Hi patchworks,
Theora is a quality based encoder, with a video Q from 0 to 10, so there's not really that much granularity to precisely encode trying to match a predetermined file size, like the way I do with CQMatic.
However, Theora blows away DivX/XviD Codecs, and if development continues the way it's going, we'll soon see standalone players supporting OGG (Vorbis/Theora)
For streaming applications, I haven't seen anything better
I have tried KVCD MPEG-1's to match Theora, and it's just not possible.
Theora is really WAY ahead of just about any other current video technology Codec.
As a matter of fact, there are some video projects where I work, that we are evaluation Theora (with KVCD compression techniques and methods
) Sorry, I can't comments more on what's going on
One of the best things about Theora is the licensing. It's BSD-style license, so we can use and modify it freely, in our commercial environment.
Dirac Codec was discarded in the evaluation, because it's (L)GPL.
But I'll give you something to whet your appetite:
http://www.kvcd.net/emotion.mpg.ogg (~5MB)
You need VLC media player to watch that:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/.
I encoded it at 1024X768 from the original, which was 1920x1080.
You can download the original here:
http://www.heise.de/ct/ftp/spezial.shtml which is ~37MB
-kwag