Passing on the Left

Schroedinger-1.0.0 is now out. (download) The 1.0.0 means several things: One, early adopters can start using it for real work — it’s bitstream compliant and fairly well tested internally. Two, it’s API and ABI stable, so integrators can work at adding Dirac support to various frameworks and tools. Three, I’m going to be inundated with bug reports for the next few weeks.

Schro works best (right now) in combination with Ogg and GStreamer, and when compressing SD and HD720 video at constant bit rate. Integration with other projects is now a priority.

Encoded picture quality in CBR (constant bit rate) mode isn’t as good as I would have liked it for a release, but this is a good baseline to ensure progress. A week ago, picture quality was much better, but there was a bad bug that caused bit allocation for some pictures to be way too high, thus starving future pictures and causing the picture quality to drop to “unrecognizable”. The workaround for this release is to make the bit allocator less agressive, so average picture quality is lower, but worst-case is now tolerable.

It’s been a rather dismal last few years for democracy and freedom in the world, but this past week has yielded several symbolic but heartening events: the Protect America Act expired, Kosovo declared independence, and Pakistan democratically rejected its military government.