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Native Sorenson Playback Comes to Linux

Posted by timothy on from the snowball-effect dept.

Pivot writes: "With the release of Xine v0.9.11a, it is now possible to play back Quicktime movies encoded with the Sorenson SVQ1 encoding natively. There are still some minor issues with sound, and still no support for SVQ3 encoding, but overall this is a major achievement. Downloads are at xine.sf.net. I wonder what apple will do about this." Note: you may have to cut and paste that "movies" link into a new tab or browser.

13 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Licensing? Patents? by JoshuaDFranklin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Licensing? Patents?

    Someone care to explain what the team did about
    these little problems?

    1. Re:Licensing? Patents? by prockcore · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yes please tell.. I have a fully working SVQ3 codec that I reverse engineered sitting on my harddrive (note, only video, the audio is QDM1 which I haven't done yet) I haven't released it due to blatent patent infringement :) but if Sorenson isn't going do to anything about it.. I may release it after all.

    2. Re:Licensing? Patents? by HeUnique · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Here's a snippet from an email which was posted on FFMPEG's mailing list:

      From: Arpi
      To: ffmpeg-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

      Date: Yesterday 23:02:26

      Hi,

      I've just examined xine's fresh working SVQ1 decoder. It's implemented in a ~60k .c file, and uses a 90k .h containing the tables.

      Looking at the source, it looks like SVQ1 is a tricky h263 variant - as gerard also noticed some time ago. They crypted (don't worry, just order
      change and some xor) the first 4 bytes of the header, to hide it's a h263 one. Ah, and they replaced the patented DCT by recursive VQ.
      And, they use YVU9 (chrominance 4x4 subsampled) instead of YV12 (2x2 subsampling).

      So, as you can see, the SVQ1 guy who wrote the native decoder, replaced the sorenson patented stuff with something free..

      --
      Hetz (Heunique)
    3. Re:Licensing? Patents? by Peter+Harris · · Score: 4, Interesting

      1) Bad laws get made.

      2) Laws are hard to remove once they are in place.

      3) The only way to get real discussion on bad laws sometimes is to defy them.

      4) It is not unethical per se to break a law. It's just that laws are generally made to prohibit unethical behaviour.

      If the letter of the law also has the side-effect of prohibiting some ethical behaviour, what do you do? You do what your conscience permits and take responsibility for your own actions.

      By the way, to head off any stupid straw-man arguments like "what if you think it's OK to kill children?", forget it. Stick to the point. If you have a real reason to believe it is OK for big corporations to restrict what ideas humans can think and write and implement in code, let's hear it.

      Personally, I think it would be easier to defy the abuse of patents in this way than to defy the abuse of copyright law. It should be harder to make the case that someone is "stealing" something they wrote *themselves*.

      --

      -- What do you need?
      -- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
    4. Re:Licensing? Patents? by JWW · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The US founding fathers broke a lot of laws, yet their goal was to set up their own country with its own government, not end civilization.

      There comes a point when people need to protest a government that no longer adaquately represents them. One such protest is to disobey laws that are viewed as bad or unjust. If enough people (see aformentioned founding fathers) protest then there can be change.

      I will use decss on my PC because I think the DMCA is a bad law. To that end I also will not pirate any DVD's. My rights should be covered over fair use, but my actions are deemed illegal by the DMCA. I choose not to follow it.

      Oh and to keep this on topic, software patents are bogus and should not be honored either. Copyrights (and copylefts for that matter are valid), but to patent software is stupid.

  2. Re:Linux is catchings up... by Garion911 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Umm.. Changing resolutions on the fly: Crtl-Alt-NumPadMinus/Crtl-Alt-NumPadPlus

    VNC: DOn't they already have a VNC client/server for X? If not, why not just use X itself? (Doah!)

    --
    Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
  3. Re:Linux is catchings up... by NotoriousQ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Here is what you are looking for
    x0rfbserver

    --
    badness 10000
  4. Re:Linux is catchings up... by Progoth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    and here's a much better one, as long as you're running KDE. passwords work, has an optional confirmation box, and even supports Tight encoding!

  5. Re:Linux is catchings up... by spitzak · · Score: 3, Interesting
    What I don't understand is why real "changing resolution on the fly" is not added to XFree86. It should be easy, they already do the hard part which is to change the hardware so the memory is drawn on the screen differently.

    The only other thing X keeps track of is the size of the root window. I propose that the server send a ConfigureNotify event to whoever is listening to the root window (probably the window manager) indicating the new size. The window manager can then respond to this by moving and resizing windows (using whatever rules it wants) to get the resized display. Of course the window managers will need to be rewritten but I expect this would happen very quickly.

    The only other thing is the screen size macros on the Display object. It would also help if xlib was changed so requesting the screen size either did a round trip or a signal was added to indicate that the local copies need to be updated. However I don't think this is vital and it can be ignored as most applications don't use the screen size for anything except to figure out the resolution.

  6. MPEG 4 on Linux by HalimCMe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What about MPEG-4 on Linux? I haven't really looked for it, but I was just wondering how well, if at all, it is supported, since the new QuickTime 6 preview supports it.

    MPEG-4 is really sweet stuff. Just as a test today, a friend and I encoded an entire full-length movie that was captured via FireWire DV and encoded it into a 653MB MP4 file using QuickTime 6 on OS X. I was amazed at the quality. It blew away MPEG-1/VCD, DivX, and even Sorenson in video quality, and the audio quality was quite good too, all while fitting on a single 700 MB CD-R.

    I would love to see DVD players support MP4 playback from burned CD-R's. The quality is actually good enough that you can sit back and watch a movie distributed on a single CD and just enjoy it without being annoyed by poor quality video and audio.

    MP4 will really revolutionize video... if the licensing issues don't kill it before it gets off the ground, but that is another story :)

  7. Re:YAXSP (Re:Linux is catchings up...) by Alan+Shutko · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Font support: NOT fixed yet.

    Does Xft give me access to ligatures and kerning pairs? Does it give me access to outlines for my drawing app? Does it give me access to full fonts I can embed in my PS/PDF output?

    There are a bunch more features that would be nice, but the mere ability to do AA fonts on screen does not equal real font support.

  8. Apple is planning to leave Sorenson anyways by frankie · · Score: 3, Interesting
    It seems pretty likely that Apple is planning to end their exclusive Sorenson license soon, and switch to using MPEG-4:

    Apple developed its own ISO-compliant MPEG-4 video codec to provide the highest quality results across a wide spectrum of data rates - from narrowband to broadband and beyond. This revolutionary codec offers compression times and video quality that rival those of the best proprietary codecs available, yet it provides true interoperability with other MPEG-4 players and devices.


    That would be huge good news for consumers everywhere (assuming MPEG-LA gives up on the per-minute fee).
  9. Safer to wait... by Sorenson+Media · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In relation to the topic being discussed, I personally would recommend waiting until Apple and Sorenson Media resolve the legal formalities and questions surrounding Sorenson Video and the exclusivity license agreement in question. If all goes as planned we should know the outcome within the next 60-90 days. That said, we don't view broad adoption and support of our video codecs as a bad thing providing we can do so in a legal manner. We have been interested in supporting Linux for some time now but due to the nature of our contract with Apple, we haven't been able to pursue this effort before now. The exclusivity agreement with Apple expired last April '02 so our options for supporting this effort are a little more open now (pending resolution of certain legal formalities). Companies or individuals interested in licensing any of our codecs (Sorenson Video 3.1 Pro, Sorenson MPEG-4 Pro, Sorenson Spark Pro) for integration into their products should contact either myself or Matt Copal matt@sorenson.com (Business Development Sorenson Media). Moving forward you will see announcements made by us later this year that will not only greatly benefit QuickTime 6, but also the Linux community as a well. Stay tuned! Ammen Harper Sorenson Media Director Product Management aharper@sorenson.com