[FFmpeg-devel] standardization route for FFV1 specification

[Dave Rice]

Hi FFmpeg-devel,

	As you may have heard, PREFORMA (a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme) is a project to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term. The project selected several audiovisual formats to focus on and MediaArea wrote a proposal focusing on three of their selections: FFV1, LPCM, and Matroska. As part of the proposal we noted that Matroska and FFV1 have not undergone a formal standardization process (via an external standardization org) and wrote up plans [1] to attempt to facilitate this via the IETF. These plans follow earlier discussions on FFV1 and standardization held on ffmpeg-devel such as here [2] and in small in-person meetings such as recently at FOSDEM. Recently PREFORMA announced that MediaArea’s proposal was selected to continue to the prototyping phase [3].

	As a quick summary of our plan: we hope to prepare the current draft of the FFV1 specification up to version 3 for consideration at an upcoming IETF meeting (we anticipate applying for a BoF meeting for IETF93). This effort would not change ffv1 but simply make the current documentation more clear and complete. Ideally it should be feasible to create an FFV1 decode based solely of the specification without having to rely on the FFV1 encoder/decoder implemented in FFmpeg. Then at a later phase we may provide recommendations towards the development of FFV1 version 4. Version 3 will be an information standard submission at IETF so that the existing implementation is standardized but not up for modification. Version 4 would at a later IETF meeting be moved through a more formal process that would include IETF feedback into the version 4 of ffv1.

	Thus far the conversation about refinement work to the FFV1 specification has been taking place with the spec's github repo [4], but to facilitate greater oversight and participation we'll start sending related patches to ffmpeg-devel for consideration. Within the repository the ffv1.lyx aims to be the basis for FFV1 standardization efforts but we hope to regularly update the html rendering within the repo as well.

Best Regards,
Dave Rice

[1] https://github.com/MediaArea/MediaConch/blob/master/StandardsNarrative.md <https://github.com/MediaArea/MediaConch/blob/master/StandardsNarrative.md>
[2] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/153269 <http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/153269>
[3] http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/kick-off-of-the-prototyping-phase/ <http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/kick-off-of-the-prototyping-phase/>
[4] https://github.com/ffmpeg/ffv1 <https://github.com/ffmpeg/ffv1>