Some thoughts about MediaCoder 2012 (Stanley posted on February 20th, 2012 )

MediaCoder 2011 R10 build 5226 was released last week. It has several minor fixups and updates of encoders and tools. I don’t know if this will be (or not) the last revision of version 2011 as I am preparing for the major update and release of MediaCoder 2012 which will feature:

  1. XML-layouted images/texts/dynamic data overlay on video (last year I’ve developed a rendering engine for another project and I am going to integrate it into MediaCoder)
  2. more detailed report on complete of tasks
  3. fixing the annoying blocking issue on parallel task processing from the root
  4. better distributed transcoding support
  5. a new splash screen that I change every year

Because right now I am involed in so much other work (e.g. I am absorbed in Arduino and is about to develop a simulator for it) in addition to MediaCoder development which I have enjoyed and continued for more than 5 years, I just want to make sure the new version 2012 will be out before too many days of year 2012 are passed away. 😉 If you like MediaCoder, please stay tuned with me here on Google+ or on the MediaCoder blog. 

What Intel Media SDK brings to MediaCoder (Stanley posted on February 20th, 2012 )

MediaCoder started to adopt Intel Media SDK in early 2010. By using the GPU accelerated encoder provided by the SDK, MediaCoder achieved significant increase in H.264 and MPEG-2 encoding speed, which reaches up to 5 times faster than encoding with x264 or FFmpeg. Being able to off load the heavy encoding computations to GPU, MediaCoder can better use the CPU to perform I/O operations, task management，audio decoding/encoding, stream multiplexing and most importantly video decoding which is also computational complex and obviously there are too many long-existing or legacy formats to have the GPU implementation for all of them. Comparing to nVidia’s CUDA accelerated H.264 encoder, Intel’s implementation provides much better visual quality, which makes the GPU accelerated video encoding acceptable by industrial customers, especially those of MediaCoder KTV Edition who perform massive transcoding for serious business use.

New release of MediaCoder iPhone Edition available with iPhone 4S preset added (Stanley posted on January 8th, 2012 )

MediaCoder iPhone Edition has updated to add iPhone 4S preset which brings better quality or compression comparing with iPhone 4 preset. Several other improvements are included.

Head for download page!

MediaCoder on the way to a distributive transcoder (Stanley posted on November 24th, 2011 )

Finally MediaCoder is stepping on its way to becoming a distributive transcoder. I decided to design a frame level distributing mechanism instead of file-level distributing. The system is made up of a master, which performs decoding and data distribution, and one or more agents, which receive raw video frame, encode them and send the encoded stream back to the master. Users will feel like still using a desktop version of MediaCoder, while the encoding is actually done on another one or more machines. This approach has several advantages:

  1. No need to expose the whole file to the encoding machine with OS file sharing.
  2. It’s possible to implement segmented + distributed transcoding
  3. The decoding is still done by a Windows box (where MediaCoder runs), which has better decoding capability. This also helps to unify the decoding standard in a distributed transcoding system.
  4. The transcoding agents need no storage for intermediate data during transcoding. The frames are transmited over LAN, encoded and send back over LAN.

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MediaCoder VP8/FLV Edition is updated to build 5196 (Stanley posted on October 18th, 2011 )

Just a moment ago MediaCoder VP8/FLV Edition build 5196 is released. This version fixed the breakage of VP8 encoding. The recent update of FFmpeg causes a new DLL file swresample-0.dll missing in the installer. Without this DLL file, FFmpeg will silently refuse to work and causes the muxing failed when producing webm files. Now everything is in order.

Home Page of MediaCoder VP8/FLV Edition

The startup crashing bug in recent build 5195 has been fixed (Stanley posted on October 18th, 2011 )

Finally another new post here. 😉 I’m surprised that the previous post was half a year ago. Time goes so fast! I want to say that I am still actively working on MediaCoder.

Recently I attempted to upgrade libSDL from version 1.2  (which has no release for one year) to version 1.3, the under-development version that looks so fancy on their new website. MediaCoder mainly uses SDL for displaying video and the graphics of Dropbox mode wholy depends on the library. However, this action brings some unexpected behavior into MediaCoder. I have downgraded the libSDL and build 5196 has this issue fixed. The new build has also fixed most anonying bugs in Dropbox mode, though I don’t know whether it’s ever used by some one after I created it months ago. 😉

Refer to the changelog for more info of the update.

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