Re: Displaying an animation / "movie"

[Søren Hauberg]

man, 15 09 2008 kl. 10:42 -0500, skrev Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso:
> >> I use Debian, but I see no octave-video package...
> >
> > I don't know the details about debian packages, so I can't really
> > comment here.
> 
> Looks like it's not packaged yet, but I have a licensing question
> here.  Debian does distribute ffmpeg, and I see that the preferred
> thing to do is to generate avis, with the mpeg4 codecs, apparently.
> Are there any patent issues here that might discourage Debian from
> packaging this? Should Octave movies be done in Ogg Theora?

  I don't know about the license/patent situation, but I'm guessing that
there probably are a bunch of silly patents around mpeg4 so that we
should avoid such a format.
  However, from a practical point of view I have two problems with Ogg
    *) It is not a commonly used format by people outside the Free
       software community. So, if you want a large audience, Ogg is
       not a great format. This is of course a chicken-and-egg type
       problem, as people will start using Ogg when it's gotten
       popular...
    *) While Ogg provides excellent compression for movies of the real
       world, it compresses things too much for things such a plots.
       I've experimented a bit with moving plots in Ogg, and the result
       really looked like crap. I'm sure that could be tweaked if time
       was an infinite resource, but other codecs did better. Perhaps
       the Free Dirac codec would be good here.

> I'm not trying to get all freeer-than-thou here, just curious.

What a cool concept! I would love it if more people would compete as to
who was more Free, so please do try to get all freer-than-thou :-)

Søren