Video Comparison

P. Muri, R. Dubey

A trade study was Suite Professional Edition for is conducted in order to select the codec need. The developer’s kit includes a ++ best suiting the requirements to apply to Compiler, Fortran Compiler, Integrated the Bandwidth Booster concept. For Performance Primitives, Math Kernel comparison, following were , Threading Building Blocks and selected: , Dirac, Red Codec, , retails for $1,349 [1]. and . The requirements in which the best codec was determined included Xvid: Video codec library implements bit-rate performance, ease of integration MPEG-4 Part 2 compression and cost. Each of the requirements are and is distributed with GNU General discussed then followed by a selection of Public License. Referring to the codec the appropriate codec. comparison study done by Dmitriy Vatolin et al. [2], for applications such X264: This Video encoder implements a as video conferencing, Xvid is not as patented compression standard appropriate as x264 mainly because of H.264/MPEG-4 part 10. The standard is higher bit rate required to give similar well accepted in industry is superior in video quality. However, good comparison with peer codec standards documentation is available on the codec for video conferencing and related and the source code is downloadable free application. X264's encoder is open- at xvid’s website: [3]. source. However, X264 doesn’t provide decoder, hence for decoding has to be Dirac: Video codec standard built and done using FFmpeg () maintained by BBC Research is based decoder. It should be noted that X264 on Discrete Transform instead like every codec listed is part of the of discrete cosine transforms used in GNU General Public License (GNU many older compression formats. The GPL). GNU GPL has no requirements algorithms in the Dirac specification about how much you can charge for have been designed with the intention to distributing a copy of . provide a competitive performance as However, to implement the codec one compared to state-of-the-art international needs the source code, which for X264 is standards. However, at least one developed by private companies. For comparison exists which used an example, provides various licensing implementation from second quarter of options on their implementation of an 2008 shows X264 scoring more highly H.264 encoder/decoder as part of their than Dirac [4]. Also, there are certain Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) comparison results, which provide package, which includes an evaluation evidence for Dirac’s unsuitability for source code download. If the source videoconference application. For code would be to be bought and kept up instance, it has been shown that Dirac updated. For all the resources needed to performance is below par compared to compile Intel’s IPP the Intel® Compiler Theora for frame processing frequency and visual comparison at low bitrate [4]. a BSD-style license. It is completely free Dirac does not implement any patent for commercial or noncommercial use. compression standard. Source code and That means that commercial developers documentation is available on dirac’s may independently write Theora website for free [5] software which is compatible with the specification for no charge and without RedCode: The Red Digital Cinema restrictions of any kind. Also, the Camera Company manufactures digital website has great documentation for cinematography cameras and accessories coding the encoder and decoder [6]. for professional and cinematic use. The company was created and financed by The objective of project is to expand the Oakley founder Jim Jannard with the concept of Bandwidth Booster for video publicly expressed intent to re-invent the data. As a result, the following reasons camera industry. The RedCode raw work in favor of Theora, which makes it, codec supports real-time play and preferred video codec. Theora has editing of QuickTime reference movies performance close to licensed industry generated in camera. Video codec is standards, complete package for encoder based on . Like Dirac, and decoder and proper documentation. RedCode uses Wavelet compression. Used in video conferencing applications The codec was created for the company's such as , a testbed source for main camera is the Red One. The video data. performance of the codec efficiency is similar to Dirac but optimized for very References high resolutions that the camera can record up to 4096 horizontal by 2304 [1]http://software.intel.com/en- vertical pixels, directly to flash or hard us/articles/intel-integrated-performance- disk storage. Source code for RecCode is primitives-purchase/ not available. [2] Dimitriy Vatolin et al. , May 2009 Theora: Video codec maintained by MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codecs Xiph.org comes with BSD-Style license Comparison, and implements no patent compression standard. Referring to the comparison in [3] [1], Theora comes very close to H.264 http://www.xvid.org/Downloads.43.0.ht standard in terms of frame processing ml frequency and visual comparison at low bitrate. This makes Theora a very good [4] Till Halbach, COMPARISON OF option for video conferencing and for OPEN AND FREE VIDEO web based video application. Also, COMPRESSION SYSTEMS A Theora is well established as a video Performance Evaluation format in open source applications, and [5] as the format used for Wikipedia's video http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/d content. Theora (and all associated ocumentation.shtml technologies released by the Xiph.org Foundation) is released to the public via [6] www.theora.org