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New MPEG 4-Based Open Source Codec
Jestyr writes: "Let me inform you about our new MPEG-4-based codec called 3IVX. You probably heard of DivX ;-) as a movie compression format. And indeed it's great.
But we (the whole 3ivx.com team... want to go a bit further. Our goal is to optimize compression so that the file size is smaller, of a higher quality and fully streamable. Moreover the codec will be supported on all platforms (Windows, Macintosh, BeOS, *nix (inlcuding Linux), Amiga ...). To accomplish this the code of the player will become an open source."" I'll believe it when its running on my desktop, but I'd love to see the world standardize on a high-quality video format that is open source. Damn Sorenson.
The term 'codec' is short for 'coder/decoder'. So for them to describe their product as a codec, which they do, it means the encoding portion of the software will be open sourced as well.
They say nothing about opening their codec, just the player. Moreover, they already have investors, IPO plans, and an NDA. They arent going to release their necoder if their investors are worried about a guaranteed profit angle.
Pretty much more of the same. Even if it works its not anything Free enough to displace WMP. Nothing to see here, move along everyone...
I've been waiting for the final release of this codec to do any actual work with it, but I'm really looking forward to this. Even if Windows Media 8 is only marginally better than Windows Media 7, it will still be the best codec around, hand down, in terms of quality and compression. Right now RealVideo and Quicktime are only holding on by their name-recognition... Microsoft has really created a formidable video system, and you don't have to pay ridiculous amounts of money, like with some other companies.
Sure, open source it, but don't GPL it. Let companies like MS and Real etc. adopt aspects of the player into existing closed source programs. If you GPL the player they most likely won't adopt it, and if it isn't adopted then all of their efforts are for nothing. Best case if the code was GPL'd would be that they create their own player over time and by the time that happens something new will come out. Just a thought.
Good luck! Sounds like a nice toy! maybe we can get rid of Quicktime or RAM's..
...I had a dream!
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
I've had mixed results from using the various binary hack MPEG4 codecs available. The best MPEG4 I've found so far (and I've tried a number) has been Microsoft's official Windows Media 7 MPEG4 format. It's truly excellent. The ISO standard implementation doesn't hold a candle to it... I hope these guy's have done some serious optimizations.
Close but no cigar. The mouse is actually using HP patents, not Microsoft. The only thing I've seen come from MS is a talking paperclip in a word processor.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Will we get 6 different iterations of pentium 4 performance comparisons on toms hardware for this new technology?
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Which way would you rather have it? A Winblows only, proprietary, guarded by 6 million attack dog lawyers format, or a format where the open source community already has half of the equation?
Yeah, it would be nice to have it both ways, but lets not get pissed off when stuff is handed to us!
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
1. 3ivx is not Open Source yet, but they hope to make the decoder OSS eventually.
;-) is probably illegal. Project Mayo is still vaporware.
;-) is unknown, we are lucky I suppose that microsoft hasn't done anything, but seing as how the cat is out of the bag, would it matter? Also, to be vaporware, doesn't a company have to promise a release date and break it. When does projectmayo plan on releasing? When have they said they are? There web site is a bit thin but I wouldn't call them vaporware quite so soon.
How do you know this? Do you have some sort of information that we don't?
2. DivX
The legality of DivX
In any case, I think it is down to 3ivx and projectmayo. Let the best codec win.
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Xiphophorus
and
Fiasco!
The 3ivx codec/player has a lot of potential, but if you look closely, there's not much going for it yet.
;-). It would take some pushing around to change the standard, but I could see this happening...except that we've got MS Video 8 coming, Divx Duex, and who knows what else out there that just has a lot more potential.
First of all, it requires QuickTime. Not only that, but the player really isn't anything but a quicktime plugin. That right there is enough of a problem to make me shy of it.
Ok, now. Another problem is this. The encoder isn't even released yet (that I know of??). What good is the player if there isn't an encoder. Until this is released what good does it do us except let us "ooh" and "ahh" about what it could become.
Performance: All I've heard about 3ivx is how poor the performance is, unless you've got a P-III with about an 800mhz CPU. So much for all of us who aren't making 75 grand a year and have to stick with the same computer for a little while.
Look what else is out there: Right now the standard is Divx
My conclusion: It has potential, but it's gonna take some kicking and screaming to make everybody happy with this one...Good luck!
(the comments contained in this posting are simply my own opinions)
Ok, lets see here
1. What we want is a REAL open source codec. We don't want an open source player, API, or "framework" -- we want a true MPEG-4 open source codec.
2. The 3ivx website has released a closed source codec that integrates into quicktime but from what they have released so far, it doesn't compete with Windows Media Format or Sorenson AT ALL. I sure hope that they will release something of decent quality soon.
3. Of all the groups working on a nice MPEG-4 codec, we have seen many die, fizzle, or simply lie. OpenCodex.com is pretty much off the face of the planet and now their website is just some virtual hosting site. 3ivx has said they have a supperior product, and that it will be open source, so far both have been false. That leaves it to ProjectMayo -- the group started by the creator of DivX. They haven't released anything yet but they sure seem to be the most professional. Perhaps we can appeal to them to become open source.
No matter what happens, the community is ready for a REAL MPEG-4 codec that does not just have some open player, it needs to be fully open so that it can be ported to all OS's, optimized, and hacked to be even better than a small group of developers could imagine.
just my $.02,
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Microsoft spends something like four billion dollars a year on research. Until now, the only useful thing I've really seen come out of that research was the Optical Intellimouse.
But I have to say that I've just tried the WM8 stuff, and it's pretty good. Actually, it's better than that--it's scary good. The audio compression blows away RealAudio, and although I've only listened to the few samples available, seems to be able to rival mp3 quality with a much better compression ratio. The video is pretty good (although I think that 'DVD quality' is a stretch--I easily noticed artifacts that I wouldn't tolerate on a DVD.)
Geez, there's a lot of hot air and FUD going on here at the moment, so here's a few facts. Most of these can be gleaned from just looking through their website.
/. (or accepted) i dont know, as it's certainly nowhere near ready for release.
...emphasis their own. The purpose is to get this product 100% MPEG-4 compatible and stable, and then to speed it up.
;-) (which in terms of piracy is the format of choice, which says a lot about its quality), and beats waiting around for MS to port WMP to Linux. Ha!
:)
- 3ivX is/will be a codec for encoding audio and video, based on MPEG-4. Hopefully it will be better than most other MPEG-4 codecs out there, the player, at least, will be open source.
- it is still VERY much in development! all the stuff out there on 3ivx.com is *test*. it is certainly not ready for public scrutiny or evaluation. Why this got posted to
- to quote from their site:
As explained in the previous report, we would like to remind you that the code contains absolutely no optimization. Nothing is assumed about the hardware - and this is to facilitate the ports to other platforms.
- In terms of multiplatformability, 3ivx runs under Quicktime, but also runs under XAnim. So now you know.
- One of the performance targets of 3ivx is to get fast encoding, as well as decoding. So far, it has encoded up to almost 3 times as fast as the Sorenson encoder. And this is still in development, with no optimisations.
- i dont know what planet people are on who are saying the codec is poor quality. Screenshots on the 3ivx site show it positively kicking Sorenson's ass at the same bitrates.
- the support page lists all sorts of other technology bits going into 3ivx, so check it out.
So there you have it. It's a free, multiplatform open source and hopefully high quality audio/video codec. It looks to be good, especially if it can be better than Div X
Though given everyone whining about the lack of a good codec for Linux for the past year or two, I'm surprised why everyone has suddenly attacked it without doing some research beyond reading the first line of the article. Get involved.
Fross
What's the value of an open source decoder, without a similarly open sourced encoder? I checked the website, and can't find any mention of the encoder and its source code.
This company just wants unpaid help to port their player around in the hopes of gaining market share...
So much hype, so little news.
;-) even.
First, there is only a 3ivx decoder which in fact
is a Quicktime 4 plugin. The de-facto standard
these days is a AVI-encoding enabled (i.e.patched)
version of Microsoft's MPEG4 V3 DirectShow filter
and that DS code alone is worth three months of
writing and debugging. But then, to make a codec
you need an encoder as well and this is also still
missing. But that is not the most difficult part.
Microsoft has spent a huge amount of work on
improvements for the original, specified MPEG4V1
written-down-on-paper standard for film encoding.
Which means they already have quite an edge
because if you look at the output of their V1 and
their V3 codecs, you will notice how much better
V3 deals with low (800-- kbit/s) bitrates. These
movies of course are ~512 Pixels (and up) in X
resolution, for 1.85:1 you see 224 pixels in Y
direction, pirated movies have around ~640x288
pixels in case you never seen one. Compare that
to the unplayable 12.5 fps stamp-sized demos on
3ivx' webpage, there's a difference isn't it.
As for Windows Media Encoder 8, while their AAC
implementation now cuts off at 16khz and still
stinks at anything above 64kbit/s compared to
MP3@128 (wme7 cuts off at 20 but lacks sound
transparency just like wme8), the new WME8
codec is now slightly better than DiVX
The visible-macroblock plague from V3 is very
well hidden now without smearing the picture,
which is quite a stunt at 500 kbit.
Thinking three years ahead, if you should be able
to once buy&download movies in MPEG4, you can
certain that MS will be supplying the codec,
because (once again) piracy has bought MS a huge
marketshare. Some russian chap even ported the
codec to Linux by emulating DirectShow DLL calls
(ouch). Combine this with a P3-Nvidia-5.1-Dolby
Digital-whizzbang X-Box and you can get a glimpse
what your kids may want for x-mas 2002 B).
Merry Christmas
from Germany.
Doesn't look like it's going to be open source, but it could definitely cause some troubles for 3ivx if it competes.
The way patents work, you can't be sure that any project is free of patents. Unfortunately, most of the people starting these "patent free" projects think that patents are like copyrights and trade secrets -- if you don't copy, you're alright. Patents don't work that way.
A safe rule of thumb would be to assume that anything is likely covered by an issued or pending patent filed by someone -- hopefull it is someone who isn't a vulture. Even when standards organizations make their members agree to license their patents on reasonable terms, they have no control over the companies who are not members. The number of software patents are growing so quickly you can never be sure a particular concept is not patented (even if you could look through all of the hundreds of thousands of issued software patents, you have no insight at all into the hundreds of thousands that have been in the application phase for a few years and are almost ready to issue).
It is an unfortunate state of affairs, but no one can claim to know that a paticular project is patent-free.
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
But it would be really good if they could use some open and unencumbered standards. DIVX;-) was really cheap, just ripping off Microsoft's binaries and putting some cracks on them. I don't think they could have made a truly free implementation because of all the patents involved, so I think it's time to move beyond MPEG4 and get a totally new and free standard, like Ogg Vorbis is doing.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
3ivx = 3-iv-x = 3-4-10 = ealo
Sorry for the lowercase roman numerals, bloody lameness filter rejected it with all uppercase :P
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
For those of you who want to see some truly amazing advancements in Microsoft's utilization of the Mpeg4 codec, go check out this page:
n /c ompare/video.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/e
If you have a high bandwidth connection the 750k stream looks quite impressive. Almost DVD quality. The audio demo is quite good as well, sounding much better than mp3 encoding at the same data rate.
There's a beta version of the encoder available from MS if anyone wants to fool around with it.
One thing I don't get with all the MPEG-4 and the Windows Media Player and DivX ;) and all is who owns what.
For example, I heard DivX was adapted from some leaked Microsoft source code. Does that mean that DivX is not fully free? I'm sure M$ didn't GPL that code.. so what's up with that?
Similarly, is the MPEG-4 codec itself free? Is it like MP3 where some institute somewhere owns it? I know it's been in development for a long time, so are there relevent patents involved?
And now 3ivX....apparently also a derivitave of someone else's work (MPEG-4)... How "legit" is the whole thing in terms of free-as-in-speech-ness? Will 3ivX-in-hardware players conceivably be legally available someday Can anyone use the 3ivX standards without paying a royalty?
Sorry, just kinda confused. I appreciate the technological acheivements here, but I'm curious about the licensing/other issues.
W
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