Better Video Codecs - was Re: [GnomeMeeting-list] ideas..

["Conrad Beckert" <conrad_b iname com>]

Hi Damien,

> Patents are not on the code, they are on the technics, so it is certainly not legal,
> at least in the US. In Europe, it is still a bit "vague".
Fortunately, the EU-parliament rejected the proposal for computer implemented
inventions in July 2005. That happened after long struggle and intense
lobbying by civil liberty groups such as e.g the http://www.ffii.org/ To keep
our freedom, we have to use it to show that it is valuable :-) Otherwise we
will loose it sooner or later.

The codec issue is a rather big one when it comes to videoconferencing, since
1- Image quality H.261 is inferior to what the usual suspects the e.g.
Messengers have to offer.
2- most SIP User Agents like e.g. xten, wengophone or the Java
sip-communicatior don't support H.261 anymore - so you can't issue a video
call from/to these clients using Gnomemeeting
 - the same goes for hardware phones / conference systems
3- as someone on this mailing list mentioned and I was told by a person
related to deaf/hearing impaired people: it's hard to "talk" in sign language
over it (but this is actually a nice application for video telephony.)

> However, there is a licensing problem. x264 is GPL, and OPAL/OPENH323 ...
> x264 should add an exception clause for OpenH323/OPAL in their license.
Well, ffmpeg is LGPL which means that you can link it as a library. Check out
ther legal pages http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/legal.php

Having compiled ffmpeg a while ago, I remember, that there is a "GPL" compile
option which means, that it disables all codecs which are non LGPL compatiple.
I wonder what's the case with H.263 (which would be a quantum leap to have it-
though it's not 264)

I also wonder how the Wengo guys and java sip-communicator folks solved their
legal problems concerning 263. (these are open source projects as well - some
GPL)

Another idea, which would solve point 1 and 3 but not 2 above: use Theora.
Check this out: http://www.tipic.com/tipicim - it's an open source Video
Jabber messenger using Theora as video codec. Perhaps opal/Gnomemeeting could
benefit. This would do to video what Speex did for audio - a decent free
codec.


Greetings
Conrad


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