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VP3, Open Source Video at 200kbs
Honest Man
noted that intel is hyping VP3 as the first low bitrate open source video codec. 200kbs for VHS quality video sounds good to me, especially when I can apt-get it. But is DivX already to entrenched in this niche?
There are patents on the technology, which means it is of no more use to the open source community than True Type font hinting and MP3.
:)
I hope that they address the patent issues, and not just brush them aside like the DivX guys have done.
There's a reason the Xiph.org project is trying to develop a video codec too
The real open source VP3 site
The VP3 open source license
The VP3 license claims to be MPL derived. Would be interesting to see if it still fits the open source criteria.
Is DivX ;) entrenched in the market? Well, how many non-technical people have heard of it? How many PCs is it bundled with? It has a reputation for being primarily used for pirated video (regardless of the truth). So, the answer is a resounding "no, it isn't entrenched".
I encouraged my Digital Video Professor here at the University of South Florida to institute divx as the codec standard for all of our projects. He tried it out and now he swears by it. I am pretty positive that divx will be used as the class standard for a while now..
//----(triple c)-------//
I went to the VP3 site to watch some movie trailers they have. When I started playing the trailer, QuickTime Player told me I didn't have the VP3 codec and offered to install it for me. I clicked OK a few times and the trailer started playing. It couldn't have been easier. It even installed the encoder, so I can encode VP3 from any QuickTime app.
Is that video *and* audio? Or is that video only? Either way, it seems too good to be true. Typically, 128kbps is the considered the bottom end for near CD quality for MP3 audio... at 200kbps for this VP3, if they have decent stereo sound encapsulated, that doesn't leave a lot of room for the video!
Even if that figure is for video data only, that seems way too good... 200kbps is barely enough to describe audio, let alone a decent representation of video! Don't forget, DivX takes about 10Mbyte/min or 1365kbps for audio and video at decent quality...
I wonder what the quality and resolution are truly like...
It's available from their cvs server. Look at: this page for more info on browsing the CVS tree.
You can't get a blue screen on a black and white monitor.
Lots of missed info for a project that whose source was released in early September. Good to see it finally got noticed by /.
-first source is available on vp3.com. You must register to download (hrm).
-Its license is MPL derived, with some restrictions on IP for their patents. Also derivatives must always be able to play VP3.
-Its streamable with QT hinting.
-only currently available for Win and Mac. Port to *nix should be easy since there is code for OS X.
-Apple and Real will be supporting it in their players
Standard VHS quality audio is encodable in something like 40-60kbps. It's nowhere near hi-fidelity. Now, stereo hi-fi stuff would probably require something like 300-400kbps for the video and audio as it'd need an MP3-like audio stream present.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
On the bottom, there is this link to the official site at www.vp3.com. The code's under a slightly modified MPL license- if you want much of anything in the way of support, you'll be paying them $395 for the "certified" version. Otherwise, it's as free and open as Mozilla is right now without the GPL license on some parts of it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
On2 owns the patents for VP3. They're granting rights to anyone that wants to use the source and produce a codec for their platform. They're granting the rights to the patents for people that make improvements to the system so long as they don't break stream compatibility with the open source code in their CVS repository.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
(yes, I suppose I should have spent a couple minutes searching on google before I posted my question).
I just found two comparisons:
Extreme Tech from June 18, 2001, compares Windows Media Video 3, 7 and 8, Real 8, MPEG-4, Sorenson MPEG-4, and QuickTime (Sorenson V3 and V2). Hard to get clear results, though it looks like they liked WMV and Real about the best.
Also, Digital Video.com (looks like it's from november) compares WMV8, Real 8, QT 5, Sorenson 3, H.263, VP3, and ZyGoVideo. Like many magazine articles, he declines to pick a "best", since it's so usage-dependant. He thought you needed to get to at least 800 kbps for VP3, didn't like ZyGo, liked Sorenson V3 better than H.263 (which he liked better than SV2), but thought WMV8 was better. Also RV8 wasn't as good, in his opinion, as WMV8.
Anyway, they might be worth a read...
I found out that the 'downloading' part is register locked. Big deal. guest:guest worked for me :-)
I love default passwords...(ahem, root:root)
And the results - for the same file, at 910 kbps, indistinguishable quality, both had minor artifacting, etc, but looked pretty good full screen, and looked great at default res. The big difference was time to encode - divx took 6 1/2 minutes to encode the clip I selected, VP3 took 11, and size - divx was 20.7 mb, vp3 was 29 mb. All other things were equal, I used Virtual Dub for both, same video clip, and the default encoding parameters for both (Medium for speed/quality in DivX 4.0, Fast Encode for VP3). My computer's a Celeron 566, 256mb RAM, running Windows 2000 SP2.
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Same thing pisses me off about digital cable and satellite. They use higher mpeg2 rate for football games and ppv movies, but they lower it for my favorite tv shows. They only have so much bandwidth (they say) so the big money makers get the better quality.
This also happens with live tv, watch a football being passed, no mpeg2 artifacts. Watch a late night kungfu movie, and you can see artifacts. Older movies are stored on tape at lower quality, they should really start re-encoding those older movies for broadcast.