Bink Layer or plLayerBink

[Paradox]

As you mentioned, there are possible patent issues with Bink and H.264. At the moment there is no open-source encoder for Bink videos (but I expect that will be coming in the next few versions of ffmpeg).

H.264 seems to be popular partly due to hardware accelerated decryption, but that is mostly relevant to handheld devices. Theora is one of those awesome open-source formats that nobody has ever heard of and that isn't used enough to push quality and compression to the next level.

Oh, for what it's worth, Uru also has support for AVI files through plLayerAVI... has anyone tried that?

[ddb174]

If I recall, the AVIs are just loaded through a microsoft library, so we should probably avoid that. (Plus, AVI is just a container format that contains other codecs.)

I transcoded a bink file from Uru into theora, and the resultant filesize at max bitrate was 13,536kB, whereas the orignal bink file was 20,303kB.
Here's the result, played back with the same player (ffplay):

theora and bink comparison.png (525.53 KiB) Viewed 2231 times

First try to figure out which one is which and why!

Show Spoiler

The left one is Theora; the right is Bink.

It appears that Theora maintains a good quality even on transcoding bink files, so it looks like a perfect choice to me.

If anyone is interested, I used the command:

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i LivePreview.bik -b 4000k -f ogg -vcodec libtheora -acodec libvorbis -ab 256k -y LivePreviewTheora.ogv

So this is also using Vorbis for audio (which Plasma already uses), and the ogg container format, which is important, because we want to make maximal use of any frame-skipping abilities present in Theora.