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Multi-Platform Video Codec Seeks New Home
We started our journey as an
open-source
project contest in response to DivX, before
DivX networks came into
being. Due to a variety of issues (not the least of which was our
main investor pulling out and funding having to come out of my own
pocket), we mutated into a closed-source project that we intended to
distribute ourselves through the help of a third party. We finished
product development almost a year ago and have a really great
portable video codec that runs on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
The problem we've run into is that with the economy being as it is,
our candidates for distribution assistance have also all dried up.
We've considered just GPL'ing it and seeing what the open-source
community could do with it, but don't have anyone to oversee changes
and official versions, not to mention from the looks of the DivX 4.0
project, there don't seem to be a lot of people interested in (or
with the knowledge to) work on video codecs.
More or less, we've got a bunch of very well written CodeWarrior
projects that need to find a new home as we don't really have the
expertise or financing to sell it or even give it away. So, I'm
interested in knowing if anyone has any suggestions for what to do
with the project, or interest in taking it over (those with
experience with this kind of thing)."
If seriously interested, you can contact Eric using the mailto link at the beginning of this article.
Isn't that where our favoriate things like fetch came from?
If you're codec is patent free, the people over at the ogg multimedia project would be bigtime interested. They've got the audio portion (vorbis) well along but they're still aways away from having their video portion (tarkin) completed. Head over here for more info
...making a presentation and taking it to various movie houses for thier online trailers? It may be hard to get them to think about switching from Quick Time, but if you can give a good quality video, with a smaller download, and multi-os support, some of the smaller movie houses may consider it.
Also, what about companies that are working on video colaboration. Generally they have in house codecs that they write, but they are not always targeted for multiple os's.
Zro
There are tons of open multimedia projects such as Gstreamer which could benefit from such a codec, assuming it's entirely patent free and unencumbered by copyright liabilities... Depending on how good it is, this could be great for OS...
Ogg-Tarkin is still in the very earliest stages of development. It'll probably stay there for a while until the guys over at Xiph get Ogg Vorbis 1.0 out the door.
:-)
And if Vorbis is any indication of the quality level that Monty, et al want to achieve with Tarkin, it's going to kick some serious ass.
To be on topic, if you guys aren't getting anywhere with investing, it may be worthwhile to see if the Tarkin guys are interested. I mean, if you're really thinking about giving it away anyway, maybe you can give some another project some serious help.
Pax, Ardax
Would it be possible to show us the quality of this codec somehow? Maybe start with uncompressed video, and have the DivX, VP3, etc. people all compress it down to a specific bitrate, and you do the same. Then once it's compressed down to that bitrate you could decompress it(since we don't have a decoder...), thus letting the general public see the quality of your codec.
Would that work? Because there are a lot of codecs, and unless you can show that this one is better than the others, I really don't see why people would be interested.
That's helpful in getting it known, which is worth rather a lot.
The codec would not in that form be usable outside of the context of freely-redistributable software. Someone who wants to integrate it into their cool, but proprietary viewer would find that they can't, at least not with the GPL-licensed version.
That can't represents the place where they can look for their revenues.
It's not obvious that there can possibly be interest in it without there being some sort of release; the company hasn't money to spend on renting Times Square to show the world they've got a K001 Product.
Releasing under something like the GPL may be the only way to get it into use, and to get any return from it.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Lovely placeholders, but wouldn't it make more sense to have actual screenshots of the codec in action? The web page is totally devoid of any useful information.
Yet another video codec. Does anyone really care?
READY.
#
If you don't truly outperform other codecs, you probably won't make money with it. Codec performance is very tricky to measure, with everyone using the codec wanting something slightly different (compression speed, decompression CPU load, image quality, motion quality, etc).
One option is to provide the compressor/decompressor for free and then offer a higher quality version of the compressor for sale. It's a tough market, though. If it's truly revolutionary, you could try selling it to Apple, Microsoft, or Real. You'll need some really good side-by-side comparisons with their current codecs and MPEG4 to get their attention, though.
Personally, I would love to see it open sourced.
Can we download a decompressor and see some demos?
It'd also be helpful if you'd benchmark your codec's playback CPU load versus DivX and the other popular formats. While nowadays PCs can handle some heavy demands, lightweight decoders would still be desirable, especially for embedded applications, etc.
If we're going to use an algorithm encumbered by patents, we might as well use MPEG-4.
However if your CODEC is not covered by any patents, then please consider releasing it under a BSD or GPL license.
For information on why software patents are bad for free software, please visit The League for Programming Freedom