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In-Depth Look At Video Codecs
johnsee writes "Atomicmpc has an incredibly in- depth look at a wide range of video codecs. It looks not only at their inner workings, but also shows the quality produced by each at a variety of settings and situations."
Oh wait I'm "new" here.... let me go RTFA. Be right back.
Get a web developer
You don't even have to read the article to guess that H.264 destroyed everything. Even VP7 doesn't stand a chance, though from my experience its the closest codec there is to H.264.
..any of the codecs the porn..i mean video sites i visit ask me to install before i get to see the videos..
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
http://digg.com/apple/DivX_Pro_Mac_Free_on_June_7
Grab it while you can.
I've found the best way to highly compress movies on OS X is to use the ASCII Movie Player codec to display the video in Terminal.app, capture that to a text file using a pipe, and then zip it all up.
What would be more interesting is, "which H.264 codec performed the best?" They probably answer this question in the article, but I can't read it because it seems to be Slashdotted right now.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
The article makes some serious errors in overgeneralizations. It says that all codecs have in common that they make bitstreams shorter for transmission. But not all codecs compress (or otherwise reduce) their data. Some codecs transmit uncompressed raw data, increased in size by adding encoding data. For example, HD video monitors connected by HDMI (or DVI) use TDMS encoding not for compression, but to increase reliability in transmitting large raw data streams (10.2Gbps) quickly enough (340MHz) over cheap HW.
And though humans learned stone tools remarkable close to finally learning to load CD-ROMs, the stone tools were paleolithic ("old stone"), while the CDs were at worst neolithic ("new stone"). Someday we'll look at the modern era as a new age, probably "hualic", or "glass" age. These silicon chips and glass fibers have changed us as much as we've changed the glass from which we make them.
Just for kicks, I note that we've encoded the Si atoms into the new tools that define our age.
--
make install -not war
Does anyone have a similar link to imaging and sound compression algorithms?
XviD is an H.263, aka MPEG-4 Part 2 "Advanced Simple Profile" (ASP) encoder, no?
This is quite different from the newer H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10 "Advanced Video Profile" (AVP)) encoders like x264 (which is part of ffmpeg, at least recently, I believe). H.264 is a much better match for high-definition video that's going to be played back on HD equipment.
I think it's been known since the AVP codecs arrived on the scene that they pretty much kicked the crap out of the ASP ones; their only major downside is the processing requirements both to encode and decode, and (more true in the past than now) limited installed base of people with the codecs.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I've just read a bit of the article and the only thing I can think of is to paraphrase Stanislaw Lem: "it always amazes me that people need a license to drive a car but can write and publish all sort of nonsense without any clue about the subject".
His descriptions of "temporal compression" and "motion compensation" (to name just two of the fundamental building blocks of modern video codecs) are so wrong they don't even qualify as an error. He confused delta compression with motion compensation, thinks MPEG1 lacked the latter, doesn't understand why the former is virtually useless for video... sigh... even trolled Wikipedia articles manage to be more accurate than that.
I feel truly sorry for the people who read that and think they've learned something about the subject.
I'm a bit skeptical of information in that article after reading the DCT description that described it as a rounding trick. What, is frequency-space too hard of a concept? Doesn't everyone get some Fourier analysis in college these days? You need to know it to be informed about a lot of modern data analysis.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
please note a lossy codec was used for paraphrasing
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
This is not "everything you wanted to know about codecs." In fact, 3ivx just released 3ivx 5.0 for encoding to MPEG4 a few days ago.
A bit of a bummer that an Australian website missed reviewing an Australian created codec.
FYI, here's the press release. And YES! It does do Linux!. Tux be praised.
http://www.3ivx.com/pr/pr20070607_50.html
Cheers
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
This article is so full of errors that i'm only going to point out this particularly peculiar part:
;p
Reverse-engineering industry standards is a great open source tradition, and x264 is the result of the video industry's new wonder codec, H.264, being given the treatment.
1. h.264 is not a codec. It's a standard, e.g. a series of papers describing what a codec should do in order to compress video.
2. x264 devs did not reverse-engineer anything. They just used the standard to write an h.264 compliant codec like everybody else.
3. If you actually reverse-engineered a standard you would get the language used, which is quite frankly well documented already
For those who like laundry lists, here are some codecs not listed: Dirac, Theora, Huffyuv, Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer Codec, MNG, Cell, NV, WaveCodec, Motion JPEG and MSU Lossless Video Codec. The wikipedia page doesn't list all of these, it took some scouting to find others and some of the early early ones are apparently only listed in the documentation on Open Source videoconferencing software I had back in the early 1990s.
Are any of these significant, though? Well, Dirac (BBC) damn well should be - we're only talking a high-definition TV quality codec by a major broadcaster with on-site offices in most countries that would be a logical choice for their remote bureaus to use and be a good candidate for competing with digital broadcasters in general.
Theora - well, it would be the ideal desktop videoconferencing codec in many ways. Those in common use today are heavier than necessary but the quality you buy with that at the bandwidth generally available just isn't worth it.
Huffyuv is said to be the fastest codec on the planet by some, which is entirely possible. That would make it good for most things where CPU power is expensive but bandwidth is cheap. (Embedded systems would probably fall into that category a lot.)
MSU's Lossless Codec is probably the slowest codec ever written, but gives by far the best compression. It makes a great reference codec to compare others against, apparently. If you could develop a decent hardware implementation, it might be a serious competitor to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, as you could pack a comparable volume of material onto a standard DVD and therefore use already-existing commodity disks and players. All you'd need is a patch kit to add the decoder. This would likely appeal far more to consumers, as they wouldn't need to spend as much, but the studios and the manufacturers would hate and despise it for the same reason.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'd like to point out that 1680x1050 is huge.
[Ahem] The new standard is 1920x1080. Cope.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
"Print" does not mean stipping out all graphics and ads, but leaving the number of pages the same.
>:(
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Leaving aside how crap the article is in terms of what it does cover, it didn't even include any Wavelet CODECs (Dirac, Snow, etc, ...) which outperform the DCT based methods, both for video and for still images (JPEG 2000).
If you're simply looking for a definitive answer as to what the best quality encoder is, you won't find it here - or anywhere else for that matter.
I'll take a whack at it.
H.263 baseline is the same bitstream as MPEG-4 pt. 2 short header (and forms the basis of the Flash Spark codec). Both H.263+ and ++ and MPEG-4 pt. 2 Simple Profile and Advanced Simple Profile have further (and different) enhancements to that core bitstream.
Being based on H.263 proved to be much more of a limit for MPEG-4 pt. 2 development than was original determined, which led to the development of newer codecs like VC-1 and H.264.
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We don't care about all of these redundant codecs. Just pick a high quality format with good compression and make it an OPEN STANDARD for all playback devices. Computers, Web, mobile phone, home theater, whatever. Just make it standard so we don't have to waste time with hundreds of incompatible formats and all the stupid codecs, drivers, and devices to play them! GAH!
Oh, I'm really a big fan of our WMA 10 Professional low bitrate modes (
And on a practical level, we support rate control modes rarely seen in other audio codec implementations, like 2-pass CBR and 2-pass VBR. This lets us get more bang for the bit compared to 1-pass CBR and VBR modes.
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So why is it that Windows Media Player started to get a remarkably better codec just about the same time that the first drafts for MPEG 4 were coming out? It would appear from the outside like they took the code and because it didn't have to pass a slow IEEE ratification board anymore, was able to be put straight to market in the same way that DivX was. Then as new improvements in the MPEG 4 code were made, suprisingly there was a new release of Windows Media Player aswell. WMP 7,8,9 were all rapid fire released and then finally when H.264 was getting close to being ratified and released lo and behold Windows Media Player gets a brand new spankin' HD codec later be to named VC-1 so as not to remind everyone that it came directly from Microsoft as Windows Media Player 10 Video Codec. If this is wrong then please elucidate because that's a whole lot of coincidences in a row. Why would a company hand over their codec for standards? Because they know that no more improvements are going to be made and that the code base from which you were working has been frozen as H.264 AVC Level 10. Meaning you can't review the code anymore as it's updated by being on the IEEE board.
Are you aware that VC-1 in the SMPTE spec for VC-1? So both codecs have fully publshed specifications, and reference source code for both encoding and decoding.
All the info about algorithms in the video codecs is fully public. The same body, MPEG-4 LA, handles licensing for both technologies, and handling patent issues around them.
Going back to the paleolithic era, Microsoft made the original reference encoder for MPEG-4 (hence the venerable MPEG-4v3 codec). Windows Media Video 7 and later were about going beyond what MPEG-4 was capable of, since we and everyone else started hitting our heads against its architectural limitations. Microsoft was also quite involoved in H.264 as well, including a Microsoft employee who chaired the committe that developed the standard.
That said, we find VC-1 is a better codec for many uses. H.264 was really designed more for an ASIC environment, and uses computationally and bandwidth intensive techniques like CABAC and a really strong loop filter that make it much more expensive for PC playback (in CPU requirements and battery life in a laptop) than a VC-1 encode of equivalent quality and bitrate. Also, VC-1's simpler loop filter design makes it easier for us to preserve textures like film grain at lower bitrates. This lower horsepower needed for decode makes it possible for us to do stuff like software-only decode of HD content inside the Silverlight brower plugin, where we have no access to hardware acceleration.
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DiVX demands your e-mail address to receive "reg key," then immediately sells your e-mail address to douche bag spammers.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Well, the OP was about how good codecs are :).
Actually, there are more non-Windows playback options than you think.
First, Flip4Mac can play back all VC-1 flavors and WMA Pro today. It doesn't play back the higher frequencies of WMA Pro, but they continually improve their support every release (full VC-1 Advanced Profile came in 2.1.1 last month). Downloading it seems pretty simple, but it isn't open source. And it nicely integrates with QuickTime, so once it's installed, WMV beccomes just another file format that QuickTime Player and the QuickTIme browser plugin can use. Can you go into some more detail as to why it's a painful option for you?
VLC 0.8.6 added WMV playback support, including VC-1. It's got some glitches around playing back B-frames, but I'm sure they'll address those. I haven't tried WMA Pro in it yet, I must admit.
Since VC-1 is a SMPTE standard, with full decoder reference source code avilable, adding decoding for it isn't harder than any other codec.
And of coures Silverlight will provide WMV playback on Mac and Windows as a browser plugin. We haven't committed to doing a Linux port post 1.0, but we've certainly gotten a lot of feedback from people who'd like to see it.
My video compression blog
Rather than talk about that terrible article, I have a question about codecs.
I've only recently started looking into video codecs. Until now I've just dumped everything to ".avi" and it was good enough. Lately I've been consolidating my data and I need to pick out a good standard format. Anybody got any preferences or ideas?
I'm leaning towards .ogg, with theora video and vorbis audio, for the sake of patent safety, and because it feels nicer not to have different parts of the same file encoded by software from different projects.
The Slashdotting finally eased up enough for me to finally get to Page 4. Earlier complaints about the complete absence of accurate facts in the technical part were dead-on. But in the proceudre, wow, it's hard to know what relevant of the test would be.
40 FRAME clips? The default GOP length of most of these codecs is longer than that! There's no useful test of rate control in there, or keyframe supression popping.
And as far as compression setings, all they say is "we used the defaults, but set it to highest quality". There isn't just ONE defualt in these products. We don't know if they're even comparing CBR and VBR, 1-pass or 2-pass. And there are lots of tweaks appropriate to different kinds of content that would be used in practic - one doesn't compress film source like cel animation!
Sheesh, there's really no useful information here at all. The average reader would probably wind up knowing less about compression after reading it...
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I encourage anyone interested to read up on JPEG2000.
So basicaly what your saying is that becasue they submitted and got approved the codec for SMPTE it some how did not derive from MPEG 4? Does the MPEG LA get paid for the use of VC-1 or does payment go directly to the members who hold essential patents on the format. It says that there are 15 other companies mentioned but Microsoft is the only one putting out codecs for it. I don't hear of a Hitachi or Toshiba VC-1 encoder. Every reference to VC-1 looks like this, "SMPTE VC-1/Windows Media® Video 9". Looks obvious who it belongs to. Ah yes, the venerable MPEG-4v3 codec, It's weird how the data rates it used were around the same as Sorenson's codec at the time. I could swear that Sorenson joined the consortium and were one of the guys who actually brought code to the table. Then about 6 months later we have MPEG-4v3. Wow. I say that because Sorenson then started touting their MPEG 4 codec about the same time but had troubles with it because it was not any better than their proprietary codec and gave yet another code base to keep up with. What's Sorenson doing these days? Keeping their mouths shut that's what. All along ON2 opted for their own glory and have a codec that is atleast close to H.264 and VC-1 but only recently do they have the market share they thought they would 5 years ago through flash. I don't know if you can talk about processor intensity these days because the level needed for software play back is so much that HD playback is only useable with in the last year and a half for the average PC anyways. The sheer size in pixels of the image was part of the problem. Let alone the math behind what to decrypt. I'm sure the Silverlight browser plug in can play back HD because hell even Flash can do it these days. 1080p is still a theoretical for most people let alone for a website unless its on an internal network over Gigabit for more than 20 users. The processors are just faster that's all. Why would they sit on a body like the MPEG 4 and then release a competing product with the same functionality? Because they can provide a better service? It seems a bit disingenuous and looks like they were there to keep an eye on the competition and to slow them down with patent disputes while they got VC-1 WVC-1/WMVa/WMV3 to market. I can see how there might be a different way of looking at this but damn, Ben it looks like it was on purpose from some points of view. MS's codecs have always been a bane to me because there's always a catch to using them and maybe that is changing but beyond that I would like to say that I really respect your knowledge in this area and used to pour over your books for how to make stuff look great. You helped me out in many situations over the past few years doing compressions just by experimenting with the data rates like you did. So thank you for your hard work and your skill.
replied to my self on this one sorry. It was meant for this post... So basicaly what your saying is that becasue they submitted and got approved the codec for SMPTE it some how did not derive from MPEG 4? Does the MPEG LA get paid for the use of VC-1 or does payment go directly to the members who hold essential patents on the format. It says that there are 15 other companies mentioned but Microsoft is the only one putting out codecs for it. I don't hear of a Hitachi or Toshiba VC-1 encoder. Every reference to VC-1 looks like this, "SMPTE VC-1/Windows Media® Video 9". Looks obvious who it belongs to. Ah yes, the venerable MPEG-4v3 codec, It's weird how the data rates it used were around the same as Sorenson's codec at the time. I could swear that Sorenson joined the consortium and were one of the guys who actually brought code to the table. Then about 6 months later we have MPEG-4v3. Wow. I say that because Sorenson then started touting their MPEG 4 codec about the same time but had troubles with it because it was not any better than their proprietary codec and gave yet another code base to keep up with. What's Sorenson doing these days? Keeping their mouths shut that's what. All along ON2 opted for their own glory and have a codec that is atleast close to H.264 and VC-1 but only recently do they have the market share they thought they would 5 years ago through flash. I don't know if you can talk about processor intensity these days because the level needed for software play back is so much that HD playback is only useable with in the last year and a half for the average PC anyways. The sheer size in pixels of the image was part of the problem. Let alone the math behind what to decrypt. I'm sure the Silverlight browser plug in can play back HD because hell even Flash can do it these days. 1080p is still a theoretical for most people let alone for a website unless its on an internal network over Gigabit for more than 20 users. The processors are just faster that's all. Why would they sit on a body like the MPEG 4 and then release a competing product with the same functionality? Because they can provide a better service? It seems a bit disingenuous and looks like they were there to keep an eye on the competition and to slow them down with patent disputes while they got VC-1 WVC-1/WMVa/WMV3 to market. I can see how there might be a different way of looking at this but damn, Ben it looks like it was on purpose from some points of view. MS's codecs have always been a bane to me because there's always a catch to using them and maybe that is changing but beyond that I would like to say that I really respect your knowledge in this area and used to pour over your books for how to make stuff look great. You helped me out in many situations over the past few years doing compressions just by experimenting with the data rates like you did. So thank you for your hard work and your skill.
See, now this is why I read Slashdot. Thank you,Kadin and your progenitors for the excellent primer on codecs. If not a full course, it gives me enough to use.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm sick of this Microsoft tactic, trying to repeat something over and over to make it a fact.
I find it offensive when I hear claims about "H264 quality, MPEG-2 speed". Not even close. I've seen a lot of WMV encodes (professionally done too, in HD-DVD discs, those rare WMV HD discs, and "official" trailers and propaganda material), and I've never been impressed. It looks just a bit better than XviD (ASP). Not so with H.264: 2+ hour movies at 720p with incredible sharpness (Casino Royale comes to mind) and no artifacting whatsoever, at just over 4GB.
About the speed: no comment. On my machine, libavcodec (in ffdshow) decodes MPEG-2 three times faster than Microsoft's decoder decodes WMV, and MPEG-4 ASP (no qpel or GMC) deocdes about twice as fast. The max I can watch with WMV is 720p (this is OK according with the hardware requirements Microsoft states), however 1080p is no problem with MPEG-4 ASP and trivial with MPEG-2.
To top it off, the incredibly fast CoreAVC makes AVC decoding just a bit slower than WMV, so I can watch 720p AVC too (mild slowdowns with bitrate peaks >10Mbps when using CABAC). If I disable the inloop deblocker, it becomes FASTER than WMV, at the cost of generally tolerable artifacting.
I believe the WMV decoder is heavily optimized with Pentium IVs in mind, so I think it'll fare a little better in one, but I don't expect very big changes.
So WMV offers a a bit more quality than ASP, significantly lower than AVC; and a bit faster decoding than AVC, significantly slower than ASP. Not a very good deal if you ask me.
It's just another case of Microsoft playing deaf and repeating the same marketing materials over and over (anybody remembers the "CD quality at 64Kbps" claims, when they still had problems competing with MP3 at ~128Kbps? A bigger MDCT window will fool normal people, but it was laughable in formal tests). I've heard your claims, and you have given me no reasons to believe it. WMV is not competitive, it doesn't fit in the sweet-spot quality/speed curve.
About the low-bitrate stuff: it looks terrible. In WMP it looks good but only due to the external postprocessing, which is excellent but:
* It's not a formal part of the codec if I'm not mistaken
* It's very undeterministic, it turns on and off as WMP feels like it (although you can force it with registry settings)
One thing that has been bugging me it whether as more powerful machines become available, this external postprocessing will start turning on on HQ encodings, blurring them.
I think there was a much easier way to figure out what to do with this story: look (look) at the home page; the aesthetic sense is so bad, you know it is crap going forward.
no one who could write a decent sentance would be associated with such bad layout.
Actually, there are a number of independent implementations of the VC-1 encoder not based on any input from Microsoft. Main Concept and Sonic Cinevision are probalby the most prominant. There's also an open source one that came out of a "Summer of Code" project.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at about Sorenson and all that. Sorenson Media had many generations of popular codecs. You're right about a connection between that and H.263 - reverse engineering determined a few years ago that the original Sorenson Video codec was basically H.263 + YUV-9 color + Vector Quantization. Sorenson the company poured most of thier codec development into real-time H.264 encoders for their videoconferencing systems, but spun off the compresion tools business, which continues to do quite nicely (and they're a fine partner of ours).
As for why VC-1 and H.264? Different codecs for different goals. VC-1 was designed for high-performance PC playback as the #1 goal, and with high def scenarios as a big factor. However, H.264 was designed with a much bigger relative focus on videoconferencing and device implementations. Different codecs with different goals, and hence different sweet spots.
My video compression blog
That number doesn't sound REMOTELY reasonable.
4K is 4096 x 2160 = 4,527,360 pixels/frame
32bpp per pixel == 144,875,520bits == 17,685 kilobytes/frame
4K is 24fps == 424,440 kilobytes/sec.
2 hours == 7,200 seconds
Which makes 3,055,968,000 Kbytes total or 2.846 Terabytes for 2 hours of uncompressed video.
And I agree with everyone who's already said how useless this article is. If you don't understand video encoding going in, their explanations won't help. And if you do, you'll feel stupider for reading it... The writer certainly doesn't seem to understand it himself.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
A better way to express the concern I was talking about is that the partners that are making this are after the fact. They did not add to the code and help create the codec. This was Microsoft's baby because everyone was focused on the ratification of H264. They didn't see this one coming. Everyone was surprised when the VC-1 Code came out as the original WMV codec. I think even you would have to admit there was a big "what the hell" from the MPEG committee. Support came after the fact not in anticipation of it. Again it's not the VC-1 encoding, because your right that's free(not really only under 100,000 people) and open to anyone to replicate that was suspect but the creation of a codec that ran parallel to H264 as it was stabilized each and every step of the way as was demonstrated by the three iterations of WMV through VC-1 which was where the code freeze happened on H264 AVC. You stopped development when they did because you knew there wouldn't be anymore advantageous progressions of code that had to be trumped.
What I was getting at with Sorenson is that you used their code as a platform to launch WMV7.0 after you saw Sorenson Video 3 compression techniques from the code they gave the Consortium which from what you say makes sense that they added and hacked the h.263 back when it was in development in 1997 or so. If I remember right, Sorenson hit their stride with Quicktime in 1998-99.
I'm curious what you do as partners with Sorenson? Do you guys co-develope Codecs or are they asking you how to better integrate their systems with your OS and media platforms. There's a big difference.
When you say stuff like "VC-1 was designed for high-performance PC playback as the #1 goal" it smacks of marketing vernacular. I know... I've done it for 10 years. What that translates to is "We know that it takes a brand knew system to fully use our program." and because its a program, you can always up the ante just a little more so that you need newer hardware. Remember that your first argument as for why you came up with VC-1 is that H264 was too intensive for computer playback. Now your saying that VC-1 was firstly made to take advantage of new hardware that easily plays back all the codecs you can throw at them including H264. So in that respect I think you can just say that it was in your best interest not back MPEG but to create your own codec that is more compatible with the philosophy and design techniques of the company. One that can grow with the demands of your customer and give them a more versatile user experience. H264 was never going to be for video conferencing as its primary goal, it was a side mention in 1998 as a possible use scenario for overlaying meta data like you would find in a weather report. AVC was specifically designed for HD digital carriers as the next major jump in distribution for broadcasting standards. The two codecs don't have different goals because if they did they wouldn't both now be on HD-DVD and Blu Ray discs. Or be touted in Windows Mobile 6 , or be the main codec for the Xbox... Wait a minute maybe that last one would fall more under the IPTV transmission aspect of H264 signaling. That sure seems like a lot of device implementation to me. By the way where is the support for h264 that you helped create? I think you left some friends at the door on your way to the show.
You have to push MS solutions... I get that. It's your devision so it comes first but this is the very real reason that no one trusts your company. They'll take your money sure but everything is laced with this poison of pickpocketing the best part of a collaboration and leaving the rest in litigation until it doesn't matter any more. I think that is one of the major under currents in the comments made on Slashdot. I say this because your really good at what you do but you happen to be part of something that is a little too much business and not enough ethics.
"Microsoft made the original reference encoder for MPEG-4 (hence the venerable MPEG-4v3 codec)."
The 'reference encoder' that doesn't even manage to output a valid MPEG4 bitstream? My hat off to Microsoft for the way they fragmented MPEG-4 part 2.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Dude, use [enter] once in a while.
_ vc-1_codec_analysis/
.mp4. Now riddle me this - why is the MSMPEG4v3 codec limited to encode to asf files only?
MS has submitted VC-1 as a standard because they wanted an alternative to h.264 (aka Mpeg4 part 10 and Mpeg4 AVC). Their main selling point was that VC-1 would have lower licensing fees. Unfortunately for them, they underestimated the number of patents held by other companies. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/14/microsoft
As for MSMPEG4v1/2/3.. MS did originally participate in the MPEG4 process, and during that time they released the MSMPEG4 codecs. Which, as we should be used to by now, did not conform with the final MPEG4 spec. As to why MS called the non-standard codecs 'MPEG4' and why they didn't immediately release a standards compliant codec when MPEG4 was finalized, well.. And when they finally did release a proper ISO MPEG4 part 2 video codec, they decided to only support Simple Profile.
Container formats is also interesting to look at. MS wanted asf to be the container format for mpeg4, but the mpeg4 working group picked Apple's Quicktime container as the basis for
There is more, but I digress. Suffice to say that MS has a history of only providing token support for audio/video standards while at the same time pushing hard on their own proprietary stuff.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Yea...that would be a slashdot newbie thing that happened there. Drive by punk just came in my office and hit the html formatting button instead of the plain text. Your right though, it was a hell of an interesting thing thing to watch. It was like seeing two politicians jockey for top position in a debate. ASF was the worst format to deal with. You always new something wasn't right.
I seem to remember something about diferent patent holders wanting a certain amount and then others that came back with some silly gadgillion type number and this is what they settled on. I remember Quicktime being delayed or at least in controversy when they first released MPEG-4 because they did it before the liscensing was settled. It is a hell of a coincidence that MPEG4 got bogged down in legality while MS was developing their own in house alternative on the side. It's kinda their MO.
I'm not sure what you think really happened, but you've got some of the major facts wrong here.
0 4/04-19BroadcastOverallNAB04PR.mspx
:). We certainly support H.264 where appropriate, for example in the Zune (for podcast playback), in the Xbox 360 (file-based playback, and in the HD DVD player), and in the MSTV IPTV solutions.
First, the presentation of VC-1 to SMPTE always hat the explicit goal of standardizing WMV9, and everyone knew it. The working name for it for quite a while was VC-9 in explicit recognition that it was a standardized version of WMV9. WMV9's bitstream was locked down with the Corona launch back in 2001, well before H.264 was complete. If anything, H.264 got more from WMV9, for example the addition of variable block sizes to H.264 High Profile (although just 4x4 and 8x8, not including the 4x8 and 8x4 modes from VC-1). I wasn't at Microsoft at the time, but was part of c24, and saw how all this unfold. You really should go back and research this point - what happened was exactly according to the plan all parties signed onto in the first place. For example:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/apr
Sorenson Media licenses our Format SDK for incorporation into their product to make WMV files. There's also good guys, and we cooperate in a number of ways.
We use VC-1 because it was a codec designed to do what we wanted a codec to do
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