DiVX contest... a chance for Clean rapid prototyping to shine?

[Matthew Lye]

  To promote the open-source development concept, the 'Flashing Yellow' website 
has started a contest, the objective being to generate a QuickTime compatible 
Macintosh viewer for Microsoft's 'DiVX' video compression codec.  The prize is 
$5000 U.S. and a DV iMac.  They are considering  expanding the contest to 
include anyone who comes up with an equally good or better video codec.

  I have absolutely no idea how well suited Concurrent Clean is to the general 
task of video processing, and understand clean & combinator parsing in only the 
broadest terms.  However, since this is essentially a reverse engineering 
project (DiVX is Microsoft's proprietary modification of the in-development 
public MPEG-4 codec) that involves parsing, I immediately thought of Clean both 
in terms of parser combinators and development cycles.  Clean programs are easy 
to modify and hard to introduce errors to.  The parser combinator parsing 
strategy would seem to be pretty robust in terms of handling ambiguity and 
errors, which would in turn seem to make them ideal for this sort of task, where
one essentially has to deduce a grammar.

  I figured I would post the news of the contest to the list, in case anyone is 
working with video or graphics in Clean.  It would be good publicity for the 
language (which, I admit, I more admire than understand), and hey...  free iMac.

  Flashing Yellow's contest news is at <http://flashingyellow.com/index.html>
  The contest FAQ is at <http://flashingyellow.com/faqs.html>


matt lye.