FFmpeg Announces High-Performance VP8 Decoder 80
An anonymous reader writes "Three FFmpeg developers — Ronald Bultje, David Conrad, and x264 developer Jason Garrett-Glaser — have written the first independent, free implementation of a VP8 video decoder. Benchmarks show that it's as much as 65% faster than Google's official libvpx. The announcement also gives a taste of what went into the development process, as well as the optimization techniques used. Currently it's only fully optimized on x86, but ARM and PowerPC optimizations are next in line for development."
Re:So what should I do with my DVD collection? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, I prefer quality over size but over 1.2GiB for a 90 minutes DVD is too much IMHO.
Really? It's still a factor of 5-10 improvement over the DVD...
When I got my first DVD drive, it went in a computer with a 20GB hard disk. For about half what I paid for that disk now (less when you factor in inflation), I can buy a 1.5TB disk. Most DVDs aren't full, they only use 6-8GB of space, so that's enough for 200 DVDs. At that price, why bother messing around with transcoders and recreating the menus - just store them as disk images and then you can transcode them later if you want.
Re:any dvd professional (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably not. x264 has a number of innate visual advantages to compressing video that were previously mpeg compressed. VP8 generally seems to win on raw uncompressed video in the races I've seen.
And the problem is, where do you find raw, uncompressed video? About the only place you will find it is if you are transferring an analog source to a dedicated internal capture card. Virtually everything else uses some form of MPEG or H.264 compression.
Re:Spec' Writing Course (Score:2, Insightful)
"specifications" in business writing class is not technical specification.
You don't describe how you convert colorspace, inverts the matrix, etc in them
Re:any dvd professional (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. The fact that VP8 generally does hold its own side by side with x264 is a pretty impressive testament to the codec.
But who cares if VP8 is technically a better codec if it doesn't actually produce superior results with the source video we work with? If it cuts CPU for decoding while offering on par quality that would be a solid advantage.
Re:So what should I do with my DVD collection? (Score:1, Insightful)
Using a modern audio codec like Vorbis is hardly "killing" the audio. Vorbis is generally transparent at around q3 and still quite respectable below that, and can thus offer savings ranging from "pretty good" (~1/2 with 192kbps AC-3) to "very significant" (~1/16 with raw PCM).
Also, H.264 in AVI is an abomination, like sex with other men or eating shrimp. If you really want to risk eternal suffering in the fiery depths of encoding hell, go right ahead, but don't say I didn't warn you.
Re:Code is specification. (Score:3, Insightful)
By not only explaining how something should be done but also expressing the reasoning to why this method has been chosen
Yes - a truly excellent thing to do. They should do the same thing with laws - define the law as they currently do but also provide a justification for the law. That way the law can be challenged in the future when the justification no longer holds. In addition, no one will ever misinterpret the meaning of a law and use it for purposes for which it was not designed.
Now back to format specifications - code makes for a very poor specification. While code can implement a specification, it generally does so in an unorganized fashion. Specifications should be clear - having no ambiguities or vagueness. Code is not so clear. And as the parent mentioned, generally does not communicate reasoning to the reader.
Mathematically based definitions are great - they are both clear and organized. Tools such as lex/flex/yacc/bison combine code with mathematical definitions to implement such specifications. The ideal format specification would include a mathematical definition along with reasoning explaining the design decisions.