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FFmpeg Finally Releases Long-Awaited Version 0.5
An anonymous reader writes "After many years of release-free development, FFmpeg, the most widely used audio and video codec library, has finally returned to a regular release schedule with the long-awaited version 0.5. While the list of changes is far too long to list here, some high-profile improvements include the reverse-engineering of all Real video formats, WMV9/VC-1 support, AAC decoding, and of course vast performance improvements across the board. To commemorate the 'lively' discussions predating the release, 0.5 is codenamed 'half-way to world domination A.K.A. the belligerent blue bike shed.' The new version can be downloaded from the official website." As another reader points out, FFmpeg is what makes some open source multimedia apps (like MPlayer, Xine, VLC and Kdenlive) so versatile.
the reverse-engineering of all Real video formats,
Sweet! does that mean that we are going to be able to play rmvb in the Wii soon?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I'd like to point out that FFmpeg is what makes some open source multimedia apps (like MPlayer, Xine, VLC and Kdenlive) so versatile.
How is one release after "many years" of nothing a "regular release cycle"? Wouldn't that require, at minimum, two consecutive releases? What if the next release isn't for another 5 years? Unless you're suggesting that is in fact their "regular release" schedule.
I'd like to point out that FFmpeg is what makes some open source multimedia apps (like MPlayer, Xine, VLC and Kdenlive) so versatile.
Thanks for that info. I was reading the Slashdot article summary, where it says: "As another reader points out, FFmpeg is what makes some open source multimedia apps (like MPlayer, Xine, VLC and Kdenlive) so versatile." and was hoping that some reader like yourself would point that out because that factoid is only mentioned once in the summary and thus is not obvious to people who only read the scrollbars on their window.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
it's incredible, I've been using ffmpeg for several years, I never thought they would do it again...
Nevertheless, I'm a bit surprised, because main ffmpeg developers were always against releases and their constraints...
I too would like to point out that FFmpeg is what makes some open source multimedia apps (like MPlayer, Xine, VLC and Kdenlive) so versatile.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Maybe this was the reader who pointed it out?!
Really? AAC Decoding is new?
I thought that this was already done by many things (VLC for one). Unless these were using an SVN build this really surprises me.
Also for us not in the know. Is WMV9 what WMP10 and WMP11 use?
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
Presumably he's the reader the editors were referring to...
Alphanos
Now I can listen to my Nobuo Uematsu collection!
This is good news. Now the bad news is I have many scripts that run ffmpeg, and they might need to be updated... But really, a new stable release is a fantastic thing.
I noticed on the release notes that ffmpeg now supports TrueHD as well as the VC-1 for video, these are both commonly used on blu-ray discs. Maybe we'll get lucky and at least now we'll be able to play our blu-ray disc tracks on linux after we remove all the DRM, & HDCP nonsense. We could sort of do it before but it's a royal pain in the ass: just last night I had to go through about four different media players to blue-ray tracks in trueHD audio and some other weird video format before I found one that could actually play my disc without spewing out error messages every frame. Even then it seemed like the dolby 5.1 sound was messed up -- the voices were coming from behind us and the music from the front.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Thanks for pointing out that fact. phew.
Can we say, "Too soon to tell" if this is going to be on a release schedule?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
So, 0.5. Does that mean they're half way done?
I would like to point out that teen pregnancy is an unfortunate problem that is difficult to prevent in our society.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Audacity :)
Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
That's the real sucky thing for us on 64-bit platforms that can't easily use the 32-bit Windows DLL's.
You can watch the videos but NO SOUND! Even if you do install all the 32-bit stuff, it will still be out of sync with the video.
Anyway, I'm happy that ffmpeg does anything in the first place. A great piece of software for sure.
There never was a real build for ffmpeg. Now that they've got a stable release, I wonder when they will start pushing out official builds for various platforms (say, Win32/64)?
That said, could they actually push out binaries? One of the strange things with ffmpeg is that pretty much everywhere you go, it is compiled different. One system's ffmpeg will have a bunch of codecs installed and another will not. You can never really count on having something like H.264. Hell, I've seen one installation that didn't even have libmp3lame on it! Reminds me of PHP in many ways--so many damn compiler flags that you are pretty much guaranteed every system will be different.
Is this a legal thing, or a "we dont have a good build process yet" thing?
When will there be a media player worth a darn on Mac OS X? Playing x264 files on OS X is not an option at this time unless you have an 8-core Mac Pro. 1080p crawls in VLC and Perian, and the CorePlayer for OS X is a joke-no AC-3 support, yet they want $20 for it? Why did they release it as a standalone app instead of a codec package for QuickTime?
Shitty utter ass, the entire situation is!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
FFmpeg, the most widely used audio and video codec library.
I think that statement may require some qualifiers, like "open source". I would guess that Windows Media, Quicktime, and several other non-free codec libraries are *vastly* more widely used than ffmpeg.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
Anyone know if/how this version can play iTMS-encrypted music and/or videos?
Multithreaded h.264 decoding is what I'm missing. Still only slice-based multithreading support, which doesn't work with 95% the content out there, which means you can't get real time decoding of full hd content on A64 X2 (core2 cpus are probably fast enough even with one core, at least the faster ones). ffmpeg-mt branch fixes this, I wonder when this will be merged (still seems to be a bit buggy).
FFmpeg is extremely powerful and versatile. Those words are, for the newer user, synonymous with difficult and confusing when the program is based on command line or a very simplistic front end. FFmpeg is very fully implimented (along with MEncoder, ffmpeg2theora and RealProducer) in the free audio and video format and parameter conversion front end software SUPER, from erightsoft.com. Free to download and use but not FOSS: small loss since it is, after all, intended for the majority of users who'd have trouble running such as FFmpeg native, those users hardly likely to want the source anyway. There are very few functions of the internal programs not implemented (setting a max output file size is one of the few). SUPER is extremely powerful while having every available function made as obvious as possible (and all have float-over hints), making it also useful as a training device for learning audio and video compression and conversion. The authors of SUPER clearly and repeatedly insist that their program is simply a front end, and that all credit for the power inside their program go to the programs they've built their around, and the authors thereof.
A minor beef is they require you to use IE with security settings low in order to download it as well as participate in the (very well attended by the authors) chat area. The 5 year span since the last FFmpeg release is a complete surprise to me, a daily user of SUPER, because there's so much more of that program available through the front end than I ever use.
I purchased DivXPro so I could convert everything to DivX, in order to play it on my DivX capable home DVD player. I found SUPER (with which I run FFmpeg almost exclusively for video) to be so much more powerful, flexible and faster, that I made the comment in the chat area that "SUPER does for free what others can't do for money". They liked that phrase so much that they adopted it as a motto. This is the sole association I have with the folks from erightsoft's SUPER project, just so your sure this is a testimonial, not an advertisement. One other small beef, they won't let you put it up for download elsewhere, even with the best of intentions on the sites with the best reputations. You can only get it from them.
I'm quite confident that SUPER will make use of the greater power of the new FFmpeg. I'm less confident I and most of the other users who just want to make things go will learn all about them. For those that do want to learn about them, the SUPER front end provides an a priori description of what will happen if you select each.
Bring it on -- no doubt erightsoft is already working on the new impplementation. In the mean time, check out the current version to find out how powerful FFmpeg already is. I'll bet you'll be surprised.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I like teen pregnancy in our society
"This MILF is paedobear approved..."
That's just damned disturbing.
Easy solution: masturbation. Not as an alternative to sex though, that would never work. The trick is getting them to do it with coat hangers.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
WTF? I am supposed to use Theora if I want an unencumbered codec??
At least VLC supports it directly.
Incidentally, VLC is not so hot on OS X these days. Instead of using FFmpeg for everything it can, it defers to Quicktime and its plugins for anything it can. Which means that most of the time you will not get an alternative method of decoding with the latest VLC versions; I can play many more files with earlier versions.
But there isn't anything like ffmpeg for batch transcoding or even one-off transcoding. A lot of commercial apps even use ffmpeg for transcoding.
Yeah learning the command line switches are kind of a bitch, but once you do, you will know more about how audio, video and metadata are combined to create "media". That said, there are some good front-ends to ffmpeg--for example MediaCoder, which lets you feel the joy of transcoding.
I would like to point out that 19 year old adult women married women who get pregnant are counted as bing a teen pregnancy in our society.
Are you suggesting we try to impregnate coat hangers?
I too would like to point out that this is getting ridiculous.
Does that mean they're half way done?
OHHHHHHHH LIving on a prayer!
Sorry. Had to. It's in my contract. =)
ffmpeg is one of the pieces in the open source world that must have the biggest gap between usefulness and usability. Ever seen the man page? Gazillions of options! Some of them can be applied multiple times for input and output. Therefore the order of arguments is significant. Took a while for me to figure that out ...
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
19 year old 'adult' women, married or not- who are pregnant?
the whole point of tracking teen pregnancy is how disadvantaged the resulting children are likely to be.
How marginally different is it really just because the mother in question is married.-when it's at age 19..
yeah.. given the choice- I'd feel far less concern about the birth to a 30 year old single mother than a 19 year old married mother
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It is interesting that his follows closely on the heels of the FAAC 1.28 Release and FAAD2 2.7 Release after an over 2 year haitus. On the other hand, the developer mailing list is quite active considering I get sourceforge-marked [SPAM] between 5-10 times per day.
Where do you think baby coat hangers come from?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
> I remember something about multimedia patents - open source developers were not allowed to release binaries.
> Could this be the case?
Nah, firstly MPlayer, VLC etc. do not really have problems, secondly FFmpeg is located in Switzerland. ... has had trouble finding developers, and thus also in general someone to do the build.
If nobody does a release at all because it is considered too much effort, why do you think they should do binary releases, particularly when the most important parts are the libraries anyway?
And lastly, binaries for Linux are usually made by the distributions (or someone else providing distribution-specific packages) and for Windows everyone VLC, MPlayer,
Have they also improved the documentation? I've looked at using ffmpeg in my own image processing application, but after reading for a while I gave up and now I just use png (you can dump png images of a video stream using mplayer).
In my opinion, a package with such a central role in the open source multimedia landscape should have exemplary documentation. A professor once told us that it is better to have a well-documented implementation that doesn't work than an undocumented working one, and there is some truth in it.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
"Teenage pregnancy is defined as a teenage or underage girl (usually within the ages of 13-17) becoming pregnant. The term in everyday speech usually refers to women who have not reached legal adulthood, which varies across the world, who become pregnant."
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
wonder if this ffmpeg will let pytivo encode subtitles into the video on the fly... previously it was too slow, and the tivo timed out, canceling the transfer... annoying.
basically wondering if it'll be faster in this case. :)
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
I would like to point out that 19 year old adult women married women who get pregnant are counted as bing a teen pregnancy in our society.
but not by pedobear
Where do you think baby coat hangers come from?
--
The answer is: sunshine
Baby hangers come from sunshine? That still doesn't answer why we should try to impregnate coat hangers.
To be perfectly fair, these problems may not be ffmpeg's fault, but as others have mentioned about cryptic command lines, that may be the real problem here.
MythTV has a companion program, nuvexport, which lets you get stuff out of MythTV and turn it into some other format, such as a DVD. It's really a script that calls other code, such as ffmpeg, under the hood and allows mere command-line mortals to get something done. For regular programming, movies, etc, ffmpeg does a find job. But for exercise videos the motion artifacts almost made my wife sick when she tried to watch them. I ended up using the "transcode" option (and underlying engine) and took the performance hit, but was able to tweak settings to get the motion artifacts under control, and get good exercise DVDs.
I also wouldn't be surprised that this is a function of nuvexport not exposing the full capability of ffmpeg, but then that's a usability issue.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Why is there never a stupid binary release?
I don't want to setup a build environment (which is probably custom, and would possibly require me to go and get ALL the libraries it uses) just to get one final EXE to stick in my "utilities" directory...
Pinky: What do you want to do tonight, Brain?
Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Half-way take over the world!
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Ever try Dragon Player? I think it is sufficiently no-nonsense for even the most ADD user.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Player
...and mail them to Rush Limbaugh.
"As another reader points out, FFmpeg is what makes some open source multimedia apps (like MPlayer, Xine, VLC and Kdenlive) so versatile."
Perhaps its also what makes them break at the same places...
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Heh. I always thought they were the adult form of paper clips...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I'd like to point out that teen pregnancy drops off significantly after age 25.
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
>the belligerent blue bike shed
clearly the bike shed should be red
Puce damn it!
This is the one thing that has no linux support at this time.
The editors gave a hat tip to Anonymous Coward?!
I've purchased hangers suitable for hanging coats to be worn by babies at Babies 'R Us, but if you're asking where they were manufactured, well, I'd guess China.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
That may be the definition that Wikipedia uses. That may be the definition that you use. That IS the definition that I believe should be used. It is not the definition that the various government and do gooder organizations use. Frequently quoted government organizations like the CDC disagree with you, me and Wikipedia.
I think you make my point nicely. Even if your not trying to.
Being married can be significantly different depending on the spouse's circumstances. Consider young military wives. Many girls who live in military communities go on to marry just out of high school and become mothers at 18 or 19. And it's not necessarily the case that they're marrying E1-E3 ranking service members. Enlisted military personnel don't make a lot, but in certain communities, it's enough to get by. In most though, it's not; however even E1 enlisted personnel have better immediate access to medical and dental care than most middle class families. So, there is a difference between the 17-18 year old teen mother married to a soldier and the stereotypical teen mother.
Where do you think baby coat hangers come from?
--
The answer is: sunshine
Baby hangers come from sunshine? That still doesn't answer why we should try to impregnate coat hangers.
it's been raining all week, you insensitive clod!
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Age 25 ? Eh ? Surely that's nineteen ?
the free audio and video format and parameter conversion front end software SUPER, from erightsoft.com. Free to download and use but not FOSS: small loss since it is, after all, intended for the majority of users who'd have trouble running such as FFmpeg native, those users hardly likely to want the source anyway.
My cousin tried SUPER on his Acer laptop. He couldn't use it because his laptop's screen is 600 pixels tall, and the OK button ended up out of reach.