[Ffmpeg-devel] Which video codec for embedded use (iPods etc) ?

[Michael Niedermayer]

Hi

On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 05:58:25PM +0000, Dave Chapman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm a developer for the Rockbox project (http://www.rockbox.org), which
> sa you may know is a GPL'd replacement firmware for a growing number of
> different portable music players (such as those made by Archos, iriver,
> and more recently some iPods).
> 
> I'm looking to investigate the feasibility of video playback on some of
> these devices.  They typically have a 16-bit colour LCD with a 220x176
> or smaller resolution.
> 
> These devices have no FPU and 32MB RAM.  Processors used are a 124MHz
> Coldfire (m68k-based) or dual 75Mhz arm7tdmi.
> 
> I'm looking for advice as to which video codec has the greatest chance
> of performing well in such an environment.  i.e. one which gives a
> reasonable compression ratio, but is "easy" to decode?

mpeg1 in avi or other simple container (not mpeg-ps)
mpeg4 in avi will have better compression but be slower
h.264 will have even better compression and be even slower

if mpeg1 is not fast enough then some old codec (ask melanson) might be 
worth a try

and obviously dont use any fancy advanced features when encoding (qpel and
gmc are very computationally expensive for the decoder, qpel is mandatory
for h.264 though)
and you will probably have to write/improve some optimized assembly for the
codec and cpu, see doc/optimization.txt in ffmpeg cvs

[...]

-- 
Michael