On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 9:08 PM, Matthew Brown<[email protected]> wrote: > Apple's position probably has much to do with their video-playing > hardware devices having hardware h.264 decoding which can't handle > Theora.
Please don't propagate this fud. Processors half the speed of the ARM11 core in the iphone can decode theora with ease. It may ultimately be the case that the particular hardware in the iphone allows it to get significantly better battery life with H.264, but the exact differences are hard to speculate on because H.264 generally needs more computation than theora, so isn't always obvious how much beyond closing that gap any specialization goes. But whatever it the results are it's *not* a matter of "not being able to handle it". Of course, Apple needs their products to have great battery life— but no one has been advancing a "one format only" path for the standard, the push was always for a baseline. So if apple offered both, they could strongly recommend whatever gives them the best battery life, since apple isn't known for rejecting apps from the app store for merely using a lot of battery life, I fail to see how that would be an issue. (And indeed, they are already in the business of specifying format settings, because you need to use a very specific subset of H.264 for the iphone anyways). And a final Apple specific point regarding hardware support… http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/07/VvxoETsSdYcyeoZQ-large.jpg The large apple-logo chip in the top left corner of this board is the iphone 3GS' CPU. I don't think it's too bold to say that Apple's disinterest in supporting Theora (and every other unencumbered media format in existence save .WAV) is the cause of the lack of specialization in their harware and not the other way around. _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
