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• Wave Goodbye ; What About VP8/WebM ?

  7 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — Multimedia PressWatch

  Some big news in the geek community this past week came in the form of Google’s announcement that it would no longer be caring about its vaunted Wave technology. I was mildly heartbroken by this since I had honestly wanted to try Google Wave. Then I remembered why I never got a chance to try it : they made it an exclusive club at the beginning. I really did try to glean some utility out of the concept by reading documentation and watching videos and I had some ideas about how I might apply it. Then again, I try to think of a use for nearly any technology that crosses my path.

  It still struck me as odd : Why would Google claim that no one was interested in their platform when they wouldn’t give anyone a chance to try it out ? A little digging reveals that Google did open it for general use back around May 18. That date sounds familiar... oh yeah, VP8 was open sourced right around the same time. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember hearing anything about Wave at the time.

  But now I’m wondering about VP8 and WebM. How long do you think it might be before Google loses interest in these initiatives as well and reassigns their engineering resources ? Fortunately, if they did do that, the technology would live on thanks to the efforts of FFmpeg developers. A multimedia format has a far more clear-cut use case than Google Wave.

• Usurper of FATE

  31 juillet 2010, par Multimedia Mike — FATE Server

  Mans sent a message to the FFmpeg-devel list today :

  A new FATE

  Mike’s FATE system has done a great job over the last few years. It
  is however beginning to prove inadequate in various ways :

  [various shortcomings already dissected at length on this very blog]

  To address the above-mentioned issues, I have been working on a
  replacement system which is now ready to be announced.

  Check it out : http://fate.ffmpeg.org/.

  Considering that he just obsoleted something I’ve poured a lot of time and energy into over the last 2.5 years, is my first reaction to this news supposed to be unbridled joy ? Hey, I’m already on record as stating that I wouldn’t mind throwing away all of FATE if there was a better alternative.

  I’m not certain but I’m pretty sure that at this point, the original FATE server is practically obsolete. Mans is already testing all of his configurations as well as the configs I test. As soon as the other FATE installations switch over to the new server, I should be able to redirect fate.multimedia.cx -> fate.ffmpeg.org, sell most of my computers, and spend more time with my family.

  Thanks, Mans !

• New Sanyo cameras have editing in mind

  13 octobre 2009

  Sanyo has announced some ’A’ revisions to their existing FH1 and HD2000 cameras, which add a new "iFrame" mode. It appears this is an i-frame only h264 mode, at a reduced 960x540 resolution. It’s a very interesting idea - if other manufacturers adopted it as an optional setting, and if NLE manufacturers supported it, it could turn H264 into an edit-friendly format. Right now, editing H264 is hamstrung by the extremely long GOPs and complex interframe relationships. Going to i-frame only makes it essentially a more advanced version of a codec like DV or DVCProHD.

  Interestingly, the bottom of the press release mentions that

  "The iFrame logo and the iFrame symbol are trademarks of Apple Inc."

  That’s news to me. One wonders if Sanyo jumped the gun on a release, or if this is just a format that Apple uses internally in tools like iMovie, which Sanyo has co-opted. I’ll certainly be keeping my eyes open for an Apple announcement about "iFrame."