Tag Archives: Choosing a codec

This article compares H.264 to WebM, Google’s implementation of the VP8 codec, using three variables (encoding time, compressed quality, and CPU requirements) for playback on three personal computers. Here’s the CliffsNotes version of the results: Using Sorenson Squeeze to produce both H.264 and WebM, the latter definitely took longer, but there are techniques that you can use to reduce the …

WebM/VP8 is Google’s recent entry into the codec market. Here’s a roughly chronological list of resources about the codec/technology. If you see any prominent articles that I’m missing, please let me know. Webm – an open web media project – Google site for WebM. The Moving Picture: Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Success – (8/2/2010) – EventDV, by …

As part of my First Looks review of VP8 and WebM for StreamingMedia.com, ran a bunch of VP8 and H.264 comparisons, initially using the MainConcept H.264 codec, since that’s the codec included with Sorenson Squeeze, which I used to produce the VP8 files. Then, I added some comparison files produced using the x264 codec, encoding via the QuickTime-based x264Encoder version …

VP8 is now free, but if the quality is substandard, who cares? Well, it turns out that the quality isn’t substandard, so that’s not an issue, but neither is it twice the quality of H.264 at half the bandwidth. See for yourself, below. To set the table, Sorenson Media was kind enough to encode these comparison files for me to …

As expected, Google open sourced the VP8 codec today at their IO conference in San Francisco. You can read my overview article for StreamingMedia.com here, or check out www.webmproject.org, a site that details the announcement. Briefly, as you may recall, Google acquired the VP8 codec when they purchased codec developer On2, in a deal that closed early this year. Today, …

In a recent blog post, Microsoft stated “We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.”  Though Mozilla currently enjoys (by far) the largest HTML5-compatible installed base of any browser, they don’t currently support H.264; just Ogg Theora, which is supported by Google Chrome and Opera, but not Safari or …

Got an email today from a colleague today that triggered the headline thought (time to switch from VP6 to H.264). His rationale was that now that MPEG-LA has extended the royalty-free period for free H.264 Internet video, it was time to change over to H.264. He was wondering whether H.264 could maintain the same quality as VP6 at 75% of …

A few weeks ago, I published an interview with MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn on the patent group’s decision not to charge for free content encoded with H.264. Then I got a note back from a reader who stated: I’m disappointed. The interview seemed to be pretty powder puff. Why not ask the harder questions, e.g., was your decision in …

I recently posted an H.264 vs. Ogg comparison, which you can see here. Ogg vs H264 – Round One I got lots of good feedback and am in the process of reworking my tests, primarily (I hope) to use a more recent codebase that wasn’t shipping when I did my testing. In the meantime, another comparison was released on February …

Summary: This article is presented in reverse order, newest on top, oldest on the bottom. I’ve briefly summarized the goal and procedure, but you can read from the bottom up to get the background. Briefly, the goal of the exercise was to compare the quality of Ogg Theora with H.264 using two test files — one SD, the other HD …