On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Ian Baker <i...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Good point. VP8 is pretty similar to h.264 Baseline. I'd be surprised if > even a person with considerable digital video experience would notice the > difference. > > However, in the context of the iPhone, there's no good way to play VP8. > Even if the software problem were solved, the lack of a hardware decoder > means it'd completely destroy the battery life. > > For our purposes, encoding files with Main or High profiles could be used > to drop the bitrate without compromising quality, thereby saving bandwidth. > It's not a huge difference, though, and I don't think we'd bother. As I > said, VP8 and h.264 are mostly interchangeable from a technical standpoint. > I brought it up to debunk the notion that because VP8 is newer, that > automatically makes it better. > *nod* for our purposes even Theora is "good enough" to put pretty pictures on the screen; we're not super concerned with the ideal codec, as much as making sure that people can actually get access to the media files we have -- the binary "works" / "doesn't work" is more important. But... there are other platforms that have a crappy video playback > experience with WebM or Theora. I don't think this thread is just about > the iPhone, though mobile is certainly the hardest problem to solve here. > Even my Galaxy Nexus running fancy schmancy Android 4.0 with WebM support isn't a good target for actually playing WebM videos. I did a quick test with 640x360 and 1280x720 versions of a quick throwaway clip: http://leuksman.com/misc/vid-tests/ The quality of the video files is not likely to be particularly good as I made no attempt to tune them well, just to check what played at all. The *only* mobile device I tested that played the 720p WebM video was my Galaxy Nexus, but verrrrry slowly and jerkily -- it's clearly not optimized or accelerated very well. The H.264 video at same resolution runs silky smooth. The smaller 640x360 WebM video runs ok, but is of course blurrier being a quarter the pixels. Only Firefox seems to run the Theora files -- the stock Android browser doesn't, nor does Opera Mobile. Nor, oddly, does Firefox run WebM files (though in theory it ought to...?) Tested with devices handy: Nexus One (Android 2.3.6; 800x480 screen) * Browser - only h.264 works; can't play 720p * Opera Mobile - only h.264 works; can play 720p * Firefox - only Theora works; kinda slow Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Android 3.2; 1280x800 screen) * Browser - only h.264 works Galaxy Nexus (Android 4.0; 1280x720 screen) * Browser - h.264 works; WebM runs but is very slow at 720p; no Theora Kindle Fire (Android 2.3.4 custom; 1024x600 screen) * Silk Browser - only h.264 works Blackberry PlayBook (Tablet OS 2.0; 1024x600 screen) * Browser - only h.264 works iPod Touch (iOS 5.1; 960x640 screen) * Safari - only h.264 works iPad 3rd-gen (iOS 5.1; 2048x1536 screen) * Safari - only h.264 works Dell Inspiron Duo tablet (Win8 consumer preview; 1366x768 screen) * IE 10 - only h.264 works It's looking pretty bleak for anything but h.264 on the mobile front (phones & tablets). :P We've also been talking about h.264 ingest, which is completely different > and arguably more important. There are millions of HD camcorders wandering > the world inside people's phones, which are also reasonably capable video > editing platforms. We could be taking advantage of that. > Agreed; accepting incoming video in h.264 will be a must. -- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
