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© 1993–2021 by Reto Kromer

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The MovIm video codec

The MovIm video codec is developed since late 2018 by Reto Kromer, who first presented it publicly in 2019. It is specifically designed for both conservation and restoration purposes, and is actually an enhancement and the replacement of the YCoCg and MSMI video codecs he developed from early 2014 and 2017 on. This work has been directly inspired by a discussion he had with Tommy Aschenbach at the AMIA Conference 2018. However, he wishes to acknowledge also the inspiration given in various occasions by Claudio Weidmann, Jim Lindner, Carl Eugen Hoyos, Peter Bubestinger-Steindl, Jérôme Martinez and Michael Niedermayer.

The MovIm package consists in the libmovim C library, implementing the MovIm video codec, and its associated movimenc, movimdec and movimplay utilities, as well as the openmovim Bash command-line interface to encode, decode, play and analyse virtually any moving image. The package is released under a 3-Clause BSD License and is provided “as is” without warranty or support of any kind. The source code will become freely available, as soon as a public beta can be released.

The library is used for both to store the digitisation raw data and to process the data during the image restoration.

Documentation

The man pages are available as PDF files:

  • libmovim, the reference library implementing the MovIm video codec
  • movimdec, the reference MovIm decoder
  • movimenc, the reference MovIm encoder
  • movimplay, the reference MovIm player
  • openmovim, a command-line interface to encode, decode, play and analyse moving images

The Change Log file is available as well on this website.

 

We are working on the following additional documentation:

  • the MovIm specification
  • the plugin for the Diamant-Film restoration software

Beta Release

Our clients can install, test and actually use a private beta of the package, which comes with a few short test files, by running the following command in the Terminal:

brew install avpres/formulae/movim

In addition, cross-compilation works well.

 

The MovIm video codec’s library libmovim was successfully tested on various modern x86_64 and ARM architectures, running under the following operating systems:

  • Linux: Debian 11.1 and 10.11; Ubuntu 21.10, 20.04.3 LTS, 18.04.6 LTS and 16.04.7 LTS; Slackware 15.0 RC1 and 14.2; Qubes OS 4.0.4
  • Macintosh: macOS 11.6, 10.15.7 and 10.14.6
  • Windows: 11; 10 version 21H1, 20H2, 2004 and 1909

2021-10-23