[Ffmpeg-devel] lzw gif

François Revol revol
Thu Jun 23 23:17:03 CEST 2005


> Hi list,
> 
> If I make a gif anim with ffmpeg the outfile is rather large.

I once checked it, was like 20% bigger than raw pics :^)

> Looking at the source I see that there is no compression
> enabled due to patent issues. This really isn't a problem
> anymore, right? The Unisys patent has expired in all
> places now?

Yes, I wrote this code and didn't include compression because of that 
at that time, (and lazyness I guess) even though software patents are 
supposedly invalid here (not sure how long for :-( ).

> Would a patch to enable it be accepted? It wouldn't be
> that much work to add since there is an (optional?) linkage
> to zlib, right?

Sure.
Just #ifdef the code to CONFIG_ZLIB.

> Is it a point in reality except for disk space? Enabling
> gzip on apache (in the case of web usage) would return
> similair results? Any opinions?

well I started it as a test to learn ffmpeg internals, and never really 
used it myself, but I guess some ppl use it to make banners.

And gzip doesn't compress local files... and must be done for each 
request.

Fran?ois.





More information about the ffmpeg-devel mailing list