Re: free video codecs?
From: Chris P. [MVP] (msdn_at_chrisnet.net)
Date: 11/01/04
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Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 10:44:53 -0500
Thore Karlsen [MVP DX] wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 18:11:09 -0400, "Chris P. [MVP]"
> <msdn@chrisnet.net> wrote:
>
[..]
>
>> Theora is a work in progress. The current build is pretty stable and
>> garnered a lot of features of VP3 from On2 through arrangement. On2
>> has gone on to make VP4, 5 6 where the quality is pretty up there
>> compared with MPEG-4 etc.
>
> Is it just me imagining things, or is it horribly slow? I tried to
> encode a 320x240 stream at 30FPS, and it sucked up 100% of the CPU.
> I'm almost wondering if it's a debug build, because I haven't seen a
> codec perform that poorly before.
It is horribly slow. The current build is not really very optimized, it's
still got a ways to go before it will be useful for realtime encoding.
> I also couldn't get the file to play. I saved it as an .ogg file, and
> tried to open it in Media Player and Media Player Classic, and neither
> application would play it.
Don't think the .ogg extension gets registered by default, and getting .ogg
or anything other than what Media Player knows about to play nice in Media
Player is a chore (I have some .reg entries to fix that here somewhere). It
should have worked in MP Classic though.
> I downloaded the latest XP install from
> http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/.
>
>> WMV is free (as best as one can determine) if you're only using on
>> Windows, ports to other OS's or to hardware devices require license
>> fees. There are some downsides to the WMV format itself in that it
>> can't be used the same as some other media formats because there is
>> no seperate parser filter available (it's part of the source) so it
>> depends on what you are doing whether that's a good idea. You can
>> still use the WMV3 (Windows Media 9) codec in AVI files if that's a
>> problem.
>
> Can you use later WM codes in AVI files? What I'd be worried about is
> if I found a bug, MS wouldn't fix it and I'd be told to upgrade to the
> latest version -- which wouldn't be of much help if it didn't support
> AVI. Keeping in mind the cease & desist letter the VirtualDub guy got
> for parsing the ASF format himself, I'd be very wary of using the
> WMV/ASF file format.
You can only use the WM codecs that are specifically designed to be AVI
compatible. I haven't had any issue on the decode side, the regular WM DMO
seems to happily decode the stream extracted from the AVI - however encoding
you need the build that is ACM compatible. In the future - who knows what
the support will be for legacy containers. I would hope that the codecs
continue with an open idea of containers.
You can freely use the WMV/ASF format through the Format SDK. It's just the
reverse engineering part they don't like very much. If you want to use the
ASF spec directly in a commerical application you can do that too (read the
license at the start of the doc
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/format/asfspec.aspx), but the
part that got "Virtual Dub guy" (Avery Lee) was section 2. (c) which
translates to you cannot publish or distribute this specification or
implementation of this specification. That basically kills it for open
source implementation.
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