xiphmont

The latest action-packed, graph- and demo-clip-stuffed Theora project update page (demo 9) is now up for all and sundry! Catch up on what's gone into the new Theora encoder 'Ptalarbvorm' over the last few months. It also instructs how to pronounce 'Ptalarbvorm'.

Ptalarbvorm is not a finished release encoder yet, though I've personally been using it in production for a few months. Pace on improvements hasn't slowed down-- the subjective psychovisual work being done by Tim Terriberry and Greg Maxwell has at least doubled-again on the improvments made by Thusnelda, and they're not anywhere near done yet.

RANDOM GRAPH:

You'll just have to read the project update to see what that is all about :-)

The demo covers what's already in Ptalarbvorm, previews of what's next to land, and a sneak peek of 1.3 once Ptalarbvorm is finished.

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.

Today shall be the Day of Blogging in general. In this case, it even counts as much-needed documentation. There have been a couple of requests for a Theora/Thusnelda update since I have't posted one in really quite a while-- and that immediately after reporting 'rapid progress'.

Because I work on Xiph code as part of my day-job responsibilities at Red Hat, I don't have complete control over my development priorities. Red Hat in general is usually reasonably hands-off, but around Thanksgiving of last year transfered me to working exclusively on a high-priority internal project, and thus transfered me off all Xiph projects including Thusnelda. This is temporary, but temporary may be a few more months yet. Yeah, 'Grrrrr' is right.

The good news is that Xiph had already been working on securing funding to get Tim Terriberry working on Thusnelda full time when I got pulled off the project. Mozilla's Chris Blizzard and WikiMedia's Eric Moeller were especially keen to push development forward when we met at the Open Video Alliance's meeting in New Haven last October, and money for contracts came through in February (the $100K mentioned there is for several contracts, not just completing Thusnelda).

As much of the Thusnelda work was me channelling Tim, this is an even better position to be in than we were before. It would be best if we could both work on it, but Tim is definitely a higher-powered video hacker than I am.

Now... can I successfully rope Tim into blogging?