On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 9:08 PM, Matthew Brown<morven(a)gmail.com> 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-lar…
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.
