[theora] Theora for webcam/conferencing use

[Bernard Jungen]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 12:11:47PM -0400, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
> My purpose in mentioning all of this is to ask others' experience in
> using Theora for low-bandwidth or video conferencing settings.  Are
> there more advanced settings that are better optimized for a
> "talking-head" kind of video, where there's more motion in a fixed area
> of a frame than on the fringes?

No experience with video conf here, but IMO it's better to keep the encoder
simple and generic, while still having the possibility to use external
pre-processing filters specialised in some kind of video. I'd not be surprised
if some filters already existed for "talking-head" video.

Maybe experimenting with denoise3d filter (hqdn3d in mplayer/mencoder)
spatial and temporal parameters might give something interesting.

>  Also, maybe something that can handle
> the inevitable white-balance and brightness adjustments that come with
> today's automatically adjusting cameras...

No experience here either, but in your specific case the colour saturation is
too high IMO. In general, I've found that less saturation helps bitrate quite
a bit, as does less contrast.

> http://aalimraan.hidayahonline.net:8000/basil-at-work.ogv
> 
> Works great in Firefox 3.5 & VLC.  ;)

As does in Xine. Though mplayer, not so surprisingly, hangs.

Cheers,

Bernard.