MSU Videogroup Filters Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: Why public access is not provided for some of the filters?

  A: There’re two main reasons:

  • Some company might have bought the filter and has exclusive rights on it. In this case it is mentioned on the page.
  • The filter status might be still uncertain (in other words negotiations with some company about this filter are still in progress).

  To clear everything up we must say that our research laboratory is not typical. A lot of universities have similar multimedia laboratories but none of them provide public access for their filters.
  Like many other labs we perform research in video processing scope. Some of our production is being sold to different commercial companies, some remains our property. Such filters are transformed into usable versions and put to public access.

• Q: Why don’t other laboratories distribute their filters for free as well?

  A: Along with commercial reasons there may be unwillingness to spend time on free versions ;). Actually it’s not that easy to get a final working version of the filter from the research one, which might fail on some input data or have very complicated options clear only to its creator. This task requires time so appreciate our doing it!

• Q: Many of your filters are rather slow. Could I expect faster versions in future?
  A: Sure you can! Despite the fact that commercial projects and promising researches are more important to our laboratory than optimization of the existing filters, we regularly release faster versions of our free filters. As a proof, two old filters recently have been made 10 times faster and soon will be available to public access.
  It’s no use to blame us for making slow filters because it only decreases the optimization process priority.
  If we have a choice whether to share a current slow version of the filter or to wait (sometimes more than a year) till someone finds time to optimize it we choose the first alternative because usually the filter already provides enough quality to be used in cases where speed is less important.

• Q: Have you thought about selling your filters. I would pay! There would be money for its optimization!

  A: Funny that such questions come most often from Russians although our foreign audience is bigger. Actually we do sell them but wholesale way only. In retail quantities we provide them for free :)

• Q: Do you need feedback (some comments, bug reports, requests)?

  A: SURE! :) Many bugs that you find can be fixed in ten minutes (if we know, how exactly to reproduce this bug). And we do it of course.
  You requests are collected as well and can be taken into account in future.

• Q: May I help you somehow if I want to get some filter?

  A: Sometimes you may. If you happened to need the same filter that we are working currently on we can cooperate. We could send you the current version of our filter for you to test its performance, report about results, problems or bugs discovered. We even can change the filter a bit to make it work better on some specific data of the person who helps us. We always appreciate real help and try to help in return.

  This answer applies to filters, that are currently work in progress. Regarding written and announced filters see answer number 1.

• Q: How to find out what filter you’re currently working on? I’d test it with pleasure!

  A: We’ve already thought about informing people about our current work because such requests aren’t rare. Soon this information will be available at our forum. E-mail us until then!

Contacts

E-mail: video@graphics.cs.msu.ru