What about the QT6/scaling issue? (was Re: [theora-codecs] Call for bugs and suggestions)

[dan miller]

My apologies for being so late to this thread.  As some of you may know, I am no longer at On2. 
However I still plan to work actively on Theora, and I believe that keeping the legacy VP3 codecs
working is important for Xiph as well.  If nothing else, all these thorny issues of build
environments and platform inconsistancies will rear their ugly heads if/when we get to the point
of building Theora-native QT codecs.

To run down the major points brought up on this thread:

* Compiler problems and legacy support -- My suggestion would be to do a final, latest & greatest
build using the present crazy toolchain (CW 5, CW7, etc), and get these binaries & archived
sources up somewhere on Xiph/theora.  Talk to Jack or whomever about setting up a download page
for this.  I will convince the On2 guys to link to it since they are clearly not committed to
keeping their site up-to-date.  Going forward we concentrate on new platforms (See below)

* Performance problems - known issues at Apple.  As someone suggested, they are not too committed
to 3rd party codecs anymore.  We’re on our own more or less, though I have found an engineer or
two at Apple over the years who cares about this sort of thing.  We (at On2) made some changes
according to their suggestions, which are reflected in the 3.2.6.x releases.  Obviously this is
improving the Windows situation.  I am not as familiar with Mac issues, someone will have to
research it further.

* Platform issues -- my suggestion: lock down the old stuff & move on.  Future development should
be OSX/QT6 (and Win/QT6) only.  Apple does such a terrible job of supporting their own API's that
it is not feasible within our resources to try to keep backwards compatibility.  Keep the old
stuff around on a page as mentioned, and make sure it's clear to newbies what to download for
their setup.

* Assembly code -- now that we're only concentrating on QT6 and OSX, we should standardize on the
newest & most popular dev systems (Apple/GCC on Mac, VC7 on Windows).  Get clean builds going and
the assembly shouldn't be too much of a headache.  The optimizations are done; however someone
needs to port them to the present toolchain.

These are my thoughts as of now - dan

<p><p>--- Mauricio Piacentini <mauricio at xiph.org> wrote:
> The auto download is ok, and this is the binary most people get after they
> upgrade their systems. The problem is with the older version you have the
> installer for, available at the vp3.com site.
> 
> Dan, is it ok for me to pack a new version (3.2.6.1) made from the current
> sources, and put it to download somehwere? Do you want to put them at on2 as
> well?
> 
> Regards,
> Mauricio Piacentini
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Apollyon" <spambrat at paypc.com>
> To: <theora-codecs at xiph.org>
> Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2003 6:31 PM
> Subject: Re: What about the QT6/scaling issue? (was Re: [theora-codecs] Call
> for bugs and suggestions)
> 
> 
> > OK, I manually removed the On2 VP3 codec from C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\Quicktime
> and
> > then re-opened a .mov encoded with On2 VP3 to trigger the "auto-upgrade"
> > feature, and now everything works fine.
> >
> > Someone should let the vp3.com folks know they're distributing bad mojo.
> I
> > don't like "auto-upgrade" stuff because I usually like to put clients
> behind
> > firewalls as well as strictly control system builds/installs.
> >
> > I guess this closes the "bug report" on this issue.
> >
> > The codec installed seems to be:
> >
> > Version: 3.2.6.0, Created/Modified: Friday, December 20, 2002, 12:41:38
> PM, 509
> > KB (521,728 bytes), which is smaller than the 3.2.1.3 version from the
> vp3.com
> > website.
> >
> > =R=
> >
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