[FFmpeg-devel] donation for snow

[Lars Täuber]

On Thu, 6 Nov 2008 10:36:10 -0800 "Jason Garrett-Glaser" <darkshikari at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The missing support in the development of snow was the reason I wanted donate some money, but i seems to be a wrong mean. I share your sadness.
> 
> This is unsurprising.  The people good enough to be useful in
> development of Snow are also good enough that their time is worth
> quite a bit of money--enough that the only way you will get them to
> work on it is either a few tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum,
> or some sort of non-monetary motivation.

My hope was that not only two other people are that interested in seeing a snow 1.0 version and join with a donation.
I think to less people know about FFmpeg and their wide spread usage in the prgramms they use. So it isn't really surprising to me either. But the hope should never die..

 > > If someone is interested in the features end users liked to have here I share my ideas.
> > The main reason for me to look for a new codec is my need for a future-proof codec. It's meant to be used as a standard to archive my private family videos made with different devices using different codecs stored in different containers. They all should transformed into a standard format.
> > That means I want me and my grandchilds in the situation to decode these films in 30+ years.
> 
> Then you really want a format accepted as an international standard,
> not some random creative idea we come up with.

No. It's my english that takes me from beeing understood. I'm sorry.
I wouldn't care if I would be the only one using the codec as long as it is available (usable) for my grandchildren and their children ....
I know no one can promise this. But OpenSource in the meaning of GPL or LGPL are good enough for me.

> > For me it is not very important which technology is used in the background, but the following points I'd liked to see:
> >
> > - independence of any company!!!
> 
> Do you mean backed by more than one company, or backed by no companies
> at all?  Most standards like MPEG-2, H.264, etc are the former.  If
> you mean the latter, that's a very bad thing, as it means less effort
> spent on optimizing encoders and decoders for that format.  A
> general-use format sponsored by only a single organization, whether
> ffmpeg or On2, is IMO problematic.

Yes, I meant the latter one but in an other way than you understood. I don't want to fear that a company dies and the developement stops because of lack of money or people getting paid for developing. I think the LGPL and publicly available source code might achieve this already.

> 
> > - codec available under open source and royalty free license (and as portable as possible)
> 
> Truly royalty-free means patent-free.  As mentioned above, this won't happen.
> 
> > - developers try to not infringe patents (to the best of the knowledge)
> 
> I will probably outright refuse to work on any project that makes that
> as a rule.

Take the ?try? literally. I better should have written ?try the best to ...?
Their are always compromises.


> > - reasonable balance between compression ratio and decoding speed on recent hardware
> 
> So, you mean... not Snow.

As long as there is no specification 1.0 Snow could be everything, doesn't it?

> > - lossless mode (intra-frame-only mode) would be nice
> 
> "Lossless" and "intra-frame-only" have nothing to do with each other.
> 
> > I'm just fine with the idea of a codec based on h.264 with reduced complexity and missing useless features.
> 
> Restricted Baseline profile?

I don't know nothing about profiles yet.
 
> > There is only one feature I can think of that might become usefull in the future. It's stereo coding. I mean compressing frames recorded from two different angles.
> 
> You mean H.264 MVC (Multi-View Coding)?  The spec has already been finalized.

How complex is it? Is it worth its complexity?

Lars