Sometimes when I have an acute nostalgy I try to cook something from my homeland.
First time I made
Köttbullar (med potatis och lingonsylt självfallet). Too bad I could not do it SWEDISH STYLE! :-(. This time I tried to make Janssons frestelse. Jag hade inget burk ansjovis men bohusmatjessill i stället blev lagom bra.
With the addition of VBLE decoder I thought once again about codecs and how they are written.
There are two approaches:
Lots of people try it, find that their codec is faster/compresses better than HuffYUV and release results. Usually those codecs don’t live long and the only bad thing about it is they being released to public in the first place.
The codecs are usually more complex, so there are less of them. But there are more ways to create one.
The main problem with these codecs is achieving good compression parameters without much hassle. For example, libavcodec MPEG-4 encoder may be the best around here but (like Soviet machinery) one has to work real hard to find out which parameters he/she needs to set to which values to get good compression. That’s the reason why people often choose Xvid instead.
There is one approach to those: add lots of crazy filtering (usually several chained filters) and equally crazy coding of residues. There you got it. Simple filters = faster compression, complex filters = slightly better compression with significantly longer compression times.
Last abstract from lossless video codecs applies to audio as well.
Those appear not too often because it’s very hard to satisfy everybody’s ears. Thus (IMO) it’s mostly limited to speech codec development. And there’s Xiph of course.