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 a replacement of his YCoCg and MSMI video codecs. 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 openMovIm package contains 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 not requiring special user’s skills will be released.

Currently the library is used mainly as a plug-in for the Diamant-Film restoration suite.

Documentation

The man pages are available as PDF files:

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

We are working on the following additional documentation:

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

Alpha Release

Our inner circle can already install, test and actually use an alpha of the package, which comes with a few short test files, by running the following command in the Terminal:

brew install avpres/formulae/movim

The Homebrew installation has been successfully tested on various x86_64 architectures running on the following operating systems:

• Linux: Debian 10.1 and Debian 9.9; Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, 16.04.6 LTS and 14.04.6 LTS; Slackware 14.2
• Macintosh: macOS 10.14.5 and 10.13.6
• Windows 10: Subsystem for Linux running Debian 9.9 or Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS

In addition, cross-compilation from Debian works well.

2019–09–14