Harman Patil (Editor)

CoreAVC

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Developer(s)
  
CoreCodec, Inc

Development status
  
discontinued

Preview release
  
non [±]

Initial release
  
January 2, 2006 (2006-01-02)

Stable release
  
3.0.1 (September 9, 2011; 5 years ago (2011-09-09)) [±]

Written in
  
Core-C (modular ANSI C), C++

CoreAVC was a proprietary codec for decoding the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) video format.

Contents

As of 2010, the decoder is one of the fastest software decoders, but is slower than hardware-based ones. CoreAVC supports all H.264 Profiles except for 4:2:2 and 4:4:4.

CoreAVC now supports two forms of GPU hardware acceleration for H.264 decoding on Windows: Nvidia with CUDA and DXVA for both ATI and Nvidia hardware.

CoreAVC is included as a part of the CorePlayer Multimedia Framework and was being used in the now defunct desktop client by Joost a system that was distributing videos over the Internet using peer-to-peer TV technology.

CoreAVC-For-Linux DMCA complaint

An open source project named CoreAVC-For-Linux hosted at Google Code patches the loader code in the open source media player program MPlayer and allows it to use the Windows only CoreAVC DirectShow filter in free software environments. It does not include CoreAVC, but simply allows MPlayer to make use of it. This project also contains patches to use the proprietary codec in MythTV, open source software for Home Theater Personal Computers and the media player xine.

In May 2008 the CoreAVC-For-Linux project was taken down by Google due to a DMCA complaint. There was speculation about this DMCA complaint, because the project as a wrapper did not use any copyrighted material, but maybe reverse engineering techniques were used without prior permission, which CoreCodec, Inc. interpreted as a violation of the DMCA. CoreCodec has stated that reverse engineering was the reason, and it was in error and has apologized to the community.

CoreAVC-For-Linux is now back online and is recognized and supported by CoreCodec. Despite this, the project's future is currently in doubt as the developer stated they are quite busy and do not have enough time to continue working on it. The developer is currently requesting help from any developers interested in contributing to the project.

Multi-platform support

In early 2008, due to popular demand, CoreCodec ported the until then Windows-only to a plethora of platforms and CPU architectures. CoreAVC is now supported on the operating systems Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as mobile-embedded operating systems like Palm OS, Symbian, Windows CE and Windows Mobile - although the Linux version is not available as retail but only for OEMs. CoreAVC runs not only on 32-bit and 64-bit x86, but also on PowerPC (including AltiVec support), ARM9, ARM11 and MIPS. As for GPUs, supported are Intel 2700G, ATI Imageon, Marvell Monahan, (limited) Qualcomm QTv. The Windows version supports CUDA and DXVA for accelerated video decoding on computers with Nvidia and ATI video cards, respectively.

References

CoreAVC Wikipedia