[PD] compression codecs

[Daniel Heckenberg]

Hi folks,

From: "/////++christian" <pd at testphase.org>
> >what OS are you using and what do you mean by 'good'?   if good means
> >nice images with little compression artifacts then that suggests a
> >different set of codecs than small file size or fast decompression.
>
> unfortunately i am using winXP and 'good' means nice images and fast
> decompression ;)
> the picture quality of cinepak and indeo5 (lil bit better) is quite bad,
but
> both work quite good on my machine.
> i was just thinking about any other codec that maybe looks better at same
> performance ...

Yup... all the VideoForWindows codecs are really nasty.  In the short term,
something like MidiVid VJ codec or one of the 3rd party MJPEG codecs might
be a good option.  Once they're installed they should be available to any
VFW based application for compression and decompression (including GEM).

I have a DirectShow based film loader and a QT for Windows based film loader
in development which should make just about anything playable in GEM on
Windows.

Look out for these in GEM CVS in the next couple of weeks.  I'm aiming to
incorporate these in a run-time dynamic way where there will only be a
single pix_film object under windows but it will use the appropriate library
to load the clip.

As a side note to the "good" discussion - under Windows the texture upload
time dominates the frame loading process so you can use nice codecs
(relatively CPU heavy) without much performance impact.  Watch out for disk
performance tho - particularly with lots of simultaneous clips.

Daniel