better codecs in sight?

[taeuber]

Hi there,

I'm an amateur filmer and looking for a free video codec to store/compress my videos in/with.

Some months ago I came across snow and hoped it will be finished in the near future or even progressing. But I'm a bit dissappointed of the development (if you can call it like this).

I'm not a programmer nor am I familiar with video codec internals. So the only thing I could do was to donate some money for developers. This doesn't seem to be very helpful though 1200 Euros came together with donations from A'rpi, Tom and me.

Now to the point: Does anyone know of an efficient (new) codec that is GPLed or LGPLed and seems to have no potential patent or license problems? It also must exist or be planned a written specification so that there is a good chance my films still are decodable in 20 or 50 or more years.

No, Theora is not an option for me.

My favorite container is matroska. I hope the matroska developers will support a new codec very quickly.

How is dirac compared to other modern codecs?

Thanks and a very good next year to you all.
Lars

[Dark Shikari]

Snow and Dirac are really the only options I can think of, and both are slower and worse than the existing H.264 standard.

And of course its not clear that either are patent-free, unlike Theora. It is really quite difficult to make a good video standard without violating any patents.

[Sharktooth]

dirac should be patent free... while snow isnt.

[taeuber]

Hi Sharktooth,

witch patent does snow infringe then?

Lars

[SeeMoreDigital]

Dirac licensing info: -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/licensing.shtml

[Dark Shikari]

Hi Sharktooth,

witch patent does snow infinge then?

LarsThere are thousands of video-encoding related patents; in order to avoid infringing them, you need to do one of two things:

1) Have all of the patents released for you to do whatever you want with (Theora).
or
2) Specifically design the codec so as not to infringe upon patents.

Even some basic concepts that I've come up with on my own have turned out to be patented.

[taeuber]

Hallo!

I'm aware that there could always be some patents infringed by any software. And the developers do not know this.This could happen to proprietary software as well.

With our existing patent systems it is nearly impossible to be 100% sure not to infringe some patents. Still there is AFAIK no one claiming his patents infringed by snow.

But back to the topic is there nothing new and promising out there?

Lars

[Didée]

I miss the reports about WARP (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=76641). :)

[taeuber]

Hi Didée,

was there any more info about this WARP?
The video pointed to in this thread isn't available any more.
Was it promising?

Thanks
Lars

[Didée]

Search the forum upon "General Lee D. Mented" & "WARP", there was more discussion going on.

The idea behind it is unique, quite different from any of the well-known video compression schemes. But iirc there was never enough working code to judge if the method could work out, or not.

[taeuber]

Searching done.

This post (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=386518#post386518) killed my hope.

Ok, any other candidate(s)?

Lars

[jeffy]

(Q:I'm an amateur filmer and looking for a free video codec to store/compress my videos in/with.)

I am sorry for being sligtly off topic, but who knows what this progress might bring to Dirac:

Well, for the professional usage: Dirac Pro
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/press.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/diracpro.shtml
http://www.numediatechnology.com/products.html

[taeuber]

Hi,

I'm a bit scared because of this patent issue with dirac. But it's better than MPEG licenses I hope.

From this pdf (http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/press-downloads/dirac-lores.pdf):
Does the BBC have patents in Dirac?
Yes. We have patent applications pending for some of the techniques involved in Dirac, and others that we intend
to put into Dirac in the future. There has been some criticism about this, so we'll be clear: this does not affect the
Open Source status of Dirac, nor does it affect its royalty-free status. The conditions of the MPL mean that we're
licensing these patents for use within the Dirac software for free.

Do you infringe any patents? Are there any royalties to pay?
The short answer is that we don't know for certain, but we don't think so. We haven't employed armies of lawyers
to trawl through the tens of thousands of video compression techniques. That's not the way to invent a successful
algorithm. Instead we have tried to use techniques of long standing in novel ways. Where we think we're novel,
we're in the process of getting patent protection ourselves, which will invalidate others' claims of priority. There
are some areas that are more heavily patented than others. Arithmetic coding is one such, even though the
technique itself has been around for 25 years. We're using a basic version, based on considerable prior art dating
back many years, which we don't believe is patented.

Are there any quality comparisons betwenn one of the latest implementations of dirac and other codecs any where in the net ?

Greatings
Lars

[nm]

I'm a bit scared because of this patent issue with dirac. But it's better than MPEG licenses I hope.
Those issues are pretty much the same ones that Ogg Theora has. On2 has licensed VP3 for royalty-free use and opened the source code, but It is not completely clear that Theora isn't infringing on some other existing patents. It's the same thing here--as a user (or developer) of Dirac, you don't really need to worry about BBC's patents.

[taeuber]

Hallo there!

It's the same result I came to last time I thought about this developement.
There seems to be nothing better than snow, even if it got stuck in its present unfinished form.

So then I ask once again:

Is there someone out there reading this who likes to support snow in its progress?
Maybe someone who could read C code and completes the specification or the like? The money (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu) is still available.

The hope survives.
Lars

[microchip8]

I too would really like to see Snow become a mature codec so we can all finally start encoding :D Unfortunately I'd like to help as much as possible but I'm too stooopid to understand C :/

[taeuber]

Hi froggy1,

what about a little donation then?

I think about changing my donation from money to hardware, because this can be simpler to accept in relation to taxes.

Regards
Lars

[microchip8]

@taeuber

do you think a donation would really matter in this case? I mean there's been a lot of $$$ donated in the past for the development of Snow (iirc, it was a total of 1200 euro/dollars ??) but still development on Snow is slow/non-existent :(

[nm]

do you think a donation would really matter in this case? I mean there's been a lot of $$$ donated in the past for the development of Snow (iirc, it was a total of 1200 euro/dollars ??) but still development on Snow is slow/non-existent :(
Apparently 1200 € was not enough to attract qualified developers and that's not really surprising. Donations and other third-party support would certainly matter if there is enough money involved. I'm sure that 5000-10000 € for a month's work would get many people interested.

[microchip8]

ummm maybe a silly question, but how many of the coders on this forum understand how Snow works and understand how wavelets work? From what I know about wavelets, they are pretty hard to understand/code right... I don't know much about coding (except writing Bash scripts) so I'm just guessing here.

[taeuber]

Hi!

It's also a question of publicity.
Even if you only donate a small account of money or you just mention you were willing to help but feel to unskilled the developers feel needed and worth working further on snow.

This is how open source works. It's mostly reputation and acceptance from the users. And positive feedback of course.

It's a vicious circle, because the codec isn't ready no one uses it and only a few just know about its existence. So only a few potential users can give feedback. To few positive feed back to less developement.

Everybody who wants to see a ready to use snow codec should give feed back or ask for further development.
[ffmpeg-devel (http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel/)]

Bye.
Lars