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On2 Releases VP6 video codec
A reader writes:"On2 Technologies, the folks who brought you the open-source VP3 video codec (now managed by Theora.org), have released our latest codec, VP6. Highlights include hi-def support with no encoder restrictions, real-time encoding at full D1 resolution, and substantial performance & quality improvements over VP5. Best of all: no "patent pooling" restrictions or external licensing fees, a la MPEG-4."
On2 Technologies, the folks who brought you the open-source VP3 video codec (now managed by Theora.org), have released our latest codec, VP6.
Glad to see people can just submit press releases.
This will be a rather hard codec to propagate, given that many people don't even know or want to know how to install XviD.
Best of all: no "patent pooling" restrictions or external licensing fees, a la MPEG-4."
:)
Will that mean my educational *ahem* videos will now be free?
Sure, VP6 has simpler licensing because it is completely proprietary, but H.264 is supposedly patent-free and it has the advantage of being a published standard with mulitple competing implementations.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
I would really recommend reading this codec comparision by doom9:
t m
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/codecs-103-1.h
Doom9 shows us very nice screenshots from non-keyframes. The conclusion is still: XViD is the best codec around. I hope people understand that whatever other companies claim (e.g. "50% better compression") you should never underestimate what doom9 says: all codecs out there now are VERY similar. None of them is really outstanding.
OK, the summary says no external licensing fees (though I don't see anywhere on the site itself that makes that claim), but then you do see this statement:
;)
"VP6 is available for commercial licensing. Note that custom engineering services may be required to integrate VP6 into your application."
So I wonder if it's going to be one of those things where almost anything will require "custom engineering services" and they'll just get you there. Maybe they just won't publish an api doc, thereby requiring their services no matter what
The On guys compared VP6 to something called H.264, which I come to find out later is an official standard (newly released) for MPEG-4 encoding. It looked really damn good, almost as good as VP6 on the frames they chose.
I understand XviD's implementation of MPEG-4 is based on H.263.
So is anybody (including XviD) considering implementing it? I understand it isn't patent-encumbered. I could be wrong...
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I dont, i'll continue to use Divx or Xvid. Being that both are either free or really cheap (for the pro ver of divx).
I dont buy thier claims that its any better than divx. To start with, thier samples are biased and most likely have been changed to show an advantage in thier product.
If they do in fact have a better quality then the comperable codecs, is it worth the cost of licening this codec for just a slight improvement in quality?
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Ffdshow is a filter for most mpeg4 codecs. Works with divx 4,5, xvid and other mpeg4 implementations. If all you do is playback, no codec required. Also if use alpha xvid codecs and it doesn't playback properly with ffdshow, you know that your vid isn't mpeg4 compliant. Btw, I capture/encode shows all the time in windows and would like to do this in linux, but it seems really lacking. First off, avisynth is an indispensable tool for dealing with video. What first attracted me to it was the best ivtc plugin by Donald Graft. This processes telecined sources back to their original film frame rate which I use on toons/film sources.
:) ).
But the versatility goes way beyond that. Here's an animated menu I made for batman tas for a vcd I was working on, which btw I authored with videopack 5 to include animated menus, galleries with audio and chapter selection (I love pimpin that
Also worth mentioning is Tmpgenc, probably the best mpeg 1 encoder, which is free. And not to shabby mpeg2 encoding. Also of course is virtualdub, which has come in handy on many occasions.
So where are the comparable linux equivalents? I couldn't find them. I'd love to see a write up on video encoding on linux, maybe I'll do one myself.
This thing only runs on Winblows.
I guess they don't realize that to some content people, cross-platform availability is more important to smaller file size.
AC comments get piped to
I did not see that listed in Doom9's comparison. It seems the MPlayer developers prefer it over Xvid. I've always used FFMPEG MPEG4 with fantastic results.
related note; the older On2 codec which has become the basis of Ogg Theora isn't dead: Ogg Theora is listed as supported in the newest version of Xine, as mentioned yesterday.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Is there one?
Or is this win only?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Quick googling shows that such codecs have in fact been investigated. But are these ideas used in any current codecs?
Of course every lossy codec has its problems, but there's at least one reason why I'm intrigued by these 3D style codecs: it could be easier to balance resources between single-frame precision vs. motion. With fast action we're less sensitive to details, so the codec could use more information for motion and less for the image details. And vice versa for slow scenes. This would happen automatically if the codec always preserved the strongest percentage of frequency/wavelet components (which is a standard way of signal de-noising).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
No doubt On2 has filed patents on VP6. Their pitch is that all the patents are (supposedly) owned by them instead of 20 different companies, so it's easier to negotiate a license. Of course, if you aren't willing to pay licensing fees at all then it doesn't make any difference.
does anyone else get the idea that all these new better more innovative codecs are seriously damaging the overall encoding scene? sure, all the computer users can just go download the latest nemo codec pack, but stand alone players trying to support all these new different formats are being over run by a army of different codecs. ultimately we doom ourselves.
Another poster pointed out that this codec isn't free, and is just as commercial and proprietry as Real and WMV. They're wrong - it's actually much worse than those in terms of cost and lock-in.
Now, I don't know what the terms are for VP6, but our company investigated implementing VP5 a while back. To encode in realtime, you needed dedicated hardware ($15,000 per license). To encode offline, you need software at $10,000 per license. This is licensed on a rolling annual basis - i.e. $10,000 a year. You then additionally need to license the TrueCast on-demand server to distribute content, which is similarly priced.
I'd expect VP6 to be similarly priced to VP5. You'd better be encoding an awful lot of video and saving an awful lot of bandwidth to make it worth your while.
OTOH, the quality of VP5 was extremely good for a given bandwidth (much better than xvid).
Ffdshow is an easy replacement, as it's based on a Linux project, ffmpeg.
The extent of my encoding comes from recording TV or VHS tapes and throwing a few filters at them for cleanup and encoding. So I've never had a chance to become familiar with what features avisynth has. Some people over at Doom9's Linux forum have mentioned getting Avisynth running in wine.
Tmpgenc should be a pretty easy replacement. Transcode seems to be a favorite for mpeg2 encoding. There was a problem when I first started using Linux, which slowed mpeg encoding to a snails pace for a while, and I've never found a chance to get back to see how it works when fully functional. A lot of peoplel swear by it though, and it's feature list is pretty impressive. Avidemux, as well as quite a few other programs also provide mpeg1 encoding, I think through ffmpeg.
Everything in VirtualDub/VirtualDubMod except video capture should work fine under wine and that's what I used for quite a while before Avidemux appeared. The design and functionality are very similar to virtualdub, and it also includes encoding to mpeg1.
One of the two best media players for Linux, Mplayer, should be noted to have better support for matroska, in cvs, than is available for the format under windows. And these tools can be used for creation and editing of matroska files.
For capture from a tv card, I use nuppelvideo, and then use avidemux to edit and convert to a smaller format.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Actually, H.264 is manifestly NOT patent free. There may be a license-fee free baseline profile for it, but it's certain that the higher profiles will have some kind of license fee ala the current MPEG-4 codec.
Still, that certainly doesn't kill a format in every case. Every DVD player pays $2.50 to MPEG-LA.
My video compression blog
I'd love to see a write up on video encoding on linux, maybe I'll do one myself.
I forgot to mention, that if you do take this on, Doom9's Linux forum is probaly the single best source of information out there to start with.
I think there's a real need for a site centered on video editing, capturing and encoding under Linux. It was probaly the single biggest challenge for me moving to Linux, simply because all the information out there is so scattered. Compiling some information is something I keep meaning to do, but never seem to be able to find the time and energy for.
Everything will be taken away from you.