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| On Dec 27, 2011, at 4:18 PM, Steve Oakley wrote: > Adobe is one of the few companies large enough to do this. I don't ask them to do it for free. I think it should/must be free. Software can be proprietary, but file formats should be free and open. And because of that, I don't think it should come from Adobe, although it would be great if they would sponsor it. The model for creating a good, completely free compression format already exists in the form of the PNG and OpenEXR still image formats. PNG was made by a free-wheeling band of open source programmers on the internet, while OpenEXR was made by a production studio. Both were introduced with open source software libraries and have since become widely adopted. What we need is a movie equivalent. I don't think it should be another codec within QuickTime, but a new format that could be used on computers that don't have QuickTime (i.e. Linux). If you really don't want to create a whole new one, maybe an MXF wrapper would do. OpenEXR supports several different compression formats for different purposes, and the new format could too. But the key is that every OpenEXR application can read and write all the different codecs because they're all included in the source distribution. For a movie format, you could allow H.264 as an option using free encoders and decoders which are already available. Of course, we'd also want lossless codecs that supported higher bit depths like 16-bit integer and 16/32-bit float. Brendan |
