Re: FWD and RE: Suggestions and questions

> On Wednesday 02 October 2002 21:03, [email protected] wrote:
> > This is part of a post to the Theora dev list that I'm quoting:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > > I'm not a developer but it takes one to answer my questions. I
> > > was just thinking about how the command line encoder could work
> > > in the end (after having played with encoder_example)
> > > Some ideas:
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > > 3. Would it be possible to work into the theora framework the
> > > possibility that a portion of a video file could be played from
> > > an external file? Example: I want my Star Trek TNG episodes
> > > from DVD to drive. The opening and titles are the same in each
> > > episode (almost) and therefore I want to save space by forking
> > > them in like I said. Is this possibly not the job of theora but
> > > rather some higher level mechanism, or am I just being stupid?
> > > Perhaps something like those strange text files that hide in
> > > front of wmv streams are what should do this, sort of a
> > > playlist only one clip is forked into another. If the ogg had 2
> > > logical streams there wouldn't be a problem putting something
> > > in between, would there?
> >
> > That is an interesting idea for the Tarkin dev team to think
> > about,so I've CC'ed it to that list.  I don't think it could be
> > easily shoe-horned in to Theora - in that instance, it would be
> > better to do it external to the codec.
> 
> Hmm, definitely interesting. I think people archiving a whole lot of 
> episodes of one series is quite common. We'd have to think about 
> whether the user will do the cut manually, or how we could detect 
> the similar sections (shouldn't be that hard really). And ofcourse 
> the format should support it. Then there's things like deciding in 
> the player what to do when the referenced file isn't available. And 
> what about when you want to stream such a file, would the server 
> piece it together first, or is should the two files be streamed 
> separately.

Ah, no, I was thinking more of letting a single Tarkin stream be a container for several video clips, analogous in a way to patterns in Amiga MOD files.  I know, I know, some of my suggestions are seriously werid, but interesting none the less :-).

<offtopic>I actually tried throwing some ideas around, seeing how difficult it would be to make an automatic WAV -> MOD converter, (well not exactly, what I was trying to do was to recognise things like repeated drum beats in a WAV, and 'take them out'), but it was way beyond my ability to get it to do anything useful, and the processing required would have made it a non-starter without eventually implementing it in a dedicated DSP chip</offtopic>

> Thinking of applications, this could also be interesting in the 
> context of online radio and television, where you could have 
> commercials in separate files. Ofcourse, they'd have to be streamed 
> as separate files then, and cached on the player side.

Hmmm, you could include several variations in the stream, (E.G. commercials for different 'regions'), then skip over all but the one that was appropriate.  Ahh, YES!  You could distribute movies on disc, with different promos to be seen in different regions!  One disc for the whole world, but if you select Europe, it plays one trailer, and if you select U.S.A. it plays a different trailer, or just neatly skips over a few swear words in the U.S.A. version :-).

> Good idea, lots of things to work out but nice nonetheless. I need 
> to get back to video coding one of these days...

Looking back over the last 3 months on this list, there are some pretty exciting ideas, I think the next generation video codec is going to be quite a big leap forward compared with basically just using DCTs and motion estimation, like MPEG currently does.

John.
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