Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system


Forgot your password?

Comment: Re:The first question that popped into my head (Score 1) 139

by iMacGuy (#31980244) Attached to: X264 Project Announces Blu-ray Encoding Support
The MPEG-2 patent license typically costs *more* than the H.264 license for most situations, so I doubt you could be in any more trouble than you already are. Of course, I haven't studied it in detail, and nothing will ever happen to you specifically no matter what you do anyway.

Comment: Re:Which doesn't answer the question ... (Score 1) 370

by iMacGuy (#31351440) Attached to: Technical Objections To the Ogg Container Format
Matroska is free and "okay". It has some technical annoyances (the authors liked a few codecs so much they made their own special complicated setups for them, the EBML parser is a lot of code) but does have generic codec wrappers and better seeking. It also has commercial support and several extremely practical tools.
MOV is the best one I know of and is generic (MP4 might not be, the spec 14496-14 isn't public so I'm not sure). The only thing I don't like about it is that the index comes at the end and is required to play the file, so you either have to write the whole thing out twice or you can't play partial files.
Something like this will probably be added to the article soon, I think he's researching it better than I just did.

Comment: Re:Mplayer OSX Extended (Score 1) 398

by iMacGuy (#30470748) Attached to: Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac
> MPlayer would stop playing altogether if the CPU couldn't keep up.
This is really a problem with the GUI defaults. Assuming you're using MPlayer OS X Extended, set Preferences -> Video -> Framedrop "Soft" and "Use multithreaded ffmpeg build", and it will play faster than any other OS X player. (excluding CorePlayer of course)

Comment: Re:Decoding Chips (Score 1) 361

by iMacGuy (#28342287) Attached to: YouTube, HTML5, and Comparing H.264 With Theora
SIMD actually helps a lot with motion compensation; it's just a bunch of parallel multiply-adds, after all. But Theora has bitstream reading problems too; you have to decode the whole frame's bitstream before displaying any of it. And there is absolutely no question of it supporting HD (sometimes even SD) because the MV length is broken.

Comment: Re:Theora FAIL (Score 1) 361

by iMacGuy (#28342201) Attached to: YouTube, HTML5, and Comparing H.264 With Theora
Youtube uses completely stock mencoder from 2005 (+ a handwritten h264 encoder by Skal for fmt=18, which probably isn't faster than x264). They just have way more CPUs than you think they do. I'm actually not sure a hardware Theora decoder could be really efficient - the memory requirements are quite bad for a codec with no multiple reference frames.

Comment: Re:repeat of ogg? (Score 5, Informative) 361

by iMacGuy (#28329409) Attached to: YouTube, HTML5, and Comparing H.264 With Theora
> Theora just scores higher on a scoring algorithm when compared ot a single h264 encoder, the open-source x264. It doesn't even do that; it only scored higher when using Xiph's PSNR tool, because it respected a buggy colorspace header written by ffmpeg that didn't match the video. x264 won rather heavily when that was fixed, but /. never retracted the story.
