[theora] Why Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA

[Basil Mohamed Gohar]

On 05/05/2010 06:20 AM, Greg Ewing wrote:
> Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
>> On 05/04/2010 09:46 AM, Tom Sparks wrote:
>>> --- On Tue, 4/5/10, j at v2v.cc <j at v2v.cc> wrote:
>>>  
>>>> i would really like to see a Dirac
>>>> Pro camera. encoding to theora in the
>>>> camera seams not the best choice for further editing.
>>>>
>>>> j
>>>>     
>>> I second that :)
>>>
>>> tom
>>>   
>> If the intention behind this is to address the concerns raised in the
>> original OSNews article, the real target codec should be MJPEG, which is
>> arguably the most "free" from patent threats.  
>
> I don't really agree. I don't think its any "safer" than Theora or any
> other software for that mater. The patent threat doesn't come with
> patent numbers because there are none. Well at least none that are not
> easily coded around. Lets not add to the FUD.
>
> Recall that there was some patent threats made against jpeg.
>
> However MJPEG is a good match for later editing. But a key frame only
> Theora would perhaps get better compression. Or better quality at a
> given bitrate.
>
> Greg
I was just referring back to the first post in this thread, which was
inspired by that original article.  As for me, a Theoracorder would be
ideal.  The advantage of an MJPEG-based one, though, would be far less
computation required for encoding, and, of course, keyframe-based
editing.  I thought about keyframe-only Theora, but then, if we're going
to do that, why not just fall back to MJPEG?  I am not qualified to
speak about the quality advantage of Theora keyframe-only vs. MJPEG, as
it's not an area that has interested me until now - but maybe that will
change.  ;)

By the way, folks, when replying to the list, there's no need to e-mail
the sender of the post you're replying to directly.  It just messes-up
threading and filtering and all that kind of stuff.  I think it's kind
of annoying that the list doesn't put the mailing-list address as the
reply-to, but that's another issue.  Several mail readers have a "Reply
to List" feature - I know Thunderbird & Evolution do, and maybe others
do as well.