

Next Generation Video: Introducing Daala - metajack
http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml

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gioele
Monty's ability to explain convoluted technical topics is astounding. He
explains everything in plain words yet it remains technical and scientific
enough.

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rikacomet
indeed, I never knew this stuff.. and since CS is not my field, I might have
never understood this.

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znowi
I'm surprised to learn that modern codecs are so conservative, incrementing on
the tech invented decades ago. I expected this field to be rampant with
cutting-edge research techniques. As the article says, the lapping
transformation dates back to the early 90s. And it's considered "the next-
next-generation" today. Why is it happening?

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ZeroGravitas
Well if a government-blessed cartel ran industry X, and there was basically
only one product with no competition, which was replaced on a predetermined 10
year cycle after a series of long political committee meetings and they'd
built a massive patent thicket to prevent upstart competition and control
rivals business models how much disruptive innovation would you expect to see?

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vanderZwan
And that, boys and girls, is why animated gifs are still being used today.

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ralfd
....what? The failure of APNG and MNG is not because of patents.

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vanderZwan
I thought one of the suppopsed reasons that browser vendors didn't bother
adding that was because we were going to have a working video tag soon.

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jwr
This is very good news. I'm glad to finally see some real development of video
encoding. I was disappointed to see Google put its weight behind VP9, which
was basically the same set of technologies as H.264, with (almost) the same
set of patent encumbrances.

The ideas behind Daala, while not revolutionary, are enough to make it quite
different from everything else out there. I also hope it means it won't
infringe on every patent out there, just some of them.

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ZeroGravitas
As the article points out, the traditional codec development is based on video
codec developments going back 25 years (and fundamental maths going back much
further) so it's not the basics that are patented. Instead it's fairly
idiosyncratic design choices because that's the MVP (minimum viable patent)
that you need to insert into the spec to get a share of the royalties.

In short, the patent stuff has always been mostly threats from the incumbents,
which are not empty but don't actually rely on any of the underlying patents
being sound. Google gets a lot of abuse from the peanut gallery for not nuking
H.264 support in Chrome but they seem to be doing amazing work behind the
scenes to get the incumbents on board with free codecs. Not ever going to earn
you as much geek cred as rebooting video codec development down a different
(and quite possibly better) path, but still a worthy endeavour in my mind.

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isaacaggrey
> but [Google seems] to be doing amazing work behind the scenes to get the
> incumbents on board with free codecs.

Huh? By not nuking H.264 support in Chrome like they publicly promised they
did anything _but_ get the rest of the industry on board with free codecs, but
perhaps I am not aware of the work Google has done recently to influence free
codec adoption.

What codecs or work are you referring to?

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ZeroGravitas
Amongst other things...

getting 11 big names in MPEG codecs to licence any patents they have that
apply to VP8 to anyone at no cost.

Putting a reciprocal patent licence on VP8 and then including it in Android
2.3 (notice Apple, Microsoft and Nokia couldn't accept either Theora or VP8 in
HTML5 because they claimed they'd get sued, a range of Android OEMs seem to
think this wasn't a showstopper. Even in the midst of smartphone patent
armageddon the only lawsuit so far was started by Nokia)

As a fairly direct result of the above getting nearly every big name in GPUs
and chipsets to build VP8 into their products.

The work around webrtc, with the currently stalled effort to make vp8
mandatory and it looks like it will be a major first usecase for vp9.

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arianvanp
Speaking of 'original' formats. Why would one prefer the Discrete Cosine
Transform to the Discrete Fourier Transform? I've only worked with the
Fourier, and I'm wondering if there are any benefits?

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0x006A
One property of the DCT that makes it quite suitable for compression is its
high degree of "spectral compaction;" at a qualitative level, a signal's DCT
representation tends to have more of its energy concentrated in a small number
of coefficients when compared to other transforms like the DFT. This is
desirable for a compression algorithm.

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arianvanp
but if you'd take the continous transform, my intuition says it doesnt matter.
as it's both a time -> frequency/phase domain transformation. So they should
store 'the same amount' of information. ??

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joeyo
Keep in mind that, in general, you need an infinite number of Fourier bases to
represent an arbitrary waveform. But if you want to use a finite number of
bases (and indeed as small of a number as you can get away with), and if the
waveform you wish to represent has known structure, there can be more
efficient representations.

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nullc
I still think we should have pointed out that the same thing that makes
feistel ciphers invertable is what makes integer lifting invertable.

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mtgx
They make the distinction on their page, too - this is a "next-next-
generation" codec, not just a "next-generation" one like VP9 and HEVC.

So if this is finalized in 2-3 years, then it will be more of a competitor to
VP10. Not sure if MPEG-LA will release another one 2 years from now. They
usually release one every 5 years or more, and VP9 managed to catch-up with
HEVC after only 2 years of work (work on HEVC started in 2008; work on VP9 in
2011), so we might see VP10 in 2 years that is twice as good as VP9/HEVC, but
not an h.266 codec that is twice as good HEVC/h.265.

It will be interesting to see just how good Daala will be. If it's going to be
released 2-3 years from now, then it should be at least 3x better than h.264,
or at least 4x better to be safe, and to be worth the switch from HEVC/VP9
(and at least as good as VP10, if Google does indeed release VP10 around then,
too). That would make 4k video as efficient as 1080p video with h.264 (file
size/bandwidth-wise).

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anon1385
>not just a "next-generation" one like VP9 and HEVC.

VP9 is not the same generation as HEVC. It's more comparable with H.264.

>VP9 managed to catch-up with HEVC after only 2 years of work

Do you mean in terms of how far along with standardisation/development they
are? VP9 is ~6 months behind, although that's not really that significant in
video standard timescales. If you mean quality then VP9 encoders have not
caught up with x264, and that in itself may take years, if they ever do.

We were promised that VP8 would get a lot better over time, but it didn't
because they basically gave up and concentrated on VP9. If they do the same
again and start looking to VP10 then VP9 will flounder. Video codecs can't
gain adoption with such short churn times. The reason there was so little time
between VP8 and VP9 is that VP8 was technically so far behind it never had any
chance of adoption.

MPEG-LA are not going to release a new codec in 2 years time. HEVC will
probably only just be seeing mature implementations and widespread adoption by
then. There is still a hell of a lot of MPEG-2 tech out there and H.264 has
been out for a decade.

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ZeroGravitas
"Next-gen", as it is in consoles, is derived from the traditional business
models where things go in 5-10 year cycles based around fixed hardware that
falls in cost over time.

Your new PC isn't called next-gen, even if it's much more powerful than your
old console. And even if you look at the longer timescales of PC, it's
hard/subjective to choose a line in the sand for one "generation" to
transition to the next. So I don't think VP9 is, wants to be, or needs to be
"next-gen" by that kind of definition.

Having said that, it's a sufficiently "next-gen" bitstream (basically it
assumes you have a certain amount of hardware oomph available) that its visual
output can be better than x264 already in most ordinary videos, even with an
encoder that could be described as "worse" in many ways. x264 may be a better
fighter "pound for pound" but it's clearly in a different weight class.

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rikacomet
so basically how much it would save : Cost/Time/Space over a 100 MB file,
compared to current codec ? A example would have been nice for non-CS people
like me.

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VikingCoder
We're at the research phase, still. The techniques seem promising, but there's
still a lot of work to do, before we get to the tuning stage. THEN, you can
have your estimates.

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rikacomet
Okay, cool

