Re: [rtcweb] H261/MPEG-1 video quality (was: I'd love it if patents evaporated)

[Adam Roach <[e-mail]>]

I sent a reply to this earlier, but just now realized that it went only 
to Justin, not to the list.


On 11/14/13 13:59, Justin Uberti wrote:
> Thanks, this is interesting. Is the ffmpeg 261 encoder limited to 
> CIF/QCIF, or can you specify arbitrary sizes?

It looks like the ffmpeg mpeg-1 coder works for arbitrary sizes. I'm not 
sure what the difference between mpeg-1 and H.261 are, though, so we 
could be talking apples and oranges (or at least apples and pears) here. 
I'll note that mpeg-1 came out in 1991, which is a good 22 years in the 
past. I'm not drawing IPR conclusions for you, but invite you to ponder 
the implications yourself.

Following Maik's lead with the mpeg-1 js decoder, I put this together:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53717247/mpg/maven.html

...with this commandline:

   ffmpeg -i maven.mp4 -f mpeg1video -flags qprd -mbd rd -cmp rd -subcmp 
rd -mbcmp rd -precmp rd -trellis 2 -g 100 -vb 256k maven.mpg

I don't really understand most of those options (I just cribbed them 
from Maik's example) or whether any of them would introduce more latency 
than is reasonable for a real-time conversation, but I will observe:

 1. The encoder claims that it was performing on the order of 90 - 100
    fps on my (admittedly modern) system;
 2. The resolution is 640x360 (somewhat larger than DCIF);
 3. The video is not, to my eye, unusable (draw your own conclusions, as
    it's clearly not as nice as modern codecs);
 4. At 74 seconds and 4.7 MBytes (i.e., 37.6 Mbits), this encoding works
    out to 508 kbits/second total.


Source video here, and NASA is acknowledged as the source of the 
material contained therein: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijAO0FFExx0

/a