Linked by lemur2 on Mon 20th Jul 2009 18:29 UTC
In a recent interview, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moller talks about the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. "Although videos have been part of the Wikimedia stable for a couple years through the open-source Ogg Theora format, the offering has been limited. Now, however, a Firefox 3.5 plugin called Firefogg will allow for server-side transcoding to the Ogg format. In addition to allowing for downloading and editing, the Ogg format also consumes significantly fewer resources during video playback. The linked article also indicates that there are other video sites (apart from Wikimedia and Dailymotion) that are moving to the open standards format for video, noting that "hundreds of thousands of public domain videos from sources such as the Internet Archive and Metavid will be available in the new format".
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RE[7]: The FUD continues over video codecs for the web.
by computeruser on Wed 22nd Jul 2009 00:46
in reply to "RE[6]: The FUD continues over video codecs for the web."
Member since:2009-07-21
None of these video cards are reprogrammable in the way you suggest. My ATI card in this machine has hardware VC-1 and H.264 decoding - the work of decoding H.264 is done entirely in the GPU using a dedicated circuit (found in all of ATI's GPUs since the 2000-series, which came out two years ago). Intel and nVidia's H.264 decoding hardware works in the same way.
RE[8]: The FUD continues over video codecs for the web.
by lemur2 on Wed 22nd Jul 2009 02:12
in reply to "RE[7]: The FUD continues over video codecs for the web."
Member since:2007-02-17
None of these video cards are reprogrammable in the way you suggest. My ATI card in this machine has hardware VC-1 and H.264 decoding - the work of decoding H.264 is done entirely in the GPU using a dedicated circuit (found in all of ATI's GPUs since the 2000-series, which came out two years ago). Intel and nVidia's H.264 decoding hardware works in the same way.
Nevertheless, the GPU itself can be used for this purpose. The GPU can render any image you desire, so it should not matter in principle if the original data for what is meant to be displayed comes from an encoded video data stream or if instead it comes from a 3D game engine ... the GPU can still apply the required computations to the data and render the result.
That is what GPUs are for.
Furthermore, I would strongly suggest to you that the rendering of h264-encoded videos on the web (say those served by YouTube) is not achieved in client browsers today via using the h264 dedicated hardware decoder circuits on grpahics cards.
I say this because my own systems is perfectly able to show h264 videos from YouTube, yet the open source Linux graphics driver for the R6xx ATI card that I have in the machine is not at all able to use said codec circuits (even though, in paying for the graphics card, I should have acquired a licensed right to do so, regradless if I choose to run a Linux OS).
Edited 2009-07-22 02:30 UTC
RE[8]: The FUD continues over video codecs for the web.
by lemur2 on Wed 22nd Jul 2009 03:11
in reply to "RE[7]: The FUD continues over video codecs for the web."
Member since:2007-02-17
None of these video cards are reprogrammable in the way you suggest. My ATI card in this machine has hardware VC-1 and H.264 decoding - the work of decoding H.264 is done entirely in the GPU using a dedicated circuit (found in all of ATI's GPUs since the 2000-series, which came out two years ago). Intel and nVidia's H.264 decoding hardware works in the same way.
Some information concerning the possibilities of a GPU and its driver handing off part off the video decoding tasks to graphics card hardware can be read here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU
Currently, the portions designed to be offloaded by VDPAU onto the GPU are motion compensation (mo comp), inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT) and VLD (Variable-Length Decoding) for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), VC-1, and WMV3/WMV9 encoded videos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Video_Bitstream_Acceleration
Currently, the portions designed to be offloaded by XvBA onto the GPU are motion compensation (mo comp) and inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT), and VLD (Variable-Length Decoding) for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) and VC-1 encoded video.
These lists strongly suggest that the hardware circuits involved are nowhere near as dedicated to particular codecs as you suggest. I see no reason why support for Theora could not be easily added to these lists.
Having said that, features such as this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder
appear to be more constrained to particular codecs. Maybe, it is hard to tell how much of this is strict immutable hardware, and how much is actually firmware or driver software running on the GPU and not the CPU (and hence called "hardware acceleration").
In any event, there is a considerable amount of Theora decoding and rendering that could easily be supported by this type of functionality of GPUs.
More general information about video compression can be read here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression
Edited 2009-07-22 03:29 UTC
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Member since:
2007-02-17
GPUs are programmable. Update the driver and these same video cards can decode Theora.
None of the points raised about where H264 is currently used have much to do with selecting a codec for the web. Most emphatically, none of the points raised address the enormous, outrageous and unnecessary costs to the vast majority of people, and undeserved windfall to MPEGLA, that would result from selecting h264 as the video codec for the web.