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VP3.com: Future VP3 Releases To Be LGPL
sudog writes: "According to this vorbis-dev posting and The VP3 Homepage VP3 (QT5-type movie compression scheme) is now under the LGPL! What's not clear is whether they intend to offer it guaranteed royalty and patent free to the community. They're actively looking for help, too. Does this mean that we no longer need the OGG-Tarkin to save us from our movie-less, video-app-less emulating?" Of course, they don't say starting when, exactly.
___ Dan Miller
(++,) CTO and founder, On2 Technologies
On Wed, 27 Mar 2002 volsung@asu.edu wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Daniel B. Miller wrote:
>
> > Hi fellow Ogg-oids --
> >
> > I wanted to let everyone know that VP3, our open-source video codec that
> > is commonly used with QT5, is being re-released under the LGPL. We are
>
> Really!?! All I can say is wow. What about the patent issues? Are you
> granting royalty-free license to the required patents along with the license
> to the code?
That's a requirement of the LGPL, so, yes.
...The latest issue of Linux Journal (remember that mag? ) has a good article on the various quicktime players available for Linux, and how to install/use them ...
Check them here : Linux Journal
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
For those bitter about Divx, have a look at XVID (www.xvid.org). This a GPL video codec based on the source of OpenDivx.
:)
This codec give me excellent results compared to Divx 3.11Alpha and Divx5...
With XVID video and OGG sound all in a OGM file (OGg Media) i get fully legal DVD-Rip !!!
> Really!?! All I can say is wow. What about the patent issues? Are you
> granting royalty-free license to the required patents along with the license
> to the code?
That's a requirement of the LGPL, so, yes
But some people picked up the opendivx code and kept developping it.
I'd say xvid is about up to par with divx5 now. (Save b-frame support, which is still divx5 only.)
Doom9's site is the premiere site on the web for video encoding. Doom9 actively tries to get his hands on the newest encoding tools, and periodically he tests them to see which codecs give the best results.
It used to be that along with the lastest versions of DivX, he tested WMV and VP3; he doesn't anymore: WMV and VP3 consistently lost and lost badly to div3 sbc, div4, and xvid. You can't say that VP3 is "the next DivX" when it's can't outperform the ancient div3, much less div4 or the newly released div5 / xvid.
[shameless plug]
I really, really, /really/ like xvid. It's an open source reimplementation of Project Mayo, the project that led to the development of div4. Development is fast; I have realized significant gains in quality and usability in even the past two weeks. The codec is fast; on my crappy windows machine it crunches frames faster than div4 and div5 and its playback filter (w/postprocessing!) uses fewer CPU cycles than div4 or div5's.
If you want to play around with xvid, the easiest way to start is to go to the xvid forums at doom9.org and read about what the codec can do for you.
[/shameless plug]
-inq
Yes, it may not perform as well as xvid, but xvid has a severe drawback, that you should be giving consideration to- patent licenses.
There is not an aspect of MPEG4 (which is what xvid is a codec for...) that is not covered by patents that need to be licensed. Nobody has a royalty free license to any MPEG4 patents for free software implementations so distribution of the codec is violating the patent rights of several companies.
You may not care now, but they're stepping up enforcement efforts of all this stuff and you may well find yourself without a codec or in trouble because you're violating the rights too.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The problem with Ogg Tarkin it is still pretty much an experiment, using techniques which is way ahead of its time. 3d wavelets haven't been heard of in any other standard which are under development.
XviD, however, exists today. It is a fully GPL'ed MPEG4 codec. However, it cannot exist legally in any form other than an experiment because the MPEG4 license still has to be paid for in order to use XviD. XviD, like LAME, will mostly exist as CVS sourcecodes under guise as an experiment, with many rogue sites around the world providing binaries (usually with automated daily compiling).
Personally, I wouldn't count on the quality of VP4 being anything earthshattering. Tests of VP3 quite clearly shows that it is behind DivX3, DivX4 and XviD in terms of quality, so something has to really shape up. This might probably be due to a lack of 2-pass VBR encoding feature in VP3. Meanwhile I will just continue to encode my rips in XviD, encode the audio with Vorbis and mux them together into an Ogg container. If VP4 or VP5 really turns out to be good enough, I would probably try to find a way to mux that video stream into the Ogg container too.
VP5 is a very different beast than VP3 - there was a whole VP4 version between there. I doubt On2 is getting much in the way of benefit to VP5 from VP3 being open source. It's probably mainly a brand recognition thing to keep their name in the codec community while they prepare VP5 for launch.
My video compression blog