[Lcabid] Results of election of President

[Russell Stuart]

On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 15:34 +0800, matheist76 at westnet.com.au wrote:
> Currently testing video compression. ffmpeg looks good. Need to test
> it through. I would like to use open encoding so I'll give ogg and
> theora a try.

We don't have a choice.  We must use an open codec.

> I know that theora's a bit shaky but I hope it matures in time. 

That was true a long time ago.  Not now.  Eg, see:
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

> I also want to really have a good look at mencoder but that doesn't
> give me the option of ogg/theora encoding from what I can see.   

Be careful which mencoder you use.  It is part of mplayer, which is open
source, but it is shipped with proprietary codecs.  Mind you so does
ffmpeg.  But unlike ffmpeg, the ones MPlayer ships are binary Windows
drivers, almost certainly distributed without permission from the
copyright owner.  That said, the mplayer shipped in the Debian
repository (but not debian-multimedia) should be fine.  It has the bad
stuff ripped out.

There is also one notable absence in your list: gstreamer.  It seems to
be the "standard" the open source world is converging on for
manipulating A/V steams.