[ktolis]

I saw at a magazine an ad on zygovideo's codec for quicktime. so I visited the site... http://www.zygovideo.com
ok...the usual blah blah...basic for free and professional for a small fee...ok i told myself let me see it...after all you don't get to see a wavelet codec everyday...(wow!)...anyway...I click download enter my email.....and voila.... http://www.zygovideo.com/codecs/ZyGoVideoMac.hqx ....tada....quality is very good and size is MUCH MUCH smaller than 3ivx. encoding time is quite acceptable and playback needs a fast machine for big resolutions.(reminds me of sorenson 1 when I had my 6100 only...). since I have a g3@500 and no g4 I can't say anything for it but the story gets here more interesting...
I asked myself....would those people actually be clever enough NOT having the professional codec for free download by the rest of us?...hmm.... after all they DO have a form that asks you to pay them online...hmm again.......lets fiddle around a bit with the url...what was that .... http://www.zygovideo.com/codecs/ZyGoVideoMac.hqx ...ok add a Pro at he end..so we get a http://www.zygovideo.com/codecs/ZyGoVideoProMac.hqx .....no this can't be so easy...aaaaaaaaaa....it is !!!!.... so this now got me to the pro edition of the codec which offers excellent quality and lower sizes. within Media cleaner (both this and the basic edition)it even allows you to set the temporal and spatial ratios (within QTPlayer you cannot do this). anyway see the pro edition (the windows' edition) codec can be downloaded by using the same trick.

As far as I can see I don't find anything illegal by downloading this file. So I have one thing to say ...test it as much as you like but if you decide to use it for commercial purposes then I suggest you buy it... the codec is very good and the quality of the software is excellent (I crashed it but it takes quite some skills to do that with this one)...


So I think in the new codecs-battle we got a new player with an attitude.
oh and by the way...the codec beats in quality and filesize the 3ivx codec, sorenson3 pro, sorenson mpeg-4(the beta) and on2's codec...... (where the hell is OpenDivX people?)...hmm...we still have to see a fractal compression codec out there...(I am working on one but veeery slowly, if anyone wants to help msg me here)

hail carracho...

[ 07-16-2001: Message edited by: ktolis ]

[Niubi]

thats some good work chief!!!

thats for the tip off, personally I will pirate and nick as much software as I can, coz I cannot afford it at all being poor student...if you can afford it though...you should pay for it anyway, but once again ktolis your da man!

[Randycat2001]

Thanks from me, too! This sounds pretty cool from what you described. You mentioned this is a wavelet codec? I haven't heard this term used for some time. Does this mean that image quality is maintained even when you scale up the picture on your screen?

Your fractal codec sounds pretty neat, too! I don't think I can help you much on it- just that it sounds pretty cool.

Since it is so easy to acquire this too-good-to-be-true demoware plug-in, do you think it could be time-expired, perhaps?

[ 07-16-2001: Message edited by: Randycat2001 ]

[KyLeW]

Thx for the heads up. I found 3ivx to be better quality though from what I saw. 3ivx handles movements and scenes where there is a lot going on much better . Also the sample movies on zygos webite went blank during playback a couple times. The test encode I did my self dipped down upon playback to 15fps sometimes on my g4 400 when I set it to 30fps. 3ivx always stayed at 30 on the same encode. But it looks like a good start for zygovideo, the more codec the better.

[ 07-17-2001: Message edited by: KyLeW ]

[ktolis]

hail people...

actually the "infinate" scaling feature is part of the fractal encoding mechanism...not of the wavelets...but wavelets may actually enhance the quality at any rate (fractal image compression (and video too) looses substancial quality)

for the record... wavelet compression is veeeery time consuming...playback is too..so don't think on encoding a dvd with this codec unless yu have a >600Mhz G3/G4 or you know that the codec suuports Altivec and you have a dual G4.....if I remember well ...from a little research I did three years ago when I got accepted at my science school here at my university the wavelets could be severely accelerated with the use of altivec. but since this is a first release I won't be hoping they have already done that yet...

anyway... the codec is very good... quality is much better than 3ivx which only supports some of the mpeg-4v3 standards....which themself have a basis on h263+ which is old story.... the postprocessing filters are excellent ...(try encding AI trailer with 83% 3ivx Test and 83% ZyGoVideoPro with normal keyframe detection and 'good' motion quality and you will see what I mean (then see the filesizes too))... the main problem for the time now is the low cpu speed for the codec since its quality is exceptional....both as software and as a video codec

for the moment the codecs' quality is better suited for live streaming and beats any other codec known at the points of quality and size (even RealVideo 8 and m$'s new codecs)

hmmm....by the way...could some1 setup a test page somewhere (homepage.mac.com etc) and have a REAL test between codecs?... whatever I have seen so far is mostly for kids and nothing serious...

regards,
hail carracho
ktolis

Thanks for bringing this up. I`ve tried Sorenson 3, Divx and 3ivx in the past week and this has them all beat except possibly for Sorenson. There it is a matter of taste. Sorenson had a better looking result but the file sizes and data rates from zygo were much better. I took a DV clip that was 25 seconds long, 89MB, 3.5MB/sec and reduced it to 340 x 280, 15fps and the data rate dropped to about 30kB/s with about a 2MB file size. Incredible. The image looked very good when there was little motion. If the motion was rapid then the image looked bad till things slowed down. Probably with tweaking this could be improved on. Compared to Divx and 3ivx this was much, much better at enlargement. I could play it back at double size and it looked very nice. This is not professional testing or comparison, just quick looks.

[KyLeW]

Originally posted by ktolis:

(try encding AI trailer with 83% 3ivx Test and 83% ZyGoVideoPro with normal keyframe detection and 'good' motion quality and you will see what I mean (then see the filesizes too))... the main problem for the time now is the low cpu speed for the codec since its quality is exceptional....both as software and as a video codec

Well I encoded a clip from Highlander that aI captured with a cheap capture card and a noisy rf cable (which I think is what the majority of people will be dealing with with these free codecs). I used the settings you described but 'good' motion quality does not exist. I assumed you ment 'high'. I encoded with 3ivx and zygo at 83% quality. I am by no means a pro encoder, I barley know what I am doing, but I represent most people.

Here are some of the numbers and the links (make sure you watch towards the end where there is a lot of movements:

3ivx-
encode time ~3 1/2 min
Byte rate- 118K/s
http://store.yahoo.com/lib/plane-ez/3ivx.mov

Zygo-
encode time ~ 4 mins (time doubles or even triples when motion quality set to most, but there is no noticable difference in quality that I can see)
Byte rate- 75K/s
http://store.yahoo.com/lib/plane-ez/zygo1.mov

the codec is very good... quality is much better than 3ivx which only supports some of the mpeg-4v3 standards....which themself have a basis on h263+ which is old story.... the postprocessing filters are excellent ...

I found the quality to be unwatchable. Maybe I did something wrong, or I need super clean media, but 3ivx looks better at the moment because it's watchable during action scenes, plays at 30FPS not 17 and it doesn't tax my G4 so hard my mouse freezes..

[Randycat2001]

I think the reason this demoware codec plugin seems to not do motion well is because the "motion quality" slider is locked in the lowest position until you pay for the pro version. The motion performance may or may not really be a problem in the full version- you just have to ante up your money first to find out.

[KyLeW]

I think I do have the pro version. I did adjust motion quality slider from lowest to high quality. After that, I put the quality to 'most' but it was still blured and slow. Like I said, the Codec is a good start, but I think it's not ready for the public yet. Maybe for pro's with media cleaner pro and so on, it works better, I don't know. But for regular people, it seems like 3ivx is more suitable. The movie clip I encoded above was not good quality to begin with and 3ivx still did a heck of a job with it without me having to experiment with all sorts of settings.

[KyLeW]

Also, it seems like the 3ivx clip downloads faster for some reason, even thought the file size is bigger.

[ 07-18-2001: Message edited by: KyLeW ]