On Jan 15, 2:05 pm, Craig Kelley <namo...@gmail.com> wrote: > After all, PNG made GIF obsolete -- and I remember when Mozilla and > Opera were the only browsers to support it.
One objection I have to this popular analogy: PNG was demonstrably superior to GIF: better compression, better transparency, better documented, etc., in addition to its lack of patent encumbrances. Few have made a convincing case that VP8 is even as good as H.264, and even then, they're only looking at a handful of side-by-side decodes. They often miss ecosystem considerations: there are toolchains built around H.264, hardware and software encoders at varying levels of sophistication, and encoding professionals who know how to get the most out of it. VP8 exists as s reference encoder and decoder (and a spec that has been openly mocked for containing large swaths of inscrutable C code, complete with TODOs) and that's about it, so in practice, VP8 will always be transcoded from something else (quite possibly from H.264!), and transcoding / generation loss is something you always want to avoid if you can. PNG and GIF were lossless, so a PNG should always be able to perfectly reproduce a source image, and typically use less bandwidth than an equivalent GIF. All common video codecs are lossy, so it's harder to compare, especially when you can have a professional use a $10,000 encoder to create a highly-optimized H.264 video, while for VP8, we apparently have the reference encoder and that's it. At the end of the day, the H.264 ecosystem is better able to deliver better video to the end-user. Even though it's not part of the codec technology, per se, I expect these and other considerations surroundig the codecs are going to tend to make H.264 consider to look better at the same bitrates, and keep getting better, relative to VP8. IMO, the big advantage of VP8 is its political correctness. If it weren't wrapped in raiments of openness, this group wouldn't even be talking about it. -Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
