Blogging Theora

It's time for the latest Thusnelda encoder project update summary!

Although I haven't gotten much time to dive back into Thusnelda coding myself, Tim Terriberry, Greg Maxwell and others have continued the work along at a merry pace. In the past few weeks, they've finally replaced the leaky fDCT from the original VP3 and begun work on adjusting the main quantization matrices and, hopefully soon, adaptive quantization. These improvements all improve fine detail rendering and, somewhat unexpectedly, improve gradient rendering as well:

The screen caps above were produced by Theora 1.0 on the left and an experimental version of Thusnelda with early quant matrix optimization work in addition to the new fDCT on the right. Both clips were encoded in constant-quantizer mode and equal bitrates.

Other improvements, more details and the full update report here.

an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture

_Finally_ available to the general public: _RiP: A Remix Manifesto_

Although this is only looking at one angle of how Copyright has been whacked way out of balance in this country by the current media powers (who want things to stay the way they are, and aren't afraid to make half of the citizens in this country Federal criminals to acheive that), it is also one of the few documentaries that manages to state its agument clearly and concisely. It's a fabulous piece of work that I had the priviledge to see last year at an early screening.

Did you agree with the various "sharing" and "public-good" premises presented in "Revolution OS" but still found yourself squirming uncomfortably at the way it was presented? And then, when it was over, wonder just what exactly it wanted you to think about? I mean, it sorta felt like it was trying to broaden your perception of... something... somehow...

RiP, on the other hand, left me flushed, excited, and ready to go do rhetorical battle. This film is worth seeing.