The new HTML5 standard’s most prominently mentioned new feature is undoubtedly the video tag - this tag enables all compliant browsers to play video embedded in a site with no additional plugins The only problem? The organizations responsible for choosing a video format are undecided. In one corner is H.264, used everywhere from Blu-Ray disc to military applications due to its tremendous efficiency, and in the other is Ogg Theora. Ogg Theora is known to be less suitable for content delivery.
UPDATE: I had originally titled this article “Home movies with Linux: Beginning the exploration (of things Linux can’t do)”, but have since changed the title to be a bit more fair. It is a given that Linux isn’t suited to certain tasks, but rather than show these things up as embarrassing shortcomings I’d much prefer to demonstrate these areas of weakness to people who strongly believe Linux should replace everyone’s Mac / PC tomorrow.
This HOWTO has been updated and dramatically streamlined! It’s worth re-reviewing if you’ve read/implemented this method already. Keep in mind, this is for experts/enthusiasts and not those looking for a quick one-click solution. The quality of video and sound is, for the average viewer, highly subjective. When it comes to viewing a DVD though, one can be certain that they’re watching the highest quality (until HD-DVD/Blu-Ray standardize) video they can get.
Hopefully people will glom onto this information, as it’s sorely lacking. Here’s the upshot - DiVX and XViD are dead. H.264, more commonly known as MPEG-4/AVC is the new champion of compressed video. And yet, most media files are still released using DiVX and XViD, chiefly because people are not totally familiar with how to create H.264 files. What’s worse, many people simply use graphical frontends to encoding engines, which don’t provide them the newest options for H.
H.264, MPEG-4’s advanced codec featured in the iPod, the Sony PSP, and both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, as well as future broadcast video standards, has a lot of skeptics. Many say H.264 doesn’t have a lot to offer people when videos are compressed at the higher bitrates required for HD content (self-contradictory, as H.264 is accepted as the standard MPEG-4 codec for High Definition). To them I just want to say: This is your brain,
