Archive for June, 2016

On FFmpeg and Voting

Monday, June 27th, 2016

Sometimes I hear that voting in FFmpeg is worse than in North Korea. Obviously people don’t know much about voting in North Korea or they wouldn’t make such statements. Here I shall try to have a short overview on voting in two similar yet different Asian countries and compare it to FFmpeg. My knowledge about North Korea comes from posts of Russian researchers, at least one of them lives in Korea and their information looks legit to me (because it lacks political agenda and has even small details mentioned that correlate well with other information from people visiting DPRK). For the other country it’s various sources not from state media (because such information is often omitted there or you hear simply outright lies). For FFmpeg I obviously have my own experience and observations from their mailing list.

North Korea

Maybe the main reason why it makes people think about FFmpeg is the fact they claim sovereignty over the whole Korean peninsula and even appoints special people to do merges govern over regions still under occupation and even promotes them time from time. South Korea actually does the same except for useless staff but they recognize people with North Korean passports as their own citizens.

Anyway, voting. The system is rather simple: you have one candidate per region and all people vote for him. The ruling member of Kim family should get 100% support in his region (around Paektu Mountain if you forgot that)—and 100% means that all voters should come and vote (I guess it’s obvious how). In other regions some voters may skip it in case they are very ill. I don’t remember whether they can vote against but it’s rather unthinkable too. There’s a story about North Koreans fleeing to China and seeing a demonstration in South Korea on the TV—their reaction was “Why do they allow it?! How can the President run such a country?!”. So people there are quite well conditioned and voting goes smooth.

Russia

This is a country with a variety of approaches to voting—some elections nobody cares about and they can be even fair (until an inappropriate candidate is elected and then they have to correct it), some elections try to keep an image of honesty in order to show outsiders that the system works fine and elected candidates are legitimate (in that case they simply try not to rig it as blatantly), some elections are rigged in the most blatant way and even more and in the ideal case there are no more elections (under some stupid pretext they’ve got rid of governor elections and now in some towns and cities mayors are not elected either because that saves money). And referendums there while still theoretically possible can’t be on any question related to government or status of some region or the questions that are decided by government.

So depending on luck in some elections a vote can matter, in other cases it doesn’t matter and in some cases it matters that much that the votes are cast and counted without voter’s participation (some regions constantly report that over 100% of voters were present and there’s a Russian meme 146% that appeared because when they reported result for parliament elections in Rostov region IIRC the percents from different parties added up to that number and there were some other regions with total sum over 100%).

There are many tricks to get desired results—inventing new demands to filter out unwanted candidates (their neighbour Belarus has a joke “In order to be eligible as presidential candidate the person must have at least five years of presidential experience”), the same voters voting again and again (because there’s a special document allowing a voter to vote in other region—and groups of people can have a dozen of such permits per member and thus vote repeatedly in several places), putting a sheaf of “properly” filled ballots into ballot box or simply counting them as you see fit no matter what was the actual vote there.

Similar story with petitions—they are often masked with similar petitions or later an expert group finds that petition to be infeasible or contradicting the law.

FFmpeg

In the old days voting was usually called mostly on naming issues and it worked. But then disagreement with the practices of the FFmpeg leader (like committing code without any review and despite objections) escalated to the point of The Split but before that there were ugly votings that included old MPlayer members that nobody cared about in FFmpeg (because the leader said everybody with commit rights on svn.mplayerhq.hu should have a vote). So after The Split and another ugly voting there were two projects. I don’t remember any voting in Libav but in FFmpeg this tradition still holds. Like recently there was a voting committee formed and there were at least two serious votes (not just a new season logo in trac)—for code of conduct (because every project should have one but not necessarily follow it) and for banning Carl Eugen Hoyos for some time. The first one obviously passed, the second one rather expectedly failed. But then A Person Known For Resigning As Leader took an action that should be allowed only to leaders and banned some people for 24 hours from the mailing list.

Well, I think it’s clear now that FFmpeg voting is not on North Korea level because there’s animosity there that can be expected only from current MPlayer team but not FFmpeg. But is FFmpeg on par with Russia? Maybe not yet but it tries hard IMO.

A Tale of Two Failed Projects

Saturday, June 25th, 2016

Yes, it’s about FFmpeg and Libav again. And yes, I consider them both to be failed projects (not that their basic goal is failed and they provide even less multimedia support than GStreamer with no external libraries used), I mean the state of the project as living and developing entity.

Even if I mostly emulate Derek nowadays—i.e. unsubscribed from FFmpeg and Libav mailing lists, do nothing productive, wait for somebody to reverse engineer codecs I care about somewhat (that would be ClearVideo, thank you very much). Yet I peruse development-related resources for both projects (mostly for finding laughs) and sometimes I see gems like this (it was pointed at in the comments as well since it answers some questions I’ve asked before).

First, I’d like to outline how large projects are organised and what to expect in general. So, if you have a large and used project you’ll have at least these components:

  • codebase (normal projects have some code to run after all);
  • developers (to add features, fix bugs and such);
  • users (to annoy developers and once in a while to provide sensible bugreport or feature request);
  • infrastructure (hosting for code, means to communicate for developers, maybe even support for users).

Developers can be also divided into three main categories:

  1. core developers—the ones who do main work on the codebase and do it in regular manner (they might intersect with the next category too);
  2. corporate developers—the ones who do work mostly on behalf of their companies (e.g. add a feature they need internally so they don’t have to maintain it themselves);
  3. contributors—developers who add some feature or provide some bugfix because they needed it themselves, they do it irregularly or even just once (again, they might intersect with the previous category).

This division is by no means perfect but it shows the main forces behind development: those who treat is as a hobby, those who do it for their benefit (i.e. making money with/from it) and those who use it and just want to be it a bit more suited to their personal needs.

So, with that all in mind let’s look at the projects:

FFmpeg

Codebase. It’s a complete mess. And its git history is even worse. The running joke is that who cares what that piece of code does, it’s FFeature so it must be kept at whatever cost (that’s how you get double decoders, demuxers and encoders; an outstanding example there would be libutvideo wrappers—refer for the details to ffmpeg-devel mailing list).

Developers. Because of the merging policy (that is likely to be codified soon—see this document again) many developers of FFmpeg code are not FFmpeg developers. And yet they are dictating API to be used in FFmpeg: the first example that also involves me—I’ve proposed side data for packets in Libav, FFmpeg hesitated for a bit yet included it with such flattering message; the most of examples include Anton’s work from introducing refcounted buffers to splitting codec parameters into separate structure—in any case FFmpeg simply takes it and converts their code to comply with a new practice (even if it has to include some horrible hacks). If that doesn’t cry out loud “a failed project” I don’t know what does.

Also (even if I’m stepping onto minefield) some FFmpeg developers are completely unfit for collective work because of their personal qualities. People may make jokes about providing full console output of ffmpeg command but it’s not Carl who’s the main problem in FFmpeg (yes, people who didn’t work on MPlayer might think otherwise; I still believe he’d be a decent leader for FFmpeg—mostly because he doesn’t focus just on technical side and he’s unlikely to be treated as a technical god who can’t make any mistake or write less than perfect code). Here it’s more about Michael and Clément—the former never really understood what being a leader really is or what resigning from a leader means (anyone disagreeing please ban yourself from a mailing list of your choice for 24 hours), the latter does not understand people at all (neither does Michael)—I’m not going to paste the link to the same document for the third time, I’ll simply quote the relevant part:

Any Libav developer is of course welcome anytime to contribute directly to the
FFmpeg tree. Of course, we fully understand and are forced to accept that very
few Libav developers are interested in doing so, but we still want to recognize
their work.

Here’s an excerpt from Michael’s mail:

> Don’t you think you should remove Diego, Måns, Kostya, … as well?

They didnt ask me to remove them, they didnt remove themselfs even
though they could, they didnt post a patch to remove themselfs.
No contributor said that he contacted them and they no longer maintain
the code they are listed for. (or i missed that)

Well, if it’s hard to realize that Libav developers don’t want to contribute to FFmpeg and don’t want to do anything with it even though it’s been over five years then you really have a problem. And I’ve expressed my thought on reuniting both projects already.

Users. You know, there’s a difference between catering to your users and selling out completely (to put it mildly). When you see some changes being done in interests of some third party often without mentioning it that looks suspicious. I’m not against making money off your work but when it’s not even mentioning the fact it looks strange; when you have a decoder with a copyright assigned to some company it’s fine, but when you have fixes for files nobody has seen or FFv1 features added because it was all paid by somebody (see here slide 12) it looks not completely honest even if there’s nothing wrong with it.

Infrastructure. From what I understood FFmpeg services are now hosted on various boxes with no plan or idea (i.e. if somebody could provide a box for something they took it) and there’s no system administrator for these boxes. Again, as I understand it, they were kicked out of Hungary for some reason and even though they got a free server and hosting in Bulgaria they cannot use that box properly because there’s nobody to set it up properly and maintain afterwards. Sounds like fail to me.

Libav

This project is failed for the different reasons but failed nevertheless.

Codebase. While it’s mostly fine sadly new features hardly come in. Just two examples—there have been talks about replacing libswscale since ages, two years ago they’d started to design it (and it went nowhere), then I offered my design with a PoC (yes, piece of that) code to test it (that’s how NAScale was born), people work on integrating it into Libav a bit and that’s all—nothing has happened yet; the second example is bitstream reader replacement—since its submission in April nothing has come out of it as all traction was lost in bikeshedding. Is it failure or what?

Developers. Here we have two problems—some FFmpeg folks and some core developers. I’ve written about the former before so let’s talk about the latter. Surprisingly or not there are counterparts for Austrian FFmpeg developers in Libav. Where in FFmpeg you have Carl Eugen, in Libav there’s Diego and I guess many have suffered from his perfectionism (in form of proper formatting). And instead of Michael there’s Anton. While he is not that leadery in general sense, he’s the one introducing big changes in API that are hardly discussed before. And even worse thing—he tries to make all nontrivial code go through him, QSV support is a good example: Maxym Dmytrychenko had submitted initial support but it was not deemed good enough so Luca Barbato had to rework it into proper form. And what do you know? It turned out to be not good enough for Anton so he worked on it himself with the result not being much different from Luca’s. And since nothing is being done about that I consider it to be a failure.

Users. Sadly, there seems to exist not so many of them which is a fail. On the other hoof they don’t need to deal with distros and Baidu and that’s a blessing by itself. Though there is still an issue with FFmpeg users who bother (ex-)developers for features present in FFmpeg but not in Libav (or present in different form), like Blackmagic card support or prores_ks encoder (hint: there’s no encoder with such name in Libav and it’s my personal pleasure to ignore mails about it).

Infrastructure. From what I heard thanks to Attila and Janne everything is working fine.


Well, maybe I should continue with Actimagine VX codec at last and forget about multimedia outside work matters afterwards (insert the obvious joke about this not hurting NihAV development at all).

A Quick Look on Perseus

Tuesday, June 21st, 2016

So, unlike those breakthrough codecs everybody talks about (I mean RMHD and ORBX.js), V-Nova Perseus was delivered (but what do you expect from a codec announced on the first of April?) and is available in some Android app. So I’ve looked at it.

The implementation seems bafflingly simple: there’s a base layer, it gets upscaled 2x and an enhancement is applied to the upscaled image. And those enhancements are essentially quantised differences after 2×2 Haar transform plus runs, all coded with context-dependent Huffman codes. If that reminds you of RealVideo—don’t worry, they code those codebook descriptions too so it’s different.

I don’t know if it really works as good as promisedmarketed but it’s an interesting approach and it introduces some variety in the world of codecs that look alike—mostly because they all use the same principles as the standard video codec with some small enhancements or building blocks replaced with functional analogues; yes, I completely forgot about Daala, please remind me about it when they settle with final design—it might be the codec of choice for GNU HURD NG by then too.

On H.264 Coding Schemes Names

Friday, June 3rd, 2016

Continuing the theme set by the previous post, let’s talk more about confusing names introduced by H.264. I mean CAVLC and CABAC.

CAVLC stands for Context-based Adaptive Variable Length Coding. While technically true because it employs variable-length codes and the code set is selected based on context it’s nothing special (and I’ve not spotted anything there that would make it “adaptive”). Again, it’s a trivial thing less exercised before because they had less ROM for codebooks. The idea of “let’s select codebook depending on top and/or left decoded values” it too trivial to get an own name IMO.

CABAC stands for Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding and the name is partly stupid and partly misleading. But before I explain why I want to present some history and terminology.

Arithmetic coding was developed in late sixties to early seventies but mostly known by work of Rissanen and Langdon that resulted in many IBM patents. The idea is that you can assign probabilities to various symbols, send them to the coder and the coding result is a long fraction belonging to the range obtained by multiplying the ranges in sequence. I.e. if we have probabilities for A, B and C as ranges [0; 1/3), [1/3; 2/3) and [2/3; 1) then AB is coded in [1/9; 2/9) range and BA is coded in [1/3; 4/9) range. It’s the ideal coding method since it codes probabilities in the minimum possible amount of bits (unless you remember it’s real world and we don’t have infinite-precision arithmetic; still, the losses are very small and there’s no better coding method).

And in 1979 G.*.*. Martin (no, not the writer known for Tuf Voyaging) introduced range coding. Which is absolutely the same thing except that (de)coder maintains low and range values instead of low and high values in a conventional arithmetic coder (hence the name). Since it was kinda not covered by patents it got more popularity over the years.

And because dealing with arbitrary probabilities usually involves division by an arbitrary integer (and maybe increased coder precision) the further improvements were for sacrificing efficiency for speed until it boiled down to coding just two symbols and creating more elaborate models to code input that takes more than one bit. Arithmetic mode in JPEG seems to be simply feeding bits from Huffman codes and such to Q-coder (patented by IBM and thus extremely popular in the wild) that squeezes a bit more entropy out of them. Then you create an advanced version (MQ-coder) and push it into JPEG-2000 until binary coding is popular in image and video coding.

So, CABAC is:

  1. Context-based — yes, static coding would be a tad more effective than Huffman coding applied to bits (hint: it gives no savings). The problem that it’s the first step of the classical scheme: modelling and providing probability to the entropy coder;
  2. Adaptive — see above;
  3. Binary — true (just remember it codes not bits but most and least probable symbols);
  4. Arithmetic — actually it uses range coding;
  5. Coding — nothing to argue with here.

In general, the naming is a lot like USSR which was hardly a union, probably not soviet (whatever that word means—literal meaning is “belonging to the councils”), republics were just provinces (or local despoties) but it was more or less socialistic (to the point its ideology can be called international socialism and it was founded by SDAPR(B) too).

And I’d like to point out that CABAC should refer to the whole process of binarisation+context selection plus coding the result, not just the exact implementation used in ITU H.264 and ITU H.EVC (even if it’s called CBAC in AVS and “we have completely different coding” in VPx). And if you want an example of context-based adaptive binary non-arithmetic coding look at ELS used in G2M2 (and if you drop binary coding then you have examples in every other advanced lossless audio codec).