[FFmpeg-devel] donation for snow

[Lars Täuber]

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.

I'd like to help in any way I'm able to. It's not very much as you already know.

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.

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!!!
- bit stream is documented, publically available and bound to version numbers
- coder is able to make use of (more than) 2 threads/cores
- recent decoder is able to decode all previous versions of the codec
- codec available under open source and royalty free license (and as portable as possible)
- developers try to not infringe patents (to the best of the knowledge)
- reasonable balance between compression ratio and decoding speed on recent hardware
--- encoding speed is irrelevant to me
--- how to meassure this?
- lossless mode (intra-frame-only mode) would be nice

Most points seem to be fullfiled automatically when realised in the FFmpeg project. That's why I was so excited about snow.

I'm just fine with the idea of a codec based on h.264 with reduced complexity and missing useless features.
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.
There is the possibility to contain 2 independent videostreams (L+R) in matroshka, but there is a lot of redundacy in this kind of streaming i think.

Thanks
Lars