Fantastic. I'm glad the trolls have taken my earlier advice and made some posts which weren't obviously filled with lies.

Lets break this one down: "not provide better quality than practically any other video format" Depends on how you define other formats. H.261/Mpeg-1? Thoroughly trounced by Theora at all bitrates. Mpeg-2? Again, trounced by Theora. VP6, theora kills it at "web" bitrates.

And this is true without any of the enhancements. The new encoder looks like it will make Theora competitive with MPEG 4 part 10.

You've managed to cite comparisons from 2005. The theora decoder was completely rewritten since then. Or perhaps you've been benchmarking the completely broken implementation in mplayer that doesn't even play all files. Theora has significant lower computational complexity than H.264, and the current decoder delivers that. 1080p theora files play fine on my old laptop, which just chokes and sputters on H.264 files.

And yes, Theora does low bitrate well. Thats why it's well suited for the web.

The overwhelming majority of FLV uses VP6, not h.264. Compare it yourself: At low bitrates even Theora outperforms VP6. (VP6 produces lots of blocking artifacts which Theora doesn't have)

Vorbis has never been widely adopted in the sense intended by the grandparent poster.

Examples would be PNG, GIF (now), JPG ... where are the highly proprietary alternatives? Zero traction.

The free thing needs to have very high penetration before it denies air to proprietary competition, but once it's there we should be forever free of having to choose between free and compatible.

No, thats kind of the point. You can download the example clips encoded with the development encoder and play them on your own system if you like.

Wikipedia isn't a "big video site", but they are an enormous site in general. A small amount of video on Wikipedia still translates into a lot of video in total.

Wikipedia doesn't publish traffic statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if the Wikipedia video traffic were more than the fifth most to the hundredth most popular "video" site combined.

Wikipedia uses a Java decoder for Theora (because no browsers include Theora yet) and for Dirac the Java version is incomplete and not real-time.

Proof? Prove to me that H.264 doesn't violate any third party patents. Prove that this slashdot AJAX comment interface doesn't violate any patents.

You're asking the wrong question.

I don't know about Unreal. Halo uses Vorbis in Ogg. Then again I can't believe that I'm responding to someone who would even suggest that Ogg has patent problems.

Proving a negative is usually hard. With patents proof is not even possible. (but proving a violation is far more straight forward) What is relevant is the decisions of experienced engineers and attorneys and what we have is experienced engineers and attorneys advising their clients (I.e. Mozilla; Wikimedia) that Theora is okay to use. Meanwhile, can you point to anything more credible than a Slashdot comment saying Theora violates anything specific?

As Wikipedia would say: "Citation needed".

Care to show an example of *any* MPEG-2 codec out performing the current Theora encoder on a typical web-video 500kbit/sec stream? Forget the new enhanced theora encoder, MPEG-2 can't even match the old crap. Plus mpeg-2 is patented to hell and back, you even have to pay for mpeg-2 decoding in Windows to play DVDs!

Can you cite a *single* example showing Vorbis to be glaringly inferior to AAC? At best the listening tests show AAC to edge out Vorbis only for speech samples at the lowest bitrates (where Xiph has Speex, which blows AAC away for those applications). And no multi-channel? wtf. Vorbis supports 255 channels.

I shouldn't expect better from slashdot, but could you at least find lies that are a bit less obvious.

Ogg high overhead? Okay, Ogg/Vorbis+Theora is something like 1% overhead vs a typical of 0.9% overhead for a movie in AVI. You win there. Then again, OGG provides frequent checksums so that a damaged OGG/Vorbis file will *never* break your speakers and damage your hearing. People who have had the misfortune of hitting a corrupted MP3 in their iPod playlist should be able to appreciate the advantage of this approach. What you consider a fault I consider a feature. Egads, room for design differences exists! who would have thought?

I've never seen a game using Vorbis without Ogg. The only reason I can think of that you'd use Vorbis without Ogg is RTP streaming. But no one is dumb enough to make patent claims about Ogg, because there is pretty much nothing to it.

Theora ships with information on the patent status. Beyond that, perhaps you should have your lawyers call Xiph's lawyers. Legal strategy just isn't something that people post about randomly on the internet.

Youtube is using VP6 (except when you explicitly ask for the high bitrate H264 version), which appears to be substantially lower quality than Theora at the low bitrates they are using.