Daala: Mozilla and Xiph to develop free video codec
The goal of the Daala project is to create a new video compression technology that is free to "implement, use and distribute". The two major video codecs that will change the web in the near future, H.265 and V9, are not free which is a problem in itself. While Google announced that its VP9 video compression standard will be royalty free, Nokia believes that it is violating patents the company holds so that at least some uncertainty remains for now.
Daala aims to deliver what Mozilla, Xiph and Skype already did with Opus, a royalty free audio codec that has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 6716 about a year ago. This time though, the aim is to create a royalty free video compression codec.
That is however not the only thing that makes Daala interesting. The developers aim to deliver performance that is one generation ahead of current generation formats such as VP9. Unlike VP9 which rely on a basic codec design that dates back more than 20 years to H.261, Daala will introduce a new "codec design" and new coding techniques that the other codecs do not take advantage of.
Check out this page on the Xiph website if you are interested in a - very - technical introduction of Daala and the technologies that the developers aim to use.
Daala tries for a larger leap forward— by first leaping sideways— to a new codec design and numerous novel coding techniques. In addition to the technical freedom of starting fresh, this new design consciously avoids most of the patent thicket surrounding mainstream block-DCT-based codecs. At its very core, for example, Daala is based on lapped transforms, not the traditional DCT.
Daala development code is available on the project's working repository.
A time line has not been posted so that we do not know yet when a first version of the codec will be made available to the public, let alone when it will be integrated into the Firefox web browser.
Clear is however that the project partners want the codec to be standardized by the IETF, and that it will eventually land in Firefox. (via Sören Hentzschel)
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Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?