On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 3:38 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 20 March 2012 19:06, Ian Baker
<ian(a)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