Money For Nothing and the Codecs For Free 206
Davis Freeberg writes "In an in depth discussion on the codec industry, CoreCodec CEO and Matroska Foundation board member Dan Marlin shares his thoughts on the growing popularity of the MKV container, confusion in the marketplace between X.264/MKV and DivXHD and weighs in on a controversial decision by Microsoft to block third party filter support in future versions of Windows media player. His interview offers a behind the scenes look at an important piece of technology that is helping to power the P2P movement. It also raises the prickly question of whether or not Microsoft is abusing their OS monopoly, in order to rein in competition within the codec industry."
Re:Hack (Score:5, Informative)
I think that if VLC runs on windows 7, 3rd party codecs will too.
VLC doesn't use external codecs. It uses the libavcodec library for playback. A completely different situation from that of CoreAVC which is an external directshow decoder.
However, Microsoft is making the new versions of media player less useful by not playing 3rd party codecs.
Well it can, it just requires some registry tweaks.
Re:What the hell is X.264? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hack (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What the hell is X.264? (Score:4, Informative)
That reminds me of people who think .mp3 stands for MPEG-3 when in fact it's MPEG-1* Layer 3 audio.
* or MPEG-2 Layer 3, or even the so-called "MPEG-2.5 Layer 3", depending on the sampling rate.
Fake codecs (Score:5, Informative)
Fake "codecs" are one of the main ways windows PCs currently get infected with spyware/viruses. This comes from all the people who install Limewire with no AV and then download the first thousand results for "porn".
VLC - has all codecs built-in. Use it. :)
Grammar Nazi warning... (Score:4, Informative)
The proper phrase is "dire straits", "strait" as in "a narrow place" -- "a tight squeeze". :)
Cheers,
Re:More on Streaming? Interview? (Score:5, Informative)
Youtube is not going vorbis+theora, their HTML5 experiment uses h.264.
Not blocking, depricating (Score:1, Informative)
You can still use whatever codec you want, they just don't support it, same as always. Nothing has changed in regards to setting registry entries or using automated hacks to use third party codecs in Windows, the same as it was for Vista and XP.
This is a whole lotta FUD spreading.
Re:Hack (Score:5, Informative)
Matroska is a container format that has existed for many years before CoreCodec co-opted it.
Speaking as someone that was involved with Matroska development from the beginning, and as someone that is not a member of CoreCodec, I just want to clarify this. Members of CoreCodec were actively involved in the development and PR of Matroska from the beginning. I don't know of any of the original Matroska development members that oppose what CC has done, and it seems that many actively support the actions of CC in regard to Matroska.
It's been my impression that Dan Marlin has, from the start, been supportive of Matroska as a way to make the world of video "right". Business decisions and plans that leverage Matroska seemed to come afterward, such that the involvement Matroska was never directly dependent on a successful business model.
Re:Hack (Score:3, Informative)
There are a couple of big advantages to CoreAVC's CUDA implementation that you may be unaware of:
1. It supports a wider range of h.264 files than MPC-HC, PowerDVD, etc with hardware offloading. In particular, it supports up to 16 reference frames. Now, in theory this shouldn't be an issue, because people should be encoding their files appropriately for use with DxVA, but many are not.
2. It allows post-processing of the video on the CPU. With DxVA, the codec has to connect directly to the renderer - MPC-HC allows some post-processing with shaders, but you're very limited. With CoreAVC, you can do whatever you like with the output before connecting it to the renderer - for example, doing post-processing with ffdshow-tryouts.
One area where CoreAVC shines is transcoding. Say you've got a quad-core machine, with an 8400GS (i.e. my server). Transcoding a Blu-Ray (crop black bars, apply higher compression with minimal reduction in quality) will happily use all 4 cores. Unfortunately, some of that time is being used to decode the original video. Use CoreAVC and nearly all the decoding is offloaded to the video card, meaning that your transcode will take less time.
I'm not going to address VDPAU, because my own experience of it (with XBMC) is mixed - it does an excellent job, except it won't display embedded subtitles from Matroska containers that use embedded fonts. Works fine with all the other renderers. Until that's fixed, it's a non-starter for me.
The only problem I have with CoreAVC is that I built my HTPC before CoreAVC with CUDA was released, and I've got an ATI card in it. It's not worthwhile changing my HTPC, and I'm hoping that eventually ATI cards will be supported (via OpenCL) at some time. In the meantime, MediaPortal is gaining the ability to display subtitles with DxVA (building on MPC-HC support) so for files that are usable with DxVA this will do the job.
Re:Video makes baby Jesus cry too. (Score:3, Informative)
This is why things like Flash video make me happy.
Flash video makes me angry, because it works exactly where it works, as well as it wants to work -- still requiring an order of magnitude more CPU than the competition, on the exact same file.
But...
of course you need to get the *latest* codec pack, which requires a new player, and new libraries, and since we only write the codecs and not the encoder or decoder itself you'll have to get product X too,
I really haven't seen that... and the codecs generally do just hook into most players.
Yes, everything always needs the latest. The only difference is that Flash will silently update itself. There's another all-in-one solution, though: VLC.