ZyGoVideo Pro for Mac OS X was released today by Media Metastasis, providers of QuickTime multimedia products and consulting services to corporate customers. It’s a CODEC for QuickTime and QuickTime Pro that compresses and decompresses video files to deliver rich, broadcast-quality video at lower transmission speeds.
“ZyGoVideo running under QuickTime rivals Windows Media Player and Real Player in both visual quality and compression speed at streaming rates of 28.8 kbps and 56 kbps,” Rob Sheffield, president and CEO of Media Metastasis, told MacCentral. “ZyGoVideo Pro for Mac OS X completes the complement of ZyGoVideo QuickTime products for both the Mac and PC platforms.”
The basic decompression component is automatically downloaded from the QuickTime Component Download site when playing clips compressed with ZyGoVideo and the next release of the QuickTime Player will include an integrated ZyGoVideo decoder. The ZygoVideo Pro compression CODEC for preparing videos for streaming or video-on-demand applications is available at the Vianet Web site.
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 Sheffield.
The company said that ZyGoVideo Pro offers 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.”
“ZyGoVideo’s Pro line is meant to achieve good looking video at low data rates with a minimum of settings so that the compression job is fast and easy to do,” Sheffield said. “ZyGoVideo Pro provides additional control over the video compression and improves quality of the key frames over the Basic version, which is available as a QuickTime 5 downloadable component.”
The Pro version enables exact placement of the key frames supporting the professional video compression needs. Key frames can be placed at every frame, which is an essential element in supporting QuickTime VR, Sheffield said. The user is provided with a set of optional controls in a pop up dialog to control scene detection sensitivity, control over motion detection sensitivity and a smoothing filter to soften blocking artifacts, he added.
The ZyGoVideo Pro compressor is available now. Individual Pro licenses are US$79. A limited 45-day bundle of the Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X Pro codec is available for $129.