Perian is going bye-bye

Perian has announced that they're ceasing development. But they're doing the right thing and making it open-sourced on Google Code or GitHub so tell any developers you know.

Perian is really an essential tool to the roaming editor especially those who cut a lot of documentaries where people tend to hand you bizarre formats. Hopefully someone will take up the reins and continue it's development.

Removing GoPro Cineform Studio's Menubar CodecStatus

UPDATE:

In the latest version of GoPro Studio (v2.5.7 as of this updated post) on OS X 10.11.3, the method easier, yet a bit hidden.

1. Launch GoPro Studio
2. Hit COMMAND + COMMA to open it's Prefs (or go to the menu bar and select GoPro Studio . Preferences...)
3. Uncheck "AUTOMATICALLY IMPORT FROM GOPRO CAMERAS"
4. The annoying menubar icon should be gone.

Sneaky, eh?

The old post below...

If you have a GoPro camera you've likely installed GoPro Cineform Studio. However it also installed a menubar item that deals with codecs and whatnot. If you've never asked for it to be there and don't use it it can be hard to get rid of it as it shows up every time you boot up. I'm not even sure what it's officially called but at the bottom of the menu it reads Check Codecs or something.

If you look at Activity Monitor you'll notice a process running called "StereoModeStatus" which is located in /Applications/GoPro/Tools/StereoModeStatus.app (technically it's inside the package here /Contents/MacOS/StereoModeStatus).

Now I don't like things being installed without my asking and I really dislike not having a way to uninstall specific things or at least permanently turning them off. You can select to quit the menubar item but it'll come back upon a reboot.

Also note that it's standard operating procedure to be able to hold down Command and then drag a menubar item around and OUT of the menubar. This thing doesn't let you Command + Drag it out of the menubar. Evil.

Here's what I did to get rid of the CodecCheck menubar thing.

Before this however, you can head to System Settings and look for "Cineform" pane and under the Process tab at the bottom you'll see "Show Stereo Status Menu". Now while this will hide the menu, it doesn't seem to always prevent the process from running. If you're like me and want the process to never run, continue reading:

1. Launch Activity Monitor (Hit Command + Shift + U to open up your utility folder and then hit A to highlight it then Command + O to launch it).

2. Look for "StereoModeStatus". Highlight it.

3. At the top of Activity Monitor's window hit Quit Process. Notice the menubar item vanishes. Yay!

4. Close Activity Monitor.

5. Navigate to your Application folder. (Hit Command + A to open it) Drill down to GoPro folder then inside there open up the Tools folder.

6. Right click on StereoModeStatus and select "Compress "StereoModeStatus".

7. After a second you'll see a new file called "StereoModeStatus.zip". This is your backup copy in case you ever need this thing again. Once you've confirmed this .zip file is there right click on "StereoModeStatus" (the original, not the .zip) and select Move To Trash.

It may ask you for your admin password to put it in the trash; further evidence of it's evil nature.

8. Empty your trash (Shift + Option + Command + Delete) and you're done.

Google's WebM Video Codec .webm

A really nice breakdown of VP8 is here if you're interested. But a summary is thus:

"The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code — up to and including TODOs, “optimizations”, and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec. I may have complained about the H.264 spec being overly verbose, but at least it’s precise. The VP8 spec, by comparison, is imprecise, unclear, and overly short, leaving many portions of the format very vaguely explained. Some parts even explicitly refuse to fully explain a particular feature, pointing to highly-optimized, nigh-impossible-to-understand reference code for an explanation. There’s no way in hell anyone could write a decoder solely with this spec alone."

"WebM includes:

• VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
• Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
• a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container"

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Google has announced WebM (not a huge surprise given all the rumors) but you can check out the latest FFMpeg version to support it from Subversion here which is a bit surprising.

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"WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container."

====

I'll goof around with it later on (possibly next week) and see what's what but I don't think we'll be editing with it very soon.

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"Reversed complexity encoding / Z-frames: A type of frame that in encoding complexity is lower than a regular P-frame but is more compact. The catch is decoding computation needs to be higher. Specific technical approaches might include:

• a combination of multi-frame processing with Wyner-Ziv coding
• mixed quality encoding, where the Z-frames are non-reference frames interspersed with regular P-frames and coded at lower quality than the target quality. The decoder recovers a higher quality version of the Z-frames by multi-frame processing using information in the neighboring higher quality P-frames.
• supplement the information transmitted for the Z-frame with additional helper information to regularize the reconstruction process on the decoder side. This could be a Wyner-Ziv layer, or something different."

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Also of interest:
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VP8 uses 14 bits for width and height, so the maximum resolution is 16384x16384 pixels. VP8 places no constraints on framerate or datarate.

and

The Developer Preview releases of browsers supporting WebM are not yet fully optimized and therefore have a higher computational footprint for screen rendering than we expect for the general releases. The computational efficiencies of the VP8 codec are more accurately measured today using codec-level development tools in the SDKs. Optimizations of the browser implementations are forthcoming.

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Higher Computational footprint means it's really inefficient at the moment and eat a lot of CPU. Although, they do say in their FAQ:
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"If I have a video card that accelerates video playback, will it accelerate VP8?
The performance of VP8 is very good in software, and we’re working closely with many video card and silicon vendors to add VP8 hardware acceleration to their chips."

Microsoft Abandons Indeo Codec

Microsoft has decided to disable a 17-year-old video codec in older versions of Windows rather than patch multiple vulnerabilities, according to the company's security team.

The update targets only the oldest editions of Microsoft's operating system: Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 already bar the Indeo codec from loading. Intel introduced the codec in 1992.

You can read the article here. I'm sure that at some point, with some client this will be an issue.

Go To Meeting's proprietary G2M3 codec

If someone hands you a video that's a .wmv but won't play no matter what you try it's likely a G2M3 format which is Go To Meeting's proprietary codec and Mac users are essentially out of luck.

If you need just the audio that's okay, VLC and flip4mac will play the audio but the video will not work. Go To Meeting has it's own page about Mac support here but it doesn't mention much about video formats and I'm not installing anything to find out. Perian won't help either.

From what a friend told me, he thinks that there is a way for Windows users to initially record video to a codec that's not G2M3 but I have no idea really.

Here is a helpful post but it doesn't specifically address playback or transcoding on a Mac.

Basically, you'll need Windows, Windows Media Encoder and possibly a little thing called TMPGEnc.