Snow (codec)

Snow is an experimental video codec developed by Michael Niedermayer for the FFmpeg package. It can compress video either lossily or losslessly. Snow implements wavelet-based compression, aiming for good image quality at very low bitrates. It is open source licensed under the LGPL.

Features

Snow is similar to Tarkin, Dirac, and numerous other wavelet-using codecs.

Technical details can be found in the [http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk/doc/snow.txt?view=co snow.txt] file included in the ffmpeg source package.

Another characteristic of snow is the usage of an intelligent and very efficient version of range encoding.

FFmpeg aims to get the codec to become a Request for Comments (RFC). Therefore, a version 1.0 has to be finished. The documentation is started in [http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk/doc/snow.txt?view=co snow.txt] .Some Snow users (or potential ones) offered [http://www.ffmpeg.org bounty] to get the specification and implementation ready for version 1.0.

Programs Using Snow

The following open-source video editing programs can encode to Snow format:
*FFmpeg
*Avidemux
*LiVES
*MeGUI
*VirtualDubMod with ffdshow tryouts
*MEncoder

ee also

*Avidemux
*FFmpeg
*LiVES
*MPlayer
*VLC media player

External links

* [http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=84593 Snow discussion on the Doom9 forums]
* [http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ FFmpeg]
* [http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk/doc/snow.txt?view=co FFmpeg's documentation on snow]