Next-Next Generation Video: Introducing Daala

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a post by Xiph.org's Monty Montgomery: "Xiph.Org has been working on Daala, a new video codec for some time now, though Opus work had overshadowed it until just recently. With Opus finalized and much of the mop-up work well in hand, Daala development has taken center stage. I've started work on 'demo' pages for Daala, just like I've done demos of other Xiph development projects. Daala aims to be rather different from other video codecs (and it's the first from-scratch design attempt in a while), so the first few demo pages are going to be mostly concerned with what's new and different in Daala. I've finished the first 'demo' page (about Daala's lapped transforms), so if you're interested in video coding technology, go have a look!"

Comments

Re:Patent Tolls heading your way

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's the submarine patents that are the bigger worry. Since this codec is based on work that's come from some academic research papers, one can imagine a sufficiently wealthy litigation-mad megalocorp paying developers to stay on top of research and file patent applications citing obvious implementation details and then keeping them under the surface until it's sufficiently advantageous to allow them to surface. This process is 100% the opposite of the intention of the Constitutional provision for IP.

BTW, the posted whitepaper is really nicely done - good job Xiph team. In a free world everybody would rejoice and be happy for your efforts.

Essential Features.. alpha support, lossless.

[thesupraman]

If you want to have a good solid niche for this (always helps) then.
1 - support a reasonably efficient lossless mode (several others have this, but it is alsways useful)
2 - support ALPHA channels (32bit, RGBA, YUVA) - this is not trivial but very worthwhile, basically ZERO of the modern codec support this.

alpha channels are a requirement for many composition/editing/video production workflows, and yet the supporting codecs are old, clunky,
and painful to use.

good alpha channel support is not trivial, but is usually not major also.

For extra points support lossless on alpha, and lossy on the other channels, that is a VERY good option for many workflows.

Gives alpha and lossless, you are pretty much guaranteed professional users.

Re:Essential Features.. alpha support, lossless.

[qbwiz]

Wikipedia claims that VP9 does/will support alpha channel

Re:Essential Features.. alpha support, lossless.

[thesupraman]

Yes, as far as I can tell thats a pretty solid 'will', closer to a 'may', but alpha there as far as I can tell is just another
channel with no special consideration, unfortunately.

But of course, the more the merrier, its just a very under supported requirement, and one that is heavily used in content creation circles.

Most end up having to use png or target image sequences, or quicktime/animation codec for support, which are somewhat poor workflows.

Re:Why still use blocks?

[cbcbcb]

You still need to subdivide the image for motion estimation, as some parts of a moving image move at different rates to others. Subdividing into blocks gives you O(N) complexity in the size of the input image, whereas doing a DCT transformation has O(N log N) complexity.

Re:There really aren't any marketing people in OSS

[serviscope_minor]

Daala? That will play well in test/focus groups - I'm certain of it.

Hmm, yeah, because the input of "focus" groups are well known for their role in chosing video codecs. So, let's look at the real commercial codecs out there:

ISO/IEC 11172 aka MPEG-1
Dirac Pro aka SMPTE 2042-1-2009 VC-2
H.222 aka H.262 aka MPEG-2 Part 2 aka ISO/IEC 13818-2
MPEG-4 er, which was that, Part 2 aka H.263 aka ISO/IEC 14496-2 or Part 10 AVC aka h.264 aka ISO/IEC 14496-10
MS MPEG-4v3 aka (unofficially) Divx ;-)

etc.

So yeah, Daala is terrible by those standards

So, basically you're randomly grousing about OSS is nonsensical and in complete contrast to reality and apparently this has caused your post to be upmodded.

I expect I'll be downmodded by whoever modded you up, but I have karma to burn so what the hell.

Re:Another day, another codec.

[LourensV]

Those existing codecs are all very similar technically, and riddled with patents. If Monty can make something new (and he can, see CELT) and work around those patents (and he can, see Vorbis, Theora), then it's definitely a welcome addition. And a codec doesn't have to dominate to be useful; Vorbis is widely used (Wikipedia, all sorts of software that plays sound and music including a lot of if not most video games) and supported on a lot of platforms (including hardware players and set-top boxes) even if it never did completely replace MP3 and AAC. If nothing else, having a free and unencumbered option will keep the licensors of the proprietary codecs at least somewhat honest.

Incidentally, isn't it about time for Monty to get an EFF Pioneer award? He's been very successfully working on freely usable audio and video codecs for well over a decade now, starting at a time when many people didn't believe that a non-encumbered audio or video codec was even possible. Someone with his skills could probably make a very good living in proprietary codec development, but he chose to start Xiph.org and fight the good fight (and now works for Red Hat). He belongs in that list IMHO.

Re:Another day, another codec.

[xiphmont8352]

We abandoned Tarkin, but not because of VP3. It was an interesting crazy idea that simply wasn't workable.

Tarkin was an attempt to replace motion compensation with a directional 3D wavelets that could predict across time. It had... disturbing... encoding artifacts.