[theora] bad news: IE9 with HTML5+h264

[Denver Gingerich]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 7:56 AM, startx <startx at plentyfact.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:56:12 +0000
> Hannes <theora.list at soulrebel.in-berlin.de> wrote:
>
>> Also for the big-market of mobile
>> devices it should be noted that many hardware vendors have
>> h264-licenses so Opera could maybe even use those.
>
> when it comes to mobile devices, the situation is a disaster anyway.
>
> im currently working on a mobile website project which contains a lot
> of videos and we would love to use theora (for the reason of freedom),
> but no mobile device i'm aware of supports theora, not even android.

That is not entirely true.  Firefox Mobile 1.0 on the N900 plays
Theora, although there isn't much acceleration so it can only play
low-resolution videos at full frame rate.  Check out the results of a
couple tests I did to see what works and doesn't work:

http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-March/003543.html
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-March/003546.html

The N900 is capable of doing much better when the Theora decoder is
well-optimized.  It can decode (not necessarily display) 640x360
videos at over 100fps.  With some layers work in Firefox Mobile, "we
should be able to play back 800x480 (i.e. native resolution) videos at
24 fps and still have 50-60% idle CPU".  For more details, see:

http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-March/003548.html

> what that means for web developer is that if you have at least to
> consider mobile users, you either go for h.264 or you have to have
> two version of every video (which is not really an option for larger
> projects)

I can't really argue with that.  Aside from the decoder in Firefox
Mobile for N900, I don't think there are many (any?) Theora decoders
for mobile devices.

Denver
http://ossguy.com/