WebM vs. Ogg Theora [closed]

Question

How would one compare Ogg Theora and WebM against the following parameters:-

1. Efficiency of compression
2. Efficiency of computation
3. Issues in Wider adaptability (why wouldn't someone make a hardward chip that does Ogg or WebM transcoding; like it is currently done for H.264)
4. Possible/Future intellectual property issues
5. Availability in existing devices

The reason I ask these questions is because I need to choose between Ogg Theora and WebM format for a software project and I am a FLOSS believer.

Admix

This question might be better suited to webmasters.stackexchange.com – Tyrannosaur

Answer 1

Good graph from this 2011 article:

This is a tough call, but honestly, WebM is probably going to win out in the end considering it's Google's project. Ogg will most likely stay what it is now in its audio counterpart-- an open standard that is not widely-adopted even though it's superior in some ways.

H.264 is Apple's, WebM is Google's. Apple will most likely end up adopting WebM, and Google will most likely continue to pare back H.264 on their devices.

I'd base your decision more on longevity than on video quality, the reason being that the quality isn't that different, and even better quality could end up losing in the end. Remember Betamax?

Metathesis

Alas, there are developers alive today that weren't even born yet when Betamax was around. :-o – Cobweb

Sad but true. The VHS vs. Betamax war should be standard historical reading in CS classes :) – Metathesis

I wouldn't bury h.264 quite yet. It's arguably superior to WebM in quality per bitrate and performance (both decoder and encoder). There is a lot of hardware out there with h.264 acceleration but virtually none for WebM. – Contravention

@guy-sitron agreed, and while I prefer H.264, standards that are open and pushed by the big guys usually end up winning in the end. I'll give you that WebM is not widely adopted (yet), but look at Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, the standard that won simply was because Sony decided to back Blu-Ray instead of the HD-DVD standard. I'm very interested to see how this will all pan out, because it COULD go either way. – Metathesis

Answer 2

We are using an optimized version of Theora for our video-chat appliation, and are very happy with the quality and performance. VP8 seems to have the same quality, but the encoder is slow compared to Theora.

Homans

webM encoding speed is really a pain in the a**. It takes ages to encode while not using the whole available horsepower of the CPU ! – Welloiled