Multi-Platform Video Codec Seeks New Home

Eric Smith asks: "I own a next-generation video codec development company, idea65 (covered on Slashdot as our previous incarnations Opencodex, and Flashingyellow). We have a finished product, but don't quite know what to do with it, and we're looking for someone (or some company) interested in taking it over." Here's the chance for some of you out there looking for a good cause, to contribute something. Loads of people (me, included) would love a good cross-platform video codec.

We started our journey as an open-source project contest in response to DivX, before DivX networks came into being. Due to a variety of issues (not the least of which was our main investor pulling out and funding having to come out of my own pocket), we mutated into a closed-source project that we intended to distribute ourselves through the help of a third party. We finished product development almost a year ago and have a really great portable video codec that runs on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.

The problem we've run into is that with the economy being as it is, our candidates for distribution assistance have also all dried up. We've considered just GPL'ing it and seeing what the open-source community could do with it, but don't have anyone to oversee changes and official versions, not to mention from the looks of the DivX 4.0 project, there don't seem to be a lot of people interested in (or with the knowledge to) work on video codecs.

More or less, we've got a bunch of very well written CodeWarrior projects that need to find a new home as we don't really have the expertise or financing to sell it or even give it away. So, I'm interested in knowing if anyone has any suggestions for what to do with the project, or interest in taking it over (those with experience with this kind of thing)."

If seriously interested, you can contact Eric using the mailto link at the beginning of this article.

If it were you...

[darkov]

If I were you (which I am patently not) I would not bother trying to sell a codec. I think there are many out there today and without some sort of corporate backing or a really compelling difference, you probably will not have much impact in a crowded marketplace. What would make more sense is developing a product that uses your codec, but provides a different sort of product or service. Maybe build a video confrencing system, or a monitoring and logging system. These ideas are off the top of my head, but you get my drift - add some sort of additional value, some application that makes your codec shine while solving a problem. Then you'll have a market and getting inverstors and customers will be a whole lots easier.

Re:Don't be so quick to GPL!

[Anonymous Coward]

anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs,

Basically, the GPL OS exception includes anything on the CD. In Windows' case that includes IE, WMP, Notepad, etc.

Re:Wow - what a business plan

[misterye]

Actually, we did have a very detailed business plan, that we thought was actually going to make money and contribute something to the open-source community. But, as with many things, and as someone said earlier, don't depend on third parties. We didn't have much choice but to rely on third parties for distribution and funding. In the end, all the funding came out of my pocket, and the distributor went under. We have a good product, we actually beat DivX to being done by about 3 months, but we got stuck there. The codec is very light and highly portable, the original version was less than 16k compiled and out-performed DivX and was patent and copyright free.

Though I guess that is something that people will want to see for themselves, and that's where we are stuck, we don't even have the funding for the legal help to get it into testers hands. After working on this as hard as I have, I would hate to see the project just die w/out it seeing the light of day. That's why I asked for possible answers from Slashdot. Maybe someone can think of something we haven't. Its happened before.