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Open MPEG-4 Codec Contest

Posted by Hemos on from the must-have-open-standards dept.

chrizzzz wrote to us about the opencodex.com contest to write a Open MPEG-4 Codec. They've got an industrial sponser now, so the first team/person to do it wins 50,000$US. The contest page has speifics about the project.

4 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. LAMP! by mholve · · Score: 4
    There's a great player out there called "LAMP" for "Linux Animation and Movie Player."

    It uses Windows DLLs for CODECs and can play AVI, MPEG2, MPEG3, SMPEG, QT...

  2. Nevermind MPEG! by mholve · · Score: 4
    (RANT) I'd like a simple, UNIX-based application that could just once and for all, play AVI, Quicktime and other formats that xanim won't do.

    How are we supposed to be a serious platform for graphics and content if we can't even play the stupidest movie clips? (/RANT)

  3. Patents? Project Mayo? by harmonica · · Score: 5

    The codec should utilize MPEG-4v.2 video motion compressors or something of equal quality, source code available on this site.
    If it's not only something similar in quality to MPEG-4 but uses MPEG-4 itself, what about all the patents? From earlier /. discussions I remember that there are quite a few... I think it's not in the interest of those who want to create an open codec that this codec will be 'illegal' like DivX ;-).

    On a similar note, can anybody say what the guys at Project Mayo are doing? Sounds very mysterious, but the line Our members include the creators of DivX ;-) seems to make it a promising project.

    It would be great to have a codec that is cross-platform, free, open-source, and performs well. And please don't put it into QuickTime -- I know that it's only a 'wrapper format' for all kinds of content, but I don't want to be forced to use that stupid QuickTime player anymore. Design the codec as a library in a way that you can make a QuickTime plugin from it if you want to. Give it a file extension of its own, so that all .xyz files will always play, everywhere! Create a small cross-platform player (maybe based on GTK) for people to download.

  4. For such a big prize.. by g_mcbay · · Score: 5
    This contest doesn't seem that well thought out.

    As another person mentioned, they plan on releasing this code under the GPL (not LGPL) which will be violated when the program is run through the QuickTime interface that is a requirement of winning!

    Also, by not forcing people to be MPEG4 compliant (according to the rules your code must be MPEG4, or something with 'better quality'), the resulting codec may not be open standards compliant, which in many ways nullifies its existence...Do we really want open platforms like Linux to still have their own different set of codecs? I guess having a 'different' codec beats having obsolete ones... but most web sites (etc) will use something more standard, regardless of quality. Unless the codec is SUPER COOL and ported to many platforms, in which case the author could likely make much more than $50k off of it by other means.

    Lastly, I looked through the site and didn't find any information on how this will be judged. Image quality alone? Or code quality? Or time to code? Anyone?