GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 484051
Lagarith codec element
Last modified: 2013-07-18 06:15:00 UTC
I would like to have the Lagarith codec as a gstreamer element. (lagarithenc and lagarithdec) The lagarith codec can be found here: http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html
Definitely needed ! Finally a good open-source lossless video codec which isn't stuck in the ffmpeg realm.
meh, It's GPL, unfortunatly.
Why is it a problem that the code is GPL?!
See http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/faq/html/chapter-legal.html
Sebastian, there is nothing on that page that explains why GPL code cannot be included in a gstreamer plugin.
It can, but has to go to gst-plugins-ugly in the end. Whatever, you would for example have a problem when, say, decoding a lagarith file and encoding it in the same process with some non-free encoder like the Fluendo ones as the GPL of the lagarith plugin would forbid this (unless it had an exception like totem for example).
I've talked to the author of the lagarith codec, Ben Greenwood. Quote: "I would be willing to license Lagarith to the gstreamer project under the terms of the LGPL if they are willing to handle porting Lagarith to gstreamer. This would also entail replacing the GPL code I use for colorspace conversion (I assume gstreamer has its own routines for this anyway), and for the windows VFW interface (which you'd probably do anyway...) I would be willing to provide high-level overviews as well as explain specific areas and answer questions that developers had, but I do not have the time right now to provide significant coding work."
that would be awesome. I had a look at the code and the core of it is really small and easily doable in a library. Most of the assembler code is in the color conversion and some of it in the algorithm to make the image compress better. The color conversion and all the wrapper code around is is not needed in GStreamer. I might give it a try soon.
Lagarith, IMHO, is the holy grail of lossless creative video creation. Alot smaller than huffyuv, and WAY less buggy. We need it! The huffyuv decoder sometimes jumps frames on my gstreamer version, but I won't file that bug yet, just for comparison that I'm fairly sure lagarith would behave better if we had it. Bumping this bug after 1 year of (presumably) inactivity.
Wim do you still want to give this a try? :)
Ok, libav has a native lagarith decoder. Marking as obsolete. (And ignore what I said in comment 1).