Sun Developing Open Media Stack

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.

Xvid

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

...uhm. not only is Xvid [wikipedia.org] 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.

Blog entry about OMS Video

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a blog entry [sun.com] for OMS Video.

Re:If Sun wanted to do something smart

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Theora was pretty bad as far as quality - like MPEG1 bad.

Re:dumb question

[_merlin]

Different context for the word stack: in this case it's a stack of components, like video and audio codecs sitting on top of some stream format sitting on a container file format. You know - like when they talk about a protocol stack (HTTP on top of TCP on top of IP on top of Ethernet, etc.).

Re:Alas, another flavour

[Sancho]

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.

Re:Open source?

[Sancho]

Oh, to have mod points for you.

Some people just don't understand that "Open Source" doesn't mean "license-compatible with my license of choice."

Re:Alas, another flavour

[Skinkie]

The problem with dirac was that it was to slow. At least two implementations Schrodinger and the partial not yet finished one in FFMPEG (last SoC) can offer the performance users want to have. Since there is there are now hardware (GPU and FGPA) decoders and encoders for Dirac, a browser plugin going to developed, chances are that this can be a next step in a better codec and free for all. Now I always wondered what will be the audio equivalent of Dirac ;)

Re:Alas, another flavour

[setagllib]

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?

H.26x: what is it?

[ajs]

Nice article on what H.26x is at ddj: http://www.ddj.com/201203492 [ddj.com]

I had no idea how tangled the standards were... ugh.

Re:Seriously? Why?

[rmdir -r *]

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.

doom9 has more info..

[SD-Arcadia]

You can check out the progress of Shrodinger (A Dirac implementation) over here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135176 [doom9.org]

Re:Alas, another flavour

[Cyberax]

??

http://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/stereo.html [xiph.org] - there is joint stereo support in OGG.

OGG format also has 5.1 support but I have not seen it 'in the wild'.