Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (6764)

• The Future of the VP8 Bitstream

  17 juin 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther) — vp8

  Recently we’ve seen software products such as VLC, FFmpeg, Logitech Vid, Flumotion and Tixeo adopting and using WebM and VP8 (the video codec in WebM) in exciting new ways.

  In addition to software developers, many hardware vendors have committed to shipping VP8-accelerated products based on our current bitstream in 2011 . Devices that use hardware acceleration for video are a very small percentage of overall web traffic today, but they are a rapidly growing segment of the market and our project must be mindful of these vendors’ needs. Given the longer lead times for changes in chipsets, hardware companies implementing the codec today need to be confident that it will be stable and supported as VP8 content proliferates.

  Like every codec, WebM is not immune to change ; the difference in our project is that the improvements are publicly visible, and compatibility and implementation issues can be worked through in an open forum.

  So, to maintain codec stability while also allowing for quality and performance improvements in VP8, we have added an experimental branch to the VP8 source tree. The WebM community can use this unstable branch to propose changes to VP8 that will produce the best video codec possible, but without the constraints of a frozen bitstream. At some point in the future, when the experimental branch proves significantly better than the stable branch, we will create a new version of the codec.

  Teams dedicated to improving WebM are actively investigating and evaluating new techniques, and are committed to do so for the long term. We encourage the WebM community to keep contributing as well. To learn more about the experimental branch and get involved, see our repository layout page.

  Jim Bankoski is Codec Engineering Manager at Google.

  

• 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 !