It’s time to say myself: you are no longer relevant. All remotely useful codecs have been reverse engineered already and most of them are obsolete. Everybody uses either H.26[45]+AAC or VP{3,8,9}+Opus and nothing else is required (even by VLC). And I grew tired too if it wasn’t obvious from my previous posts (I don’t even blame lu_zero anymore).
And thus my plans are to document Duck TrueMotion 2X and VP4, ClearVideo and hopefully VX.
In NihAV (yeah, like it’ll ever happen) I decided to implement just fringe codecs like those and no new modern codecs maybe except Bink2 and WMV3 (I know what should be done to support beta P-frames there but the libavcodec decoder is so unwieldy that my brain switches off trying to analyse how to do that change there; before you say anything it’s a part of the code written before I took over it and failed to make it into full-featured decoder during GSoC 2006).
Yeah, I realized the same thing a few years ago– the multimedia tech world is just so boring. Not a bad thing in the grand scheme of things– a lot more users are able to make seamless use of multimedia tech thanks to the boring standardization. But we’re a long way from the “wild west” feeling of the old days.
Well I think FOSS basically moved faster than what anyone could produce. “It plays in VLC” is basically the defacto standard for multimedia now.
The problem is that rather there are not so many producers anymore if you don’t count lossless codecs—those keep appearing by dozen each year.
MagicYUV is next killer lossless codec.
I don’t think multimedia are boring today. We still need stronger compression and better quality. But those needs are served by the mainstream codecs and future advancements will come from following mainstream developments, even if some new radical things will get imported into them.
Fringe things you have found interesting were really mostly fringe – they didn’t matter much, didn’t push forward the state of the art, weren’t of much use and usually a “me too” efforts. Those are getting rarer luckily because the bar is higher and it is harder for lamers to thing they have chance. When stuff like “SIF1” or ORBX.js /laugh/ happen, everybody just ignores they exist and that is for the best. That past jungle was really useless too, but back then people made the mistake of not ignoring the noise.
I have practical needs and purposes, so I don’t care about that noise, while the mainstream is actually *interesting*, or actually exciting as PR people say – because it is working on that progress thing.
I wish people learned to get working ratecontrol in less than 6 years since the standardization, because that kinda craps over said progress.