Free Software Types are Banging the Theora Drum, Hopelessly
blog.apphacker.com
blog.apphacker.com
In-browser H.264, maybe, but that's has nothing to do with the quality of open source H.264 decoding. Maybe a plugin problem, and likely a temporary one at that.
I use open-source codecs to watch H.264 all the time. I have watched hundreds of hours of it on Linux-driven devices without a problem. This article is nothing but FUD itself.
And if you want to talk about the quality of H.264 encoding, I'll put x264 up against any commercial product any day, period. It beats the hell out of everything I have seen.
To say the fight is over may be true for Theora. That is a losing battle because, despite its promise, Theora just can't match the quality and efficiency of H.264. But again, you are mixing two things together if you think that the death of Theora is the death of open source video encoding and decoding.
VP8, by the way, has already been open sourced by Google. This will very likely change everything.
EDIT: Correction: No they haven't yet, but multiple sources report that they will at I/O. My bad.
It has not. It's only rumored that they will release it at I/O in May.
As to compiling ffmpeg yourself - again, non-trivial. Better to rely upon good builds or packages. I've done it on occasion to take advantage of some new cutting edge stuff. The thing is, ffmpeg works really well. It is a fabulous tool with a tremendous amount of power and capability. But any complex piece of software, with many pieces and many dependencies, is going to be difficult to build.
Many services will surely rely on trans-coding on the fly, questionable support for this format on the server level might adversely effect development on open source platforms.
Also, VLC is easily the single worst media player I've used (on any platform). If I wanted to look at a screen full of blocky green artifacts, I'll write a screensaver -- at least that won't take up a core to do so.
I don't know any Linux user that can't play h.264 videos.
I understand that there are ways to watch H.264 in Linux if you're willing to skirt / violate patent law (such as pirate repositories), but I'm not interesting in doing so. Advocating for open formats is, in the long run, better.
I'm no H.264 supporter, but it's a non-issue to play it on Linux, so you really need a better argument, like "I refuse to use it out of principle".
But nobody has ever gone to jail for this.
(I'd also assume that some poor, probably non-white person has gone to jail for exactly this kind of law that everyone ignores.)
In addition, many postprocessing options are inefficient and actually decrease video quality. For example: the default settings in both VLC and XBMC cause video to slowly get blockier and oversaturated until a new keyframe comes in. Again, the same videos look fine when played in Quicktime, and I've seen this issue across platforms.
Another problem I've had is that I'll often see a single row of green pixels at the bottom of the screen. It's probably caused by some sort of off-by-one error.
All of these sorts of annoyances accumulate to become infuriating. No commercial product would be released in such a state.
Also, the feature isn't auto-detected in any player I've used. You have to know that your card and player support VDPAU, and know how to enable it.
And if you don't have nvidia, sucks to be you for buying from a video card mfg that doesn't make nice things for its users.
Is it that a vast majority of Linux users are unwilling to _pay_ : for content and software ?
If it is as I suspect, then it could easily sound a death knell for media consumption on Linux. I wonder how much sooner would we have had Linux hardware-assisted H.264 playback (ffmpeg, vlc), if there money to be made off them.
H.264 is evil for content producers - for content consumers, if (and _only_ if) the quality of H.264 >>>>>>>>>> Theora, then I can see why we would have to pay for it.
This is just a second wave of attack for Jobs cause the first one failed.