HTML5 Theora Video Codec for Silverlight

Post by jdowdell » Fri, Feb 05, 2010, 11:32 PM UTC

jmillikin wrote: post #18

mdasen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to burst any bubbles, but Silverlight isn't a plugin that everyone has in the way that Flash is. Silverlight seems to be at slightly less than half of all users ( http://www.riastats.com/ ). So, that would mean anyone with Firefox, Chrome, or Silverlight could watch it and that would be pretty awesome since I think Microsoft will push for greater adoption. But right now, Silverlight isn't so well adopted. Better…

Thanks for the link -- it looks like I was drastically overestimating Silverlight's market penetration. However, the graphs on that site appear unreliable -- for example, they show Silverlight's market share dropping by 14% between January 22 and 26. Do you know if the raw data is available?

Travis keeps the sites confidential, for obvious reasons. It's plausible that there was another shift in sites sampled recently, similar to the doubling that it reported for Silverlight starting one week in November: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdowdell/4180222368/

I saw Alp's post last night... plausible, a good engineering challenge. Not sure how it will play out in the world though. But it sure added some spice to this morning's Theora-vs-H.264 wars.... ;-)

Post by nl » Sat, Feb 06, 2010, 8:18 AM UTC

pieter wrote: post #14

jmillikin wrote: post #7

Looks like Theora wins -- this means that about 94%* of web browsers either support it natively, or can watch it via a pre-installed plugin. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Except that most modern mobile devices DO have a hardware h264 decoder, but aren't fast enough to run theora as a plugin -- if they even have support for plugins.

That's a (common) partial misconception. It is possible to get at least partially accelerated Theora decoding on mobile devices, now. For example http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp... has some writing on a decoder for OMAP3 chips (Moto Droid, Palm Pre).

That isn't quite the same as H264 in hardware, but should have comparable performance and more importantly should improve battery life considerably.

Re: HTML5 Theora Video Codec for Silverlight

Re: HTML5 Theora Video Codec for Silverlight