[Ffmpeg-devel] Macromedia Flash 8

Colin Ward lists
Tue Sep 20 03:04:20 CEST 2005


Mike Melanson wrote:
> 
>>> For my part, I am busy investigating VC-1/WMV3 support right now.
>>
>>   Could I trouble you to give a quick rundown on this?  I took a look 
>> around the Internet to try and find some information on the various M$ 
>> codecs but it's a little confusing.  Is WMV3 a really old format or do 
>> the number systems used by M$ codecs and file formats just not make 
>> much sense?
> 
>     WMV3 is the hottest thing going in the Windows Media camp. It is 
> also known as WMV9 and is also soon to be known as VC-1 or VC-9 and is 
> part of the upcoming (so they say) HD-DVD standard (as opposed to Sony's 
> Blu-Ray which is supposed to support stock H.264).

   Ok, thanks.  You can never trust version numbers these days, 
especially if the marketing men have had anything to do with them.  WMV9 
could be version 9 of WMV, if engineers set the version number, or it 
could be only version 2 or 3, if marketing men set the version number!

   I noticed that MPlayer can play some WMV9 videos but crashes with 
others;  is this because support is only partially complete thus far?

   WMV9 *is* pretty hot stuff too.  I went to a telco about a year ago 
who were experimenting with broadband HD video and were playing WMV9 
files on a huge wall mounted plasma screen, and it was *very* 
impressive.  However, what was disappointing (and this applies to H.264 
as well) was that the codec seemed to use the brute force approach (in 
terms of CPU and bandwidth) to get its quality.  What would have been 
*really* impressive if WMV9 and H.264 got their amazingly high quality 
while still having only the bandwidth requirements of previous 
generation codecs.  I mean, the Serenity H.264 trailer is heaps nicer 
than the Serenity Quicktime trailer, but it was several times the size, 
which takes away the "wow" factor a bit.

   But I'm probably in danger of starting a long thread here, so I'll 
stop thinking aloud about such things.  :-)

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