Nice. browsers have supported this for a long time, and it was annoying ffmpeg did not, because that meant a lot of non-browser desktop apps couldn't view them either.
I've been waiting for this feature! Whenever I've encountered an animated WebP, I've had to drop it into ezgif.com to convert it to mp4, now I can just write a quick Bash function to transform it with ffmpeg.
When I was a vision engineer at a previous role back in 2022-ish, laptop-class Intel chips used in their SFF NUCs were powerful enough to run small finetuned convolutional nets by dancing across the different on the package: first decode using QSV, and then downsize using the CPU, run the images through an OpenVINO model running on the iGPU, and aggregate results and append metadata using the CPU core. You could have 50% of the hardware in today's high-end security cameras for 10% of the cost.
I have to assume that hardware advancements in the past four years have only pushed the efficiency envelope further.
What made you give up on it? Lack of time, or did you just not find it fun? “Season 2” of games came out last year.
I’d really like the chance to play with one and maybe even try to develop for it. Unfortunately, the price is a bit steep, even more so when considering shipping and taxes to the EU. I kept checking for years (and still do from time to time) to see if they’d sell through a retailer in the EU or if I could get one second-hand here, but it’s looking like that’ll never happen.
I've seen some very recent niche tech demoing fast-refresh e-ink screens but pretty much everything until now has required a noticeable flash to clear the entire screen on update. Which is fine for reading books but not for quick animating in an action game.
Most e-ink displays do not refresh faster than the original GameBoy which was 60fps.
Would probably be great for like, text adventures, visual novels, turn based strategy games, etc.
But lcd screens are so cheap I don't even know what the advantage of an e-ink screen would be for this. I was just misremembering what the niche part of the playdate screen was.
Edit: And just to continue the nerdier part of the conversation, the dmg-01's refresh rate was indeed ~60, but it's pixel response time was so bad it really made it feel way slower. I remember when the GBC came out how amazed I was at how clear the games looked. dmg-01 felt like a tiger handheld a lot of the time.
60fps is the speed the PPU pushes pixels to the LCD, not the speed the LCD physically refreshes itself. That part was slow enough you could toggle pixels at 30Hz to simulate more than 4 levels of gray.
I have a Boox e-reader. You can run Firefox on it, you can drag-to-scroll like a phone, there's a lot of ghosting (like the game boy) but it works fine. Now I wish I still had a game boy to compare it to.
So far, Claude has helped find missing backports for the upcoming 9.0 release."
Although i was under the impression that they ususally preferred hand optimized assembly.
Not sure what their LLM/AI contribution policy looks like compared to other fundamental OSS projects.
> Although i was under the impression that they usually preferred hand optimized assembly.
Using LLMs/agents to do gap analysis and fill boilerplate doesn't rule out also reviewing the output and hand-optimising. That is how the tools should be used (if you aren't being a luddite like me and not using them at all) rather than click-and-hope vibe-coding.
And as a ffmpeg user with some old/weird hardware, I would much prefer click-and-hope support to no support at all. Ideally they’d have the resources for a real live human to hand-code assembly for every codec for every platform, but that’s probably not realistic. I’ll take what I can get and dust off my assembly skills if a click-and-hope implementation is close but not quite enough.
The problem I see is that LLM use deters many potential contributors. I understand that in your use case this is not an issue since you prefer working code over theoretical contributors (as said makes a lot of sense), but I am noticing this in many projects that transitioned hard into an AI dependency. It puts a barrier to some people. If 99% of a project's contributions are via AI, is that project still alive?
Yes, contribution is what keeps a project alive. It's up to the people involved to maintain quality. That's management. Two different things, both important.
You can very likely do the click-and-hope on your own with a 20 $/month cursor/codex/claude/grok subscription.
edit: actually if you have the weird/exotic hardware you’re in the best position to do so as you can actually test whatever the coding agents would shit out.
In FFmpeg's twitter page it says that several of their developers got six free months of Claude Max 20x plan through Anthropic's Claude for Open Source Program, and that it was used, so far, to help find missing backports for this 9.0 release.
- Extend AMF Color Converter (vf_vpp_amf) HDR capabilities
- LCEVC track muxing support in MP4 muxer
- Playdate video encoder and muxer
- Add v360_vulkan filter
- HE-AAC 960 decoding (DAB+)
- transpose_cuda filter
- Add AMF Frame Rate Converter (vf_frc_amf) filter
- SMPTE 2094-50 metadata support and passthrough
- ProRes RAW VideoToolbox hwaccel
- APV Vulkan hwaccel
- Animated WebP decoder
- Animated WebP demuxer
- Remove CELT decoding support (doesn't affect Opus CELT)
- Remove ogg/celt parsing
- Bitstream filter to split Dolby Vision multi-layer HEVC
- Add AMF hardware memory mapping support.
- ONNX Runtime DNN backend with GPU execution provider support
- Remove deprecated NVENC options and support for pre-11.1 SDK versions