On 15 December 2005 17:02, James wrote: [ snip - lots of good stuff ] > All things video are a work in progress. I can run (2) color > video streams over a 56 kbps frame relay link, with acceptable > quality for a utility. For their needs, nothing is close to > H.264, at this time, as we have evaluated dozens of formats. > H.264 is also the most efficient in raw video storage. Still > I stuggle with a software package that will run on linux; > one day. H.264 is largely being ignored by the 'open source' > community, for obvious reason, but, it does yeild stunning > results.
I can only agree on each single point. We managed to encode a 1h45m movie in full TV quality (which isn't all that much quality) using H.264 with a resulting file of about 500MB!!!!!! It took 5 hours on a dual G5 (yes, a mac). So encoding is rather expensive. Decoding can be done on the fly. Especially interesting for me is that I can stream it using just about 100Kb/s per stream. My target is a LAN with hundreds of simultaneous streams, and H.264 let me get away with Gb technology for the backbone. All that said, I *can* watch H.264 on linux by now. No audio yet, though. That's not the fault of ffmpeg; it's just that the encoding software on the mac uses some audio codec I can not get my hands on for linux - yet. Encoding H.264 on linux is a different bowl of fish. Last time I tried it, the result was - how should I put it? - bizarre. But then, it is, like James said, a work in progress. I had a ffmpeg snapshot from August, and it couldn't display it at all. Got a snapshot from November, and it did it beautifully - except for the audio. For now, I use macs for a commercial product. The moment things get right on linux, I'll drop macs and use linux boxes in newer deployments. Uwe -- Unix is sexy: who | grep -i blonde | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount sleep -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
