[theora] recommendations for web video bit rates

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Denver Gingerich <denver at ossguy.com> wrote:
> It would be good to have at least one resolution/bitrate that decodes
> well on mobile web browsers that support Theora (I think that's just
> Firefox, but I could be wrong).  If this use case isn't specifically
> targeted, it's possible that none of the selected quality levels will
> play smoothly on mobile devices (or none will do so reliably).  This
> would be a major impediment to Theora/Wikipedia's perceived usefulness
> or competitiveness with H.264: "Why can I play YouTube on an iPhone,
> but I can't play Wikipedia videos on an N900?"
>
> Since Theora doesn't specify profiles like H.264 does, it's important
> to do some testing of our own to find a particular resolution/bitrate
> of Theora that most devices with a Theora-capable browser can handle.
> This could be done at least with Firefox on the N900 and whichever
> Firefox pre-release is available for Android (using whichever
> "minimum" hardware it will support).
>
> I'm willing to try out some videos on my N900 if someone can give me a
> few to try.  I'm guessing there are others on this list that have an
> N900 to try so perhaps we could split up the test cases between
> multiple people.


If you're using a properly optimized build anything reasonable which
will fit on the screen should play without problems, if you're not
then it won't perform acceptably regardless of what settings are used.
 I'm guessing that you're not using theorarm on the n900 right now, so
measurements on that won't be useful. (The numbers I've heard for
theorarm are hitting into the realm of 100fps with normal videos).

Not that it wouldn't be good to profile these things... but it's not
likely to be a material question for this project.