[theora] Blockiness

[rcooley at spamcop.net]

I tried out Theora to see what the future holds, and see some pros and cons.

As a great plus, I have noticed that, even at the lowest quality (ie.  "-v 0"),
the detail, and overally quality is clearly better than anything else available.

On the negative side, at qualities comparable to MPEG4, I've notcied a great
deal of blockiness.  It's not as bad as blockiness from other codecs, as the
macroblocks are much smaller, and the detail of the picture (ie. within the
macroblocks) is still quite good, but it's a very bad thing, and detrimental to
the video just the same.  I am a bit concerned because I did not experience the
same issue with the handful of standard VP3 videos I've tried.  

Although I'm quite excited about Theora, I seriously hope that the problems with
blockiness are either limited to the current alpha version, or that the possible
problem with be resolved before the beta release.  Blockiness is certainly the
bane of digital video, and I'm excited about Theora primarily because VP3 did
not show blockiness at even very low bitrates.
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