server. And that option must be a reasonable option.
Such as OGG Theora/Vorbis because of the license and the blog article I’m commenting on.

According to Adobe I can’t even watch their Flash-delivered H.264 videos unless it is for my “own non-commercial” purposes.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flash_Player:9:Update:H.264#Q:_What_parts_of_the_H.264_license_are_included_when_I_buy_Adobe_Products.3F

Ben Waggoner pointed out on Slashdot that Youtube’s 12 minute limit on video length is a license related issue. Why should we accept such arbitrary limits on web video. If Google can’t afford to pay it how is Wikipedia or your local University going to?

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1268327&cid=28329643

There’s an ongoing debate about codec choice for HTML5 yet i can’t find a single readable explanation of what I can and can’t do with H.264/AAC, as a consumer or a producer, and how much it would cost me. Everything surrounding H.264 licensing assumes you are either a large commercial TV station or Video-on-Demand producer or you’re a passive consumer of TV and movies. That alone is enough to put it directly at odds with the ethos of the open web.

What if I want to put videos of cats with humorous subtitles on the web? Or videos of lectures? At the moment it appears that I may have to pay up to $10,000 dollars annually after next year but as I say the issue is so clouded it’s not actually clear if that’s true.

http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/

Version 0.19 was just released which fixed some problems with iMovie 08. Other operating systems sometimes need video in other formats (especially mobile) but there’s a good overview here:

http://reports.graymattergravy.com/2009/06/02/video-tag-embed-with-fallbacks/

Let’s say I’ve just bought myself a shiny new MacBook. I record something on my camcorder, import it to iMovie, do some editing and now I want to export it in Theora+Vorbis format to put on my website. How would I go about doing this? Remember, I don’t even know what the Terminal is

Secondly, my mates all have Windows PCs and iPhones. Is there a way I can embed these videos on the page such that they can see them? Is it a good idea to export it to H263/4 aswell so Flash Player / Quicktime / iPhones can view it too?

(Is all this coming in a future hacks.mozilla article?)

This doesn’t mean H.264 as a compression format has been questioned as leader in achievable compression performance, it simply points out that in the economics of online streaming other factors play a significant role, too.