FFmpeg Picks Up Support For New Formats

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FFmpeg Picks Up Support For New Formats

While there still is no official release of FFmpeg, committed to their SVN repository last night was support for several new formats. FFmpeg has picked up a QCELP/PureVoice speech decoder, floating point PCM decoder and encoder, Nellymoser ASAO encoder, Electronic Arts TGQ decoder, Speex decoding via libspeex, MXF muxer, E-AC-3 support, and a RealVideo 4.0 decoder. FFmpeg is a popular open-source project that supports audio/video encoding and decoding with numerous codecs...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjkwMg

[bulletxt]

very interesting news. I hope ubuntu 9.4 will update its ffmpeg package to a newer svn revision.

[r1348]

I wish they could support the intel Indeo 5 video codec, a considerable number of old videos around are coded that way, as it was once default on Windows.

[greg]

What happened to the efforts for generic frame-level multithreading support? It was a Google SOC project and as far as I know it's quite finished.

[Louise]

Is Real Video 4.0 the latest Real codec?

[whizse]

Is Real Video 4.0 the latest Real codec?

As far as I can tell, yes it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Video#Codecs

This is pretty exciting news, as rv40 was one of the few remaining codecs people use binary .dll's for.

[Louise]

This is even better than I thought :)

[dashcloud]

This is even better than I thought :)

Just so you know, Real Video 3.0 isn't finished yet- so if you have those format videos, it's going to be a little longer.

[dashcloud]

Michael: it's unlikely there will be a formal release, so it's better to just treat it like versions of Wine: every version is (or should be) better than the previous one (and if it's not, that's a bug).

The frame-level multithreading is progressing slowly- it's in a seperate branch- ffmpeg-mt (accessible here: http://gitorious.org/projects/ffmpeg/repos/ffmpeg-mt)
From the experiences of people who have tried it, and used it in their programs, 2 cores gets a decent bump up, but 4 cores is where it gets really good performance. This test: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1214539#post1214539 shows about a 300% gain over plain FFmpeg.

Bulletx: Sadly, your best bet now (and for the forseeable future) will be to build your own (or possibly get them from debian-multimedia.org) There's a great guide on the Ubuntu forums on how to build FFmpeg & x264 from source.

[Kano]

ffmpeg is getting better, but for me it is still not good enough to watch h264 ts for example using kaffeine. It works for some frames, then the errors come and artefacts. In bad cases the codec fails completely - with too many bad bits.

[deneb]

ffmpeg is getting better, but for me it is still not good enough to watch h264 ts for example using kaffeine. It works for some frames, then the errors come and artefacts. In bad cases the codec fails completely - with too many bad bits.
Either you are using a very old version of the decoder or the MPEG-TS demuxer in Kaffeine (Xine) messes something up. The current FFmpeg H.264 decoder handles all common H.264 streams properly, including Blu-ray and HDTV sources (once decrypted). Of course there are still bugs and H.264 is a very complex standard, so everything may not work. But if you have problems with many files from different sources, there is definitely something wrong with your software/hardware setup.

Try playing your files with a recent MPlayer SVN revision (you'll probably need to build it yourself though).

[curaga]

How long does it usually take for improvements in ffmpeg/libav* to be available in mplayer/mencoder?

[susikala]

Has anybody built mplayer with ffmpeg-mt already? I have tried to copy the libav* folders from ffmpeg-mt into the mplayer build directory, but the result does not quite utilise all four cores. Is there anything else I should do?

Forget about it: in my eternal wisdom I forgot to provide lavdopts with threads=n. It's now working pretty well.

[dotancohen]

While the addition of these new formats is nice, the most important missing format of all is still not included: AMR. AMR is the format used in cellular phone's audio and video formats. Now that theses devices are popular (and use is growing) the need for native AMR support is critical. I know of two Kubuntu users who switched back to Windows because the need to interface with the media from cellphones was so important. And that is after they got over the hurdle of switching from MS Office to Open Office!

[curaga]

In mplayer you get AMR support by installing the narrow- and wideband libs before it, would this be the case for ffmpeg too?

[dotancohen]

In mplayer you get AMR support by installing the narrow- and wideband libs before it, would this be the case for ffmpeg too?

For some reason, at least with mplayer RCs, that breaks my ability to play anything else! Tested on Kubuntu 7.04 and 8.04 installed from Medibuntu repo.

[dashcloud]

While the addition of these new formats is nice, the most important missing format of all is still not included: AMR. AMR is the format used in cellular phone's audio and video formats. Now that theses devices are popular (and use is growing) the need for native AMR support is critical. I know of two Kubuntu users who switched back to Windows because the need to interface with the media from cellphones was so important. And that is after they got over the hurdle of switching from MS Office to Open Office!

There's a branch with preliminary AMR support- it's probably more useful for developers though since it's grown kind of stagnant. Check out the /soc/amr instead of /ffmpeg/trunk.

[dotancohen]

There's a branch with preliminary AMR support- it's probably more useful for developers though since it's grown kind of stagnant. Check out the /soc/amr instead of /ffmpeg/trunk.

Thanks, that is nice to know. However, I will not be installing that on my user's systems. My 'users' are friends / family / associates who I've installed Kubuntu / Fedora for. There's a good 20 of them and I have learned not to install development builds if I don't want to be doing free tech support for life.

[sihv]

Has anybody built mplayer with ffmpeg-mt already? I have tried to copy the libav* folders from ffmpeg-mt into the mplayer build directory, but the result does not quite utilise all four cores. Is there anything else I should do?

Forget about it: in my eternal wisdom I forgot to provide lavdopts with threads=n. It's now working pretty well.

Wow, I just tried the mt-branch. I ran some test material I haven't been able to play without frame skips and losing a/v sync before. For example, H264 BD video runs without any framedrops with both cpu cores at 70%. A randomly chosen 1080p video clip played about 50% faster in mplayer's benchmark mode. I had to use -demuxer lavf on the BD material, though, otherwise the video window wouldn't appear at all for some reason.

Anyway, I'm impressed. :) Can't wait until this gets in ffmpeg trunk. I have a Core 2 Duo E6600 overclocked to 3 GHz, by the way.