
CineForm Goes Open Source - warrenski
http://cineform.blogspot.com/2017/10/cineform-goes-open-source.html
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dkh
This is very exciting news. I've been a huge proponent of CineForm in the
production pipeline for several years now. Glad this finally happened.

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ttoinou
Aren't the files too big ?

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m-p-3
For distribution, yes. But for production and post-production that's fine.

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ttoinou
I understand it's an intermediate codec. It seems that it's even heavier than
ProRes XQ so I'm wondering but yeah, hard drive are cheap now

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0dan0
Generally CineForm is lower bit-rate for the same quality as ProRES. See
[https://blog.frame.io/2017/02/13/50-intermediate-codecs-
comp...](https://blog.frame.io/2017/02/13/50-intermediate-codecs-compared) for
an independent analysis.

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j_s
I am interested to see how the patent side of this shakes out, it seems to be
a minefield for video codecs. Is there some scenario where going open source
exposes the authors/companies involved to potential trouble?

Releasing under Apache License Version 2.0 seems to cover the normal bases
with its Grant of Patent License. What are the compelling reasons to choose to
use the MIT alternative?

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sturmen
It would seem that CineForm is inherently simple, so perhaps it does not
infringe on any of the "more clever" codec's inventions (AKA patents). I
imagine GoPro ran it through legal before doing this.

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0dan0
Was the idea. CineForm was developed to avoid patents in 2001, by using
technology that patents had already expired: 2-6 blockless wavelets, RLE and
Huffman entropy encoding -- this is about that is used to make CineForm.
Simplicity is what drove performance, wavelets over DCT is what helps in
quality.The patent mind-field is in distribution codecs that strive for the
lowest possible bit-rate, which was not a design goal for CineForm. Declaimer:
I'm the author of the linked article.

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ttoinou
160k LOC ? Sounds a lot...

Great news anyway. Can't wait to see this in FFmpeg !

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muizelaar
ffmpeg has had a CineForm decoder since Jan 2016:
[https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavcodec/cfhd...](https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavcodec/cfhd.c)

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dkh
Yes, but not an encoder, and that's the piece preventing it from being used to
its potential. It's also nice when you no longer have to reverse-engineer the
decoder. FFmpeg is one of my favorite things on earth, but minor differences
between its implementations of closed-source codecs unfortunately prevent it
from being a viable alternative in high-end post-production in many
situations. ProRes encoding in FFmpeg for instance, although it certainly
"works" as far as one can tell, still usually fails a few tests during the QC
processes the bigger media companies use, and that generally means you can't
use it, full-stop.

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ttoinou
Can we find thoses quality control tests online ? I'm very interested in
knowing what's wrong.

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petedoyle
Anyone have any thoughts on whether this could be implemented on the GPU?
(e.g. CUDA) Especially encoding.

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0dan0
The 2-6 integer wavelets would be very fast on a GPU, although they are almost
too simple. GPUs struggle more this the entropy encoding/decoding, which is
what a prevented a GPU port in the past. Do any GPUs have generic Huffman
cores now?

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ingenieroariel
Could gopros in the future be configured to save in cineform directly from the
device? I have a 128gb SD card and have always wanted to get a compression
with less loss than protune.

