> MPlayer would stop playing altogether if the CPU couldn't keep up.
This is really a problem with the GUI defaults. Assuming you're using MPlayer OS X Extended, set Preferences -> Video -> Framedrop "Soft" and "Use multithreaded ffmpeg build", and it will play faster than any other OS X player. (excluding CorePlayer of course)

x264 defaults to fast mode; rerunning it with more analysis on that file (basically -A all -m 9 should cover most of it) gains another 2db. Also, that test, like some other Theora tests, is on a 176x144 video. Exactly how often do you watch those?

SIMD actually helps a lot with motion compensation; it's just a bunch of parallel multiply-adds, after all. But Theora has bitstream reading problems too; you have to decode the whole frame's bitstream before displaying any of it. And there is absolutely no question of it supporting HD (sometimes even SD) because the MV length is broken.

Youtube uses completely stock mencoder from 2005 (+ a handwritten h264 encoder by Skal for fmt=18, which probably isn't faster than x264). They just have way more CPUs than you think they do. I'm actually not sure a hardware Theora decoder could be really efficient - the memory requirements are quite bad for a codec with no multiple reference frames.

Man, I suck at formatting.

> Theora just scores higher on a scoring algorithm when compared ot a single h264 encoder, the open-source x264. It doesn't even do that; it only scored higher when using Xiph's PSNR tool, because it respected a buggy colorspace header written by ffmpeg that didn't match the video. x264 won rather heavily when that was fixed, but /. never retracted the story.

ffmpeg has no idea what a broadcast flag is; your file is probably encrypted, which it won't deal with.

FFmpeg can open images too, although I don't remember the supported formats. It's also much faster at it.

Of course, it is. And sometimes people get mad about that, and then they go off and invent gstreamer and its 1000 plugins wrapping different libs of various quality, all of which break at different places. I don't think this is better.

When was the last snapshot that didn't build or work?

NSA outsources data recovery to Kroll Ontrack, who cannot recover data from a zeroed disk anymore than anyone else can. And why would you bother physically destroying a disk platter? This isn't homeopathy or anything, you can actually get rid of magnetism.