David Gerard wrote:
Forwarded with permission of the author - he emailed this privately after a comment on the whatwg list.
Summary: Theora video on iPhone is not going to be easy even with a volunteer to write it - the first and second generation iPhone/iPodt Touch CPUs aren't up to the task. So, Theora fans have a new puzzle to try: get an anaemic ARM to decode Theora fast enough to be useful!
When I asked if I could forward this here, he said to feel free and also noted:
"I've been hanging out in irc to improve ffmpeg's Theora decoder, but arm11 is going to be especially hard for any Theora decoder due to the lack of L2 cache and only 16k of L1 data cache."
Thanks for the research & update! Would certainly be interesting to see if it can be done, even if only on the newer devices.
-- brion