Media Metastasis LLC has released a new video codec for QuickTime, which it says supports Mac OS 8, 9 and X, as well as QuickTime for Windows.
“ZyGoVideo Pro is a QuickTime video encoder and decoder optimized for streaming video from the Web,” according to Peter Martin, Media Metastasis’ director of engineering. “It brings high quality streaming video to QuickTime comparable to Real and Windows Media.”
He added that ZyGoVideo is particularly well suited for use in creating streaming video for movie trailers, music videos, and other artistic work. Even 28k and 56k videos stream smoothly while retaining crisp detail in hard to compress items such as text, Martin said.
ZyGoVideo purportedly provides a full set of professional compression settings to control data rate, quality and encode/decode speed for a nearly limitless number of video sources. It enables low-level assembly routines so that compression and decompression go “blindingly fast,” according to Media Metastasis.
The company said that ZyGoVideo Pro features: better color space for key frames; precise key frame placement; key frame sensitivity selection; motion sensitivity selection; smoothing video setting; preset values for Media Cleaner Pro; and a tutorial guide for better compression.
ZyGoVideo is based on wavelets compression. This compression technology has been under development for over eight years to support JPEG 2000 stills and video teleconferencing applications. The ZyGoVideo version of this technology will use the “aggressive compression” capabilities of JPEG 2000 and the video teleconferencing characteristics to enable “excellent streaming video.”
A basic version is available for free and a Pro version for an introductory price of US$49 from the product Web site. The site also has videos that let you compare ZyGoVideo for QuickTime with Windows Media and Real Player. ZyGoVideo will also provide video decompression on Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). A Palm OS compatible codec will be available soon.
ZyGoVideo is the first video compression product from Media Metastasis, a company formed in 1998 to serve the needs of video and audio compression professionals in porting and tuning codecs to the QuickTime architecture.
“ZyGoVideo is an outgrowth of the need for high quality, real-time video compressors for QuickTime,” Martin said.
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