Re: Is this group still alive...

Hi there!

>     I've come across this group today and have been
> reading alot of the old posts.   I realize that the
> postings have petered off.  I am really interested in
> this project.

    You are right, a few months ago this project was, at least,
a little bit more active.  I believe that most of us are quite busy
with our real life dutties.  Many of us are also working commercially
on H.264/AVC, so sometimes is not easy to know what could be
contributed as open software, or even what it's worth...

> 
>     Does any one have some uml of how this system is
> supposed to work.  I found one diagram here.
> 
> http://www.iapplianceweb.com/printableArticle?doc_id=OEG20021202S0072

    That diagrams is mostly codec independent.  Except for a few
details like intra prediction and the deblocking filter it could also be
valid for MPEG-2/4.  You can find more detailed information on
H.264/AVC in http://www.vcodex.fsnet.co.uk/h264.html.

>     Also, I like Aitor Garay's ideal of doing some
> thing in Java.  I work in the video conferencing
> industry (sales side, but have a bs in cs) and I have
> seen some amazing (non-standard) codecs run in Java. 
> It seems this company is doing some thing with Java
> (probably j2me and jmf).

    The idea could be good, but as someone pointed out on
this mailing list, people will not be very interested on working
on a research/learn codec implementation in Java.  Java is too
slow for practical use.  Even pure C/C++ is too slow and some
kind of parallel/multimedia support is need (MMX, 3DNow!,
Altivec...).

> 
>     I understand that h.264 is based off of mpeg 4 and
> IBM has a package on alphaworks

    Not exactly.  Even if the ISO will adopt it as MPEG-4
Part 10, there are a _lot_ of differences with MPEG-4.
A MPEG-4 codec must be modified extensively to cope
with H.264/AVC too.

>     Although I have an excelent grasp on Java/C/C++, I
> know next to nothing about rendering video.  Is there
> a good starting point for this?

    You can find a good introduction to video compression in
http://www.vcodex.fsnet.co.uk/videocodecdesign/index.html.
Otherwise the net is full of useful information.

>     If this group is still alive, please sound off
> with any information that you've obtained on the
> subject.  I'd like to compile a FAQ as soon as
> possible to incourage people to join in.

    Of more priority is to have some working code...

    /AITOR




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