VideoLAN x264 Achieves Blu-Ray Compatibility
VideoLAN x264 is a free library written from scratch for encoding H264/AVC video streams. It announces to be the first free software Blu-ray encoder, the first free software encoder to be able to generate Blu-ray compliant video.
H.264/AVC was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 – MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content. H.264 is used in such applications as Blu-ray Disc, videos from YouTube and the iTunes Store.
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With x264’s powerful compression, it’s quite possible to author Blu-ray disks on DVD9s (dual-layer DVDs) or even DVD5s (single-layer DVDs) with a reasonable level of quality.
However, in accordance with the Blu-ray specifications, the disc image file uses the UDF 2.5 filesystem, which may be incompatible with some older virtual drive and DVD burning applications. To get the menus and such working correctly, an actual Blu-ray player is also needed.
In addition to Blu-ray support, x264 now has these features:
- Native variable-framerate ratecontrol, which makes sure your encodes get a correct target bitrate and proper limiting of maximum bitrate even if the duration of every frame is different and the “framerate” is completely unknown.
- Supports pulldown (telecine) in much the same fashion as it is handled in MPEG-2. The calling application can pass in flags representing how to display a frame, allowing easy transcoding from MPEG-2 sources with pulldown, such as broadcast television.
- Exports HRD timing information, which is critical for compliant transport stream muxing.
VideoLAN x264 announced x264’s Blu-ray compliance on 25 April 2010. VideoLAN x264 is released under the terms of the GNU GPL.
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