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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.
I'd like to point out that FFmpeg is what makes some open source multimedia apps (like MPlayer, Xine, VLC and Kdenlive) so versatile.
The Will has several ports of mplayer available. The version called MPlayer CE is the most actively developed.
http://www.wiibrew.org/wiki/MPlayer_CE
It can be installed by the Homebrew Channel. The downside of the mplayers port is that they has no memory protection so attempting to play files that they can't play can crash the Wii requiring a hard reset. I've done this a number of times and haven't suffered anything evil like bricking the thing.
I think he was trying to point out that previously FFmpeg didn't have any release cycle at all. They wanted everyone to download and compile the latest CVS snapshot and use that. In fact, to get help from the mailing list they usually require that you download source and recompile first. The fact that they have locked in and officially named a release is significant.
We're working on it. Just to let you know, while I'm sure an official release will be useable, don't expect the raw source ffmpeg model to go out any time soon. I expect that bug fixes and features will be in the repository very quickly and if you have a need for these things, you should probably compile the code from source. You may also want to keep an eye on the mailing lists
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-cvslog/
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel/
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).
I'll throw my recommendation behind this one. Quicktime's interface isn't bad but it's format support is terrible (and for things like WMV files you have to wait for a good amount of time where it does a mini-conversion before it plays). I *normally* find VLC a very usable player on most systems (Linux, Windows) but the Mac OS X version has always been really, really buggy for me. Mplayer Extended gives you essentially the Mplayer backend with a Quicktime-esque interface.
The only thing that still bugs me on Mplayer Extended (and it's often the same on many players) is that clicking in the tracking bar to a specific location in a video often puts you "somewhere kinda close to that point" rather than EXACTLY to that point. Minor quip though.
Honestly though, as much as people knock Windows, I've STILL not found anything on any platform that beats Media Player Classic for a simple, no nonsense video player. http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Not "restarting." "Starting." They have never had a release schedule as they do not do releases. OR didn't. Whatever.
Currently hooked on AMP
The release codename is 'half-way to world domination A.K.A. the belligerent blue bike shed.'. Did you even read the abstract, or just the news title ?
Yes they did. There were regular snapshot releases of FFMpeg up to around 0.4.9, then they decided making proper releases was too much effort and adopted the policy that only CVS could be considered "current". This is great if you're an FFMpeg developer, but sucks if you're the unlucky SOB who is trying to package the damn thing into a release. Hopefully we'll get back to semi-regular releases and I can stop worrying about trying CVS snapshots daily until I get lucky and one builds, and works.
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
I recently came across MPlayer OS X Extended, which is almost as good as VLC is on OS X - unlike the normal mplayer builds. You might want to check it out if you haven't tried it before.
Try Movist on OS X, it lets you choose between FFmpeg and QT. And the interface is lovely.
Actually the news about it is that instead of using a GPL AAC decoder, they have their own LGPL decoder that is twice as fast as the old decoder. This LGPL AAC decoder is something that has only come about since maybe last year's Google Summer of Code.
> No, it won't decrypt/break DRM for you.
To be pedantic, that is not completely right. It will decrypt ASF/WMV/WMA files, it will not break the DRM though - so you need to get the decryption key from somewhere else (e.g. FreeMe2)
I have used super a number of times and quite frankly it's the most confusing, badly designed, and downright ugly piece of software I've ever had the misfortune to use. Even the website itself requires you to click though pages and pages of self-important prose and pointless charts before you can actually download the software itself.
Oh and my favorite feature is the 'auto-update' nag screen which says on my machine 'You are using an OBSOLETE version of SUPER It might induce encoding errors or crash at anytime' on startup.
Classic!
In case you're curious....
I-frames are essentially an entire picture. You could decode an I-frame and have a screenshot from the movie file.
P-frames (predictive) are essentially stored as the difference between the current frame and the preceding I- or P-frame. You save quite a bit of space this way, as you suspected.
B-frames are like P-frames, but they're predicted based upon both the previous and next frames.
The catch is that in order to skip to a specific P- or B-frame, you've got to decode the dependencies, too. So you have to strike a balance--you could be extremely space-efficient if you only ever coded one I-frame, but seeking would suffer horribly. Likewise, you could encode only to I-frames, but you'll be using a lot space. There's nothing strictly wrong with decoding the required frames and then starting playback from the dependent frames, but that can take time. The user would probably prefer seeing a bit more of their film than wondering if their player is broken. Not only that, what if the user tries to skip around several times?