The post reacted against the Google employee's phrasing, and compared current YouTube auto-compression to custom Theora compression.
But it has since been misread by many as comparing the codecs and their capabilities.
Chris Di Bona was essentially correct when implying that the pre-2001 type of innovation in Theora/VP3 would not be technically persuasive to modern content sites.
I don't believe that the comparison to YouTube is fair. YT allows far higher resolution video("HD"), and even the default player window is 640x360. Of course YT player could be upscaling all videos from 480x270, but that would be a bit silly. I think more research is needed before drawing conclusions.
No, Theora doesn't rock, or more correctly it hasn't rocked
Until a few months ago when they made a breakthrough in the development version of their encoder, Theora was the WORST mpeg4-like codec in active development, much worse than h263 (which is itself awful). Double the bitrate / encode times and half the quality -- it hadn't really improved at all since it was open sourced.
Now it's no longer the very worst modern codec (beating h263, but still mediocre), but it's at least 4 years too late.
Vorbis audio is widely used in commercial game development because it's very free and very good at low bitrates. Theora has only been used by agenda-driven freetards, basically just Wikipedia. Mozilla will likely be the only browser vendor shipping Theora and not h264. Apple and MS will never ship Theora, and Google is currently only shipping h264.
I wouldn't have a problem with people advocating its sole use for ideological reasons if it wasn't dogshit for so long (and mediocre now).
Google Chrome is shipping Theora/Vorbis. They ship it as well as H.264 in Chrome, but without H.264 in Chromium (as they can't licence the patents).
Opera has had Theora/Vorbis supporting builds for a while. It seems very likely they will go with Theora when they launch full support.
Note also that Xiph Qicktime codecs allow Safari to use Theora as well. These codecs should just intsall from the net when you encounter such a file, but while we wait for Apple to get around to that they could easily be piggy backed onto one of the many pieces you need to install to get all video working well on Mac OS X (Perian, VLC, mplayer, or even Mozilla Firefox)
It may only be mediocre or "good enough", but it is "free". If you don't understand the importance of that to the web then congratulations on your lack of "ideology".
Or maybe letting some random corporations place a tax a vital part of our technical infrastructure in return for marginal technical benefits is an ideology, just not a very good one?
This is not ideological. It is practical. Adobe Flash exposes your system to a variety of vulnerabilities and is unlikely to get much better. Adobe considers making the user vulnerable a feature and they brag about it to people they sell their commercial products to. They also offer an unreasonable license to the player that sensible people refuse to accept. So, if Ogg Theora allows embedded videos at comparable quality for the same bitrate, and websites like YouTube adopt it, then it is a big win for the user. Sensible people can now play videos and we can recommend disabling Adobe Flash and so everyone is a winner.
I just wish there were some easy way to get it to play fullscreen in Firefox, or detached in a resizable window. One of the big goals of these web standards is to give users the power to decide how they view web sites instead of having it decided for them. I happen to have a large screen, and I want to embiggen my videos.
Hm, not sure about fullscreen, in firefox, but the w3c spec definitely says user agents can support it. Here's the HTML 5 video spec if you're curious: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#video
But it has since been misread by many as comparing the codecs and their capabilities.
Chris Di Bona was essentially correct when implying that the pre-2001 type of innovation in Theora/VP3 would not be technically persuasive to modern content sites.
jd/adobe