On January 9, 2001 at MacWorld SF, Sorenson announced the release of the beta version of the Sorenson MPEG-4 codec and encoder/decoder. The file formats supported are Quicktime and MP4. No word on whether AVI will be supported or not.
Does anybody know if the beta codec can be downloaded from anywhere? It is based on the final ISO MPEG-4 v2 specifications, and supports VKI (variable keyframe interval) and 2-pass VBR (variable bitrate) encoding. It also has optimizations for Altivec and SSE. I don't think it currently has optimizations for SSE2, 3DNow!, or 3DNow!2.
Unfortunately this is not an open codec. The only open source MPEG-4 codec is OpenDivx (www.projectmayo.com). It is still behind the Sorenson codec since it doesn't support 2-pass VBR (although it does support VKI), and the quality seems even worse than the hacked MS MPEG-4 v3 codec (Divx 3.11) for most purposes. I seriously hope that OpenDivx can overtake the other codecs in development since it has the advantage of being open source. However, since it is currently not ahead of the implementations by Philips and Sorenson, anybody know where the Sorenson MPEG-4 codec can be downloaded from? Their website doesn't mention anything, and they don't seem to respond to e-mails regarding this matter.
Thanks.
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