With Firefox 3.5 out, I decided to give the much discussed video codecs a try. Ubuntu Podcast #30 is a bit over 50 minutes long, at 640×360. The original video file is over 500 MB. Using ffmpeg2theora, the OGV is around 180 MB. Not bad.
The fallbacks seems to work ok. IE visitors see the embedded flash player, Safari users can watch the video with Quicktime.
Playback on a 1.6 ghz machine with 1.5 GB RAM seems a bit choppy at times, but not completely horrible.
Let me know what you guys think.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Indeed firefox 3.5 has issues playing ogg video files efficiently. A little trick i picked up was that if you right click on the playing video and click “hide controls”, cpu usage will go down 20-30% percent.
From what I have heard ffmpeg2theora uses old version of theora library. Have you tried using gstreamer pipelines directly?
If you don’t like command line you may want to try using transmageddon – http://www.linuxrising.org/transmageddon/