Since Badaboom is a baseline-only encoder, I would guess one of its main markets would be to backup movies in a format that can be played by iPods or similar.
And it seems that I made a slight oversight here also; --qp 0 in x264 (in the standard as qpprime_y_zero_transform_bypass_flag) is set, H.264 can indeed be a lossless format too, making it the only MPEG video format with a lossless mode.
All MPEG formats (including H.264) are lossy; if you want lossless, use HuffYUV, Lagarith, or FFV1 (or one of a countless variety of similar proprietary formats, such as Sheer YUV). Of course, this will give far larger file sizes, for obvious reasons.
To begin with, x264 blows the water out of Badaboom in terms of speed when similar settings are used. Badaboom appears to use the rough equivalent of --aq-mode 0 --subme 1 --scenecut -1 --no-cabac --partitions i4x4 --no-dct-decimate in terms of x264 commandline... its no wonder its "fast" when they compare it to x264 on far slower settings!
GPU encoders won't be able to compete with CPU encoders until they either get a lot faster (in which case they'll compete in the "high performance" market) or they get much better quality, since at sane settings x264 unsurprisingly blows Badaboom out of the water quality-wise, too. Until then, the product is not only completely proprietary but furthermore simply inferior, and they're going to have a very hard time marketing it.
At the price they're charging, they should be offering something on the order of 1 megabit H.264 or the equivalent. Yet I opened one of the free episodes they had up and the quality was almost as bad as Youtube. One could argue that the prices were reasonable if the video was nearly as good as DVD, or at least as good as broadcast, but this is ridiculous.
Unfortunately the telcos probably had a viable defense that they were acting (1) on government instructions and (2) on government advice that their action was legal.
This isn't very hard to understand--the entire reason for the existence of the FISA law is that it explicitly states that the telcos are not to listen to the executive branch, even if it makes such an order. They blatantly ignored the law that was written exactly to stop this sort of situation.
An entire series of rather graphically and musically impressive shooters--all made by a single programmer in his spare time. They're a hell of a lot of fun to play, and their difficult ranges from mildly challenging to rather crazy to utterly nightmarish.
Part of the problem also lies in the fact that, this time around, the same people who are most likely to be the first-adopters (the geeks) are also the people who are most likely to torrent their Blu-ray movies instead of buying them.
Almost all DVDs are progressive, not interlaced; they're usually soft or hard telecined, but the actual content is progressive. Native interlaced DVDs are reserved for things like concerts that were actually recorded with interlaced cameras.
A lot of the problem comes from the fact that Blu-ray quality quite often sucks. This has nothing to do with the format, and everything to do with the mastering process. I have seen countless Blu-rays that hardly have enough detail to justify a DVD release, let alone anything in HD; some examples include Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, the latter of which was done as a film transfer... and had dirt all over the film and jittered throughout the entire movie, along with the film grain, which seemed completely out of place for an animated feature.
Its difficult to market a new format with better quality when in reality a large number of the discs are produced so badly that there's no reason to get them in place of a DVD.
If I'm wrong about this--please correct me; I'd love to know that the GPLv3 doesn't prevent us from doing this!
Our company uses x264 in commercial products and abides by the GPL. One thing we are considering is creating an FPGA-based addon card using a low-cost FPGA to accelerate the motion search. The code for this FPGA would be released as GPL also. However, there is no open source driver to load code onto the card--in fact, one requires the developer kit in order to modify the code on the FPGA. We would be selling these boards individually, without the developer kit (an extra $1000 purchase or similar). Therefore, its a closed platform... but we can't do anything about it. GPLv3 would, in my understanding, prevent us from distributing such boards.
So we're sticking to GPLv2.
Real stopped being a "real" format years ago; their latest formats RV30 and RV40 are just ripoffs of early drafts of the H.264 standard with slight modifications.
They include games with no real native client (EVE Online, which has a built-in Cedega-like engine), but they don't list The Ur-Quan Masters, possibly the best native-Linux game in history? Given how small their "Adventure" category is, they would have done well to include it...
Blu-ray discs already *use* H.264 (usually; some use VC-1). They just use absurdly high bitrates to compensate (partially) for the fact that the encoders they use are extremely inefficient.
Except that x264 is already the most efficient multithreaded encoder in the open source world. I don't see what you mean; there is no such thing as an x264 "video format"; its called H.264, and given that x264 is an encoder and not a decoder, it isn't exactly our job to do multithreading, given that we don't even have a decoder to implement such a thing in!
x264 is proud to announce that we have four students this year through the Videolan project; they will be working on frametype decision, more efficient inter-macroblock search, better psychovisual optimizations, assembly and profiling improvements, and an interesting tree project that will track the use of data throughout the video stream to maximize the quality of pixels that are referenced the most in future frames.
After 6 months of improvement resulting in two major visual optimizations and a 30% speed increase, we're now going to have an incredibly productive summer. Happy encoding!
The GeForce 8800GTX, for example, has 16 stream processors, each of which can run up to 8 identical commands per clock (SIMD). They're not the same as the main graphics processors; they're a separate part of the chip AFAIK.
I'd like to say that the author of this article is completely clueless.
Perhaps he should define his position more, and say something like "Open Source interfaces aren't creative" or "Gnome isn't creative," rather than paint a vast category of software, including quite a bit of highly creative non-Linux software, with a single brush.
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HuffYUV supports RGB and YUY2, and the ffmpeg extension (FFVHUFF) supports YV12 too.
Since Badaboom is a baseline-only encoder, I would guess one of its main markets would be to backup movies in a format that can be played by iPods or similar.
And it seems that I made a slight oversight here also; --qp 0 in x264 (in the standard as qpprime_y_zero_transform_bypass_flag) is set, H.264 can indeed be a lossless format too, making it the only MPEG video format with a lossless mode.
All MPEG formats (including H.264) are lossy; if you want lossless, use HuffYUV, Lagarith, or FFV1 (or one of a countless variety of similar proprietary formats, such as Sheer YUV). Of course, this will give far larger file sizes, for obvious reasons.
To begin with, x264 blows the water out of Badaboom in terms of speed when similar settings are used. Badaboom appears to use the rough equivalent of --aq-mode 0 --subme 1 --scenecut -1 --no-cabac --partitions i4x4 --no-dct-decimate in terms of x264 commandline... its no wonder its "fast" when they compare it to x264 on far slower settings!
GPU encoders won't be able to compete with CPU encoders until they either get a lot faster (in which case they'll compete in the "high performance" market) or they get much better quality, since at sane settings x264 unsurprisingly blows Badaboom out of the water quality-wise, too. Until then, the product is not only completely proprietary but furthermore simply inferior, and they're going to have a very hard time marketing it.
I'm on 1 gigabit dedicated downlink. I don't think my connection is the problem.
At the price they're charging, they should be offering something on the order of 1 megabit H.264 or the equivalent. Yet I opened one of the free episodes they had up and the quality was almost as bad as Youtube. One could argue that the prices were reasonable if the video was nearly as good as DVD, or at least as good as broadcast, but this is ridiculous.
Unfortunately the telcos probably had a viable defense that they were acting (1) on government instructions and (2) on government advice that their action was legal.
This isn't very hard to understand--the entire reason for the existence of the FISA law is that it explicitly states that the telcos are not to listen to the executive branch, even if it makes such an order. They blatantly ignored the law that was written exactly to stop this sort of situation.
An entire series of rather graphically and musically impressive shooters--all made by a single programmer in his spare time. They're a hell of a lot of fun to play, and their difficult ranges from mildly challenging to rather crazy to utterly nightmarish.
Part of the problem also lies in the fact that, this time around, the same people who are most likely to be the first-adopters (the geeks) are also the people who are most likely to torrent their Blu-ray movies instead of buying them.
Almost all DVDs are progressive, not interlaced; they're usually soft or hard telecined, but the actual content is progressive. Native interlaced DVDs are reserved for things like concerts that were actually recorded with interlaced cameras.
A lot of the problem comes from the fact that Blu-ray quality quite often sucks. This has nothing to do with the format, and everything to do with the mastering process. I have seen countless Blu-rays that hardly have enough detail to justify a DVD release, let alone anything in HD; some examples include Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, the latter of which was done as a film transfer... and had dirt all over the film and jittered throughout the entire movie, along with the film grain, which seemed completely out of place for an animated feature.
Its difficult to market a new format with better quality when in reality a large number of the discs are produced so badly that there's no reason to get them in place of a DVD.
Better make sure they have sufficient dreadnought and battleship support with that thing, or it might get ganked.
If I'm wrong about this--please correct me; I'd love to know that the GPLv3 doesn't prevent us from doing this! Our company uses x264 in commercial products and abides by the GPL. One thing we are considering is creating an FPGA-based addon card using a low-cost FPGA to accelerate the motion search. The code for this FPGA would be released as GPL also. However, there is no open source driver to load code onto the card--in fact, one requires the developer kit in order to modify the code on the FPGA. We would be selling these boards individually, without the developer kit (an extra $1000 purchase or similar). Therefore, its a closed platform... but we can't do anything about it. GPLv3 would, in my understanding, prevent us from distributing such boards. So we're sticking to GPLv2.
Real stopped being a "real" format years ago; their latest formats RV30 and RV40 are just ripoffs of early drafts of the H.264 standard with slight modifications.
But The Ur-Quan Masters is the port of a commercial game, Star Control II.
They include games with no real native client (EVE Online, which has a built-in Cedega-like engine), but they don't list The Ur-Quan Masters, possibly the best native-Linux game in history? Given how small their "Adventure" category is, they would have done well to include it...
Blu-ray discs already *use* H.264 (usually; some use VC-1). They just use absurdly high bitrates to compensate (partially) for the fact that the encoders they use are extremely inefficient.
Except that x264 is already the most efficient multithreaded encoder in the open source world. I don't see what you mean; there is no such thing as an x264 "video format"; its called H.264, and given that x264 is an encoder and not a decoder, it isn't exactly our job to do multithreading, given that we don't even have a decoder to implement such a thing in!
x264 is proud to announce that we have four students this year through the Videolan project; they will be working on frametype decision, more efficient inter-macroblock search, better psychovisual optimizations, assembly and profiling improvements, and an interesting tree project that will track the use of data throughout the video stream to maximize the quality of pixels that are referenced the most in future frames.
After 6 months of improvement resulting in two major visual optimizations and a 30% speed increase, we're now going to have an incredibly productive summer. Happy encoding!
Through the Videolan project, x264 is accepting SoC applications this year. We don't have many mentors though... so the competition will be tough!
Drop by #x264dev on Freenode and get involved in the qualification tasks before its too late... more information can be found here.
Involves a lot more use of the phrase "Ememomorpuguh," and a lot more Yahtzee reviews.
The GeForce 8800GTX, for example, has 16 stream processors, each of which can run up to 8 identical commands per clock (SIMD). They're not the same as the main graphics processors; they're a separate part of the chip AFAIK.
I'd like to say that the author of this article is completely clueless. Perhaps he should define his position more, and say something like "Open Source interfaces aren't creative" or "Gnome isn't creative," rather than paint a vast category of software, including quite a bit of highly creative non-Linux software, with a single brush.
Now if only more businesses acted this way.