[theora] I'm almost very impressed with theora 1.1 beta 3

[Jim Darby]

Firstly I have to say that having just tried out theora 1.1 beta 3 the
improvement over the previous 1.0 is amazing. In my very subjective view
it looks like the same quality for about half the bitrate and that's
amazingly impressive. The results have for the most part been excellent
and my congratulations to all concerned for there very hard work.

There is (for me) only one serious problem remaining. As Monty points
out in http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html there is an
issue with flat colour surfaces and gentle gradients. This is most
annoying! For example, a video I was encoding the other day has a floor
area that's pretty much just a plain polished black. When watching this
there was very noticeable blocking artefacts on the floor that because
of their nature proved very distracting.

Is there any work going on in this area? It seems that even upping the
bitrate significantly fails to solve this problem. Or are there any
tweaks I can perform to help?

Many thanks and keep up the good work!

Jim.