Codec Completeness: Report

Today I’ve committed (I hope) the last patches to VMware Video decoder (videos looked rather funny without mouse pointer).

So, here are the stats for decoders:

  • VMware Video: 98% (some blocks are unknown but don’t interfere with decoding process)
  • VC-1 Simple/Main Profile: 75% (downscaled frames won’t be supported and B/BI frames are in progress)
  • VC-1 Advanced Profile: 40% (interlaced mode is not supported and BDU coding is not parsed – samples, anyone?)

6 Responses to “Codec Completeness: Report”

  1. Blimblim says:

    I just wanted to say thanks for the the excellent VC1 work. I’ve been following the development closely and now that VC1 Advanced Profile is supported for the type of video I do (720p videos of games) I’ve switched to this codec instead of Xvid with great results.

  2. Kanniball says:

    Blimblim have you tried x.264?
    it’s a great codec and it’s a standard.

    Kostya:
    Thanks again for your work, because now people don’t need to use binary codecs to see some internet contents.

  3. malc says:

    You mentioned earlier that complex profile is not important, but today (for the first time) i saw a channel9 interview(
    http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=234632) encoded using said complex profile. I guess those will keep poping up in large quantities sooner rather than later.

    p.s. BTW what is the reason for declaration that it’s not important to begin with?

    p.p.s. And thank you for your wonderful work.

  4. Kostya says:

    Complex profile is obsolete and it’s said so by Microsoft itself. It was called ‘Advanced Profile’ in old WMV3 encoder and is not supported by the new one (and no info is available). So, my reasons for declaring them not important are:
    * They are very rare
    * They should not occur in the future
    * There are more important tasks to do – like supporting old simple/main profile WMV3 (where situation is the same but they occur often enough).

    But all of that does not mean that those files may not be supported in future. Theoretically they could be decoded by main profile decoder and some of them really do but some of them (like yours sample) contain unsupported features which need extensive RE’ing,

  5. Thanks for your work.

    Concerning “complex profile”, I would like to point the videos provided by the French Television Channel “Canal+”, (click on “vidéos, bandes annonces”), especially mms://vipmms.canalplus.fr/canalplus/guignols_${date}_a.wmv (with date in YYMMDD format), which I like to watch daily.

  6. Blimblim says:

    Kannibal: WVM9 is supported out of the box on most computers (since sadly the vast majority is still running XP), is accelerated by lots of graphics card and has the great advantage (for me) to be working on the Xbox 360 too. I like H.264, but it has none of the advantages of switching to WMV9 from XVID (except picture quality, of course).