for several weeks now i'v been following the development of a new (soon to be) commercial H.264
decoder (and soon CoreCodec Encoder too) for several
platforms, while mostly covering the x86 family to date, it is very impressive.

it will playback 1280*720*25 1250 Kbps on an Athlon XP 2400+ with Ice Age 2 clip http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p ... post761387
plays rather nicely at 25 fps with an old Nvidia 440 and better on an ati 9550.

you can get the beta x86 player and directX codec here http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p ... post764937 or if thats down or missing the DirectX AVC file aac plg avc plg Kurt did a Mirror Here
http://home.arcor.de/mutterstadt/

the final version is going comercial any day now
apparently so its possible these beta links might be removed so be quick if you want to test them.

if you have a doom9 membership you can comment on betaboys reply to me (ALAS it takes 5 days to be able to comment for new accounts).

i advise you to read the FULL (large)thread to get the full picture , but basicly these people are demo coders and have found an effective codebase to make
it werth their commercial time to code up a multi platform en/decoder and other related products and sell them at at good rate and also licence to companys.

given that the people here are not your average linux people and are willing to pay a fair price for a fair product i thought BB and others here might
like to know about these people and perhaps get a
deal going before some other people/companys get in there and bar any real PPC development, if you so wish.

it seems that betaboy is rather behind with the current andd near future markets for the PPC so perhaps you might pop over there, read up on the full thread then help him and the other devs understand what the ppczone and other boards and devs here are all about.

my question:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p ... post804032

betaboys reply:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p ... post804186

it seems he may not have followed my link back here
so that might colour his answer, if you could clarify
for him the current cpu,board,projects etc and link to them to prove that this effort would be werth it and perhaps convince them there could be a valid market in these things then i beleave that this good
H.264 decoder and its near future Encoder and other products could benifit all concerned.

it seems very quiet around here lately, why is that ?.

Hi popper,

Certainly H.264 codecs would be great for anyone and everyone - it is the basis for most of the new video technologies appearing these days.

However it is always very hard to get developers to develop for platforms they are not truly dedicated to work with. Throwing hardware at people doesn't work. They have to want to use it. Also posting to forums saying "look at this great software!" doesn't inspire much other than rubbernecking.

FFMPEG is probably the best bet for H.264 on PowerPC - it is high visibility and runs on most platforms. A lot of the algorithms used in H.264 are vectorisable. MPEG-4 has a lot of opportunities in motion prediction and so on, and certainly will in the inline deblocking/deringing parts. Although for best performance on a G4 or slower processors this had better be disabled, lowering visual quality. FFMPEG also has good support for PowerPC already, with both specific integer/fpu scalar and vector functions.