[FFmpeg-devel] donation for snow

[Jason Garrett-Glaser]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
> * having motion estimation and ratecontrol actively developed in x264 but
>  none of the improvments merged back.
Motion estimation in Snow is still more advanced than x264 in some
respect; Snow has iterative ME, x264 doesn't.
> Basically in the end its either, I finish snow alone or it dies ...
> In that respect the question is what does "finishing it" mean actually?
> Is the goal to have a codec that is better than x264? Or should we follow
> xiph and pretend that our codec is patent free even though we dont really
> know.
>From the little I know about snow, I'm pretty sure it violates patents
left and right (median MV pred, same tapfilter coeffs as H.264, etc)
> Ive no doubt that snow could beat x264 given a few determined and smart
> developers
I highly, highly doubt this, assuming you stick to the basic current
idea of Snow.  I don't doubt that you or I could make a better format
than H.264 if I tried--there are dozens of places one could make
improvements--but what I do doubt is the ability to make a better
format *using overlapped wavelet*, since thousands of people have
tried that for something on the order of two decades and failed
miserably.  And if its not overlapped-block wavelet, it really just
isn't Snow.
> Of course such a effort also like finishing snow depends on people actually
> contributing/working/"doing viewing tests".
> Is there any interrest in doing something like that?
Well, making a new format requires a lot of work.  It'd be far easier
to just base the format off of H.264.  Remove sub-8x8 partitions,
remove interlacing, remove CAVLC, add a few thousands more contexts,
replace the DCT with an 8x8 hierarchical lapped transform, allow a
delta-quant syntax element per transform, etc, etc...

If you actually want something patent-free that doesn't suck, give up
now, its a fruitless pursuit.

Dark Shikari