[FFmpeg-devel] donation for snow

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 08:24:38PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
[...]
> Now theres not just snow, but theres are other attempts to write free video
> codecs. What is missing is some effort to work together ...
> Thats especially noticeable when one looks at H264 designed by the JVT which
> is made of ITU VCEG and ISO MPEG, its funny but they definitly managed to
> unify their forces much better than the FOSS people who ended up with tarkin
> theora, dirac, snow, ...
> 
> I think that doing what the JVT had done would be the most likely successfull
> path. In addition to what they did (and that is the reason why theres any
> sense to "duplicate" the effort) it should be required to avoid anything that
> is known to be patented unless the patent owners license their patent for free
> to every user of the codec. And the codec should be kept as simple as
> possible, not having 2 seperate entropy coders (CAVLC/CABAC) supporting 2
> variants for interlacing, 3 variants of coding a few bits in the header, and
> a dozen different timestamps/frame numbers/ picture order counts.
> 
> Also similar to the JVT each change to the codec would have to be carefully
> tested in terms of quality/bitrate/speed. In this respect we would need some
> guidline that says what percentage of slowdown is ok for what amount of PSNR
> gain. The actual decissions of what to accept would inevitable be done by
> voting or consensus.
> 
> 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?

If there is interrest, then there are several pathes that should be
considered, that is:
a x264 based encoder and lavc based decoder which replaces all the parts
that are patented by other solutions, that is ones having better quality
per bitrate and or being simpler at the same time. Avoiding just patents
would likely fail due to none of us really giving a damn and just improving
quality a little would be asshatry because 1-2% isnt worth to break from
standard h.264 and giving the world yet another codec to support.

the second path would be continuing with snow or another FOSS codec

the third would be starting a new codec from scratch

Only thing needed are people actually working ...

[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being
governed by those who are dumber. -- Plato 
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