Who is better / faster?
A Unity plugin playing a streamed OGG Theora or a Flash based Youtube player?
Lets see 
http://yogware.bluegillstudios.com/VideoPlayer/VideoDuel.html
I’d like to hear how it plays out for you. For me the Unity version starts about a half second before the youtube version, but with an obvious bump in quality. (And this is for real, after I emptied the cache)
The flash version loaded before the Unity version, the compression was less good (dunno what kind of codec and compression rate you’ve used there) but it also ran a little bit less jerky. Unity video content generally tends to be jerky on slower systems. I can watch bigger and better looking content with on2VP6 and h.264 on my system and i also got other developers reporting the same.
Moreover Unity’s content can’t make usage of video formats which are common in both the CD/DVD and the net world. You first have to reencode them which either costs time and money or if you don’t have the uncompressed material available comes with a loss in quality.
Same thing happened here.
Well, to be fair, the Unity video file was much larger than the one on youtube. I guess you know the exact sizes, but Firebug shows Unity one being 38MB versus about 9MB for Flash one. No wonder quality is lower in Flash version!
I know. I’m just saying that to the end user (Who has a fast computer / connection) Unity seems much better.
Now I have versions with a 41 and 14 megabyte OGG file. Also switched the default to use the lower setting.
High: http://yogware.bluegillstudios.com/VideoPlayer/VideoDuelhi.html
Low: http://yogware.bluegillstudios.com/VideoPlayer/VideoDuello.html
taumel, does the lowres version work smoothly for you?
The Unity version loads second for me in each case, but only by about a quarter second. Yes, it looks better, but I’ll give that up to be able to watch a section of the video over and over again with ease. I suppose that anything that isn’t a .mov isn’t going to do a great job with that, though, from my experience.
@Yoggy
It loads faster now due to the smaller filesize. Just one thought on this, making videos is kind of an art on it’s own if your heading for the best solution because it depends on many aspects like the film material (f.e. keyframerate needed for the speed of the movie), the functionality you need to be included (bidirectional keyframes?) and and and. The Theora codec like it’s implemented now is nice for you own little movies but as already said it lacks the switches for finetuning for certain purposes and the format generally isn’t suited for typical client work, so please give us h.264!