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Sun Developing Open Media Stack

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the shine-it-up-and-call-it-new dept.

Graftweed writes to share that Sun is working on a new open video codec called Open Media Stack (OMS). OMS video will be based on H.26x technology and promises to deliver royalty-free open video. This certainly isn't the first attempt at an open codec, hopefully Sun will decide to add something to the table beyond just their name.

4 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Xvid by TheGreatOrangePeel · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...uhm. not only is Xvid an "attempt" at an open codec, it's arguably a success. I use it for just about all of my encoding, andyway and it's certainly more of a success than Theora.

  2. Re:Alas, another flavour by Sancho · · Score: 4, Informative

    Theora is a last-generation codec. It's pretty good, but quality/compression-wise, it's comparable to DivX.

    What we really want is something which is comparable to h.264.

  3. Re:Alas, another flavour by setagllib · · Score: 5, Informative

    Except that Sun's work is based on h261, because it's so old that no patents can possibly apply to it any more. Dirac is a current/next-generation codec that's also royalty free, and certainly a lot closer to completion than Sun's offering. The FAQ for OMS considers Theora and Dirac as friendly competition, which is fair enough, but really, why not just put more talent into Dirac?

    --
    Sam ty sig.
  4. Re:Seriously? Why? by rmdir+-r+* · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's an awfully big assumption. From my experience within the corporate world, I'd feel reasonably confident in saying that not even half of the folks who use h.264 even know that dirac exists, much less have looked at it as an alternative to h.264.
    It is important to note that Dirac was only finished this year.