Uh, this article here on Slashdot is about *brand new* improvements to Theora, how it is vastly better from original Theora of even one year ago, and also about how a really old broken version of ffmpeg was also causing really terrible quality problems....

So you post several year old screenshots made with an old, unknown [but definitely broken due to age] version of ffmpeg.

BRILLIANT. Seriously, dude, fewer bonghits.

You have to measure the PSNR of each codec with the same tool, silly (and avoid doing colorspace conversions which are lossy in the interchange. Keep the output in YCb'Cr' format). If you're using the x264 encoder's reported PSNR *cough*ahem* it's known to be wrong. It always reports way higher than other tools, like it's forgetting chroma is subsampled or its log-space algebra is just wrong or something.

Let me check myself with the clip linked in the article....mmmm lessee.... yep! that's what you're doing. So, BZZZT, no gold star, try again.

To be fair, the whole thing is part of 'the Ogg Project'. Saying 'Theora is Ogg' is not actually incorrect, and it might get you laid at parties.

No need to be such a stickler, here have a beer.

That practice is called 'dumping' and is illegal for most goods and services, at least in the United States.

Why would either Slashdot or Streisand apply here? Just wondering. Slashdot traffic isn't exactly likely to bother MITnet much, and I'm hardly likely to censor my own post or have MIT remove it.

I *had* been thinking of adding some gradient improvement screencap examples though.

And following Thusnelda will be Snuppflog. They're just internal project names.

Intel chooses boring internal codenames like towns, we choose silly things that our incredulous detractors dare us to use. But only if we like them.

Actually, I oversimplified to the point of being partly misleading--- the few famous lab studies conducted on DDT that implicated it in egg shell thinning and carcinogenesis turned out to have been seriously flawed. When verifying the study results, others later found that in some studies the DDT had been contaminated with PCBs (powerful toxins/mutagens), in another rat study found the feed supply to have been heavily contaminated with aflotoxin (also a carcinogen) due to moldy conditions, etc. The studies that had originally implicated DDT were not in the majority, and so science was skeptical even at the time that DDT was the culprit (not that the press cared). When the flaws in the experiments were found and the studies repeated, they did not find DDT to have any significant affect on animal health or the reproductive success of bids (ie, no egg shell thinning). It was thus posited (but not proved) that if DDT was having an effect in wild populations, it was due to industrial contamination of the DDT, not the DDT itself.

Science corrected its mistake, but the media thought the original story was way more interesting. Truthiness isn't a new concept.

It was found out some time ago that it wasn't DDT itself thinning the shells of birds' eggs such that the eggs were too fragile to be viable, it was contaminants and impurities in the DDT due to the way it was being manufactured. DDT itself proved relatively innocuous, but this was established long after it had already been banned.

If it can be manufactured without the toxic impurities, it is indeed a miracle cure for many of the developing world's ills.

The most important question unasked

Cheers,
Monty
Xiph.Org