On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 3:38 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 20 March 2012 19:06, Ian Baker ian@wikimedia.org wrote:
- WebM (aka VP8) is really not bad, but is technically inferior to h.264
Main and High Profiles[1].
This comparison appears specious in the context of this thread, which is the iPhone - the iPhone (which is the context of this thread) doesn't support Main or High, only Baseline.
How does VP8 compare to H.264 Baseline profile?
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.
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.
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.
-Ian