German PEGs

Having said everything I could on the current political situation, I returned to looking at random codecs and I found one with a curious name.

The name is DPEG and it’s used in at least one random game I’ve never heard of. It turned out to be a rather simple tile-based codec with raw intra frames and inter frames that employ RLE and motion compensation.

So nothing interesting but then it struck me: wait a bit, I remember REing a codec with almost the same name, block-based RLE coding approach and also from a German company (a different one though).

And there’s this Fraunhofer society involved in MPEG Video and MPEG Audio (different branches though)…

So what’s the German fascination with naming codecs [A-Z]PEG and how many out of 22 possible codecs are really implemented?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2022 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Game Video, Useless Rants, Various Video Codecs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “German PEGs”

  1. Multimedia Mike says:
    September 29, 2022 at 2:34 pm

    Deutsche Picture Expert Group? 🙂

  2. Kostya says:
    September 29, 2022 at 3:05 pm

    You may be right. Or it might be from the developer’s first name (we remember such cases as well).

  3. Starlessandbibleblack Sabbath says:
    October 3, 2022 at 6:51 am

    [A-Z]PEG … now you are forgetting
    * the discussion – even a controversy – over what is a letter in German. ä ö ü ß (the latter just got its capital form five years ago)
    * … and related to that: ligatures, which in German also are related to compound words, they are not only appearance.

    So when they fall short of ASCII capitals, someone may even consider putting “ff” in front of something. And maybe in the end, there will be a tool that handles both mpegs and other codecs, and someone will consider calling it ffmpeg. Remember where you read it first.

  4. Kostya says:
    October 3, 2022 at 1:44 pm

    For simplicity I don’t expect e.g. ÄPEG to be created as well as other non-Latin names (and “Großes esszet” is a DDR thing I don’t accept). Of course somebody might go on and prove me wrong by creating one.

    As for the tool, I think you meant ffPEG which sounds like something Paul B. might create (or fork). Here we’re talking about codecs that a) created by Germans b) are palettised and block-based (though it’s not mandatory) and c) their name matches pattern “[^J]PEG”. Tools are dime a dozen, there’s even one for magnifying image over two hundred times, I’ve been hearing about this x264 quite often for some reason.