< Features
Thusnelda
Summary
Update libtheora to the 1.1 release.
Owner
- Name: Christopher Montgomery (xiphmont), AdamJackson
- Email: cmontgom@redhat.com, ajax@redhat.com
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 12
- Last updated: 2009-07-22
- Percentage of completion: 50%
1.1alpha2 is in rawhide.
Detailed Description
libtheora 1.1 incorporates a substantially improved encoder, codenamed 'Thusnelda'. Compared to libtheora 1.0, the new encoder can produce comparable quality encodings at a lower bitrate, or better quality at the same bitrate.
Over the last year, Monty has produced a series of detailed reports describing the Thusnelda improvements as they have been developed:
- Improved motion estimation and mode selection
- Rate-distortion optimization
- One-pass DCT tokenization
- Token optimization
- Lambda unification, lambda/qi mapping
- Quantization matrix tuning, forward DCT error reduction
The development of Thusnelda was supported by Red Hat, Wikimedia and Mozilla.
Benefit to Fedora
A lot of positive momentum has been building around open video on the web. With this feature, Fedora becomes more attractive as a platform for producing video content in open formats.
Scope
libtheora needs to be updated. All video-encoding applications that support theora will transparently benefit from the improvements in Thusnelda, including all applications that use gstreamer to encode video. Good examples in this category are GUI transcoding apps like transmageddon and arista (see http://lwn.net/Articles/333904/).
Applications that use mplayer or ffmpeg for video encoding will not benefit, since these frameworks come with their own implementations of the Theora format.
How To Test
Use a video-encoding application to produce theora-encoded content. Compare the quality with content produced with libtheora 1.0 and notice the improved quality.
User Experience
Unchanged.
Dependencies
None.
Contingency Plan
Revert to libtheora 1.0.
Documentation
No specific documentation should be needed, libtheora 1.1 is a transparent replacement for libtheora 1.0.
Release Notes
Fedora 11 comes with libtheora 1.1, including the new 'thusnelda' encoder.
Comments and Discussion