[FFmpeg-devel] donation for snow

[Jason Garrett-Glaser]

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 10:20 AM, Lars T?uber <lars.taeuber at gmx.net> wrote:
> Hi Michael.
>
> On Tue, 4 Nov 2008 20:24:38 +0100 Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
>> > I'll be sorry to do this but it seems snow will die before beeing born.
>>
>> code lives or dies depending on developers pushing things forward or not,
>> and iam surely sad that noone is working on snow. Especially as there are
>> many possibilities and ideas of what and how it could be improved both
>> quality and speed wise.
>
> The missing support in the development of snow was the reason I wanted donate some money, but i seems to be a wrong mean. I share your sadness.

This is unsurprising.  The people good enough to be useful in
development of Snow are also good enough that their time is worth
quite a bit of money--enough that the only way you will get them to
work on it is either a few tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum,
or some sort of non-monetary motivation.

> If someone is interested in the features end users liked to have here I share my ideas.
> The main reason for me to look for a new codec is my need for a future-proof codec. It's meant to be used as a standard to archive my private family videos made with different devices using different codecs stored in different containers. They all should transformed into a standard format.
> That means I want me and my grandchilds in the situation to decode these films in 30+ years.

Then you really want a format accepted as an international standard,
not some random creative idea we come up with.

> For me it is not very important which technology is used in the background, but the following points I'd liked to see:
>
> - independence of any company!!!

Do you mean backed by more than one company, or backed by no companies
at all?  Most standards like MPEG-2, H.264, etc are the former.  If
you mean the latter, that's a very bad thing, as it means less effort
spent on optimizing encoders and decoders for that format.  A
general-use format sponsored by only a single organization, whether
ffmpeg or On2, is IMO problematic.

> - codec available under open source and royalty free license (and as portable as possible)

Truly royalty-free means patent-free.  As mentioned above, this won't happen.

> - developers try to not infringe patents (to the best of the knowledge)

I will probably outright refuse to work on any project that makes that
as a rule.

> - reasonable balance between compression ratio and decoding speed on recent hardware

So, you mean... not Snow.

> - lossless mode (intra-frame-only mode) would be nice

"Lossless" and "intra-frame-only" have nothing to do with each other.

> I'm just fine with the idea of a codec based on h.264 with reduced complexity and missing useless features.

Restricted Baseline profile?

> There is only one feature I can think of that might become usefull in the future. It's stereo coding. I mean compressing frames recorded from two different angles.

You mean H.264 MVC (Multi-View Coding)?  The spec has already been finalized.

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