Archive for September, 2006

Variety of lossless audio codecs

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

There are currently 14 lossless audio codecs mentioned on MultiMedia Wiki page (look here for further links):

  • Proprietary (Apple Lossless, Meridian Lossless Packing, Real Lossless, WMA Lossless)
  • Closed source (LA, LPAC, LTAC, OptimFROG, RK Audio)
  • Open source (Bonk, FLAC, MPEG-4 ALS, Monkey’s Audio, Shorten, TrueAudio, WavPack)

FFmpeg currently has decoders for Bonk, FLAC, Shorten, TrueAudio and Apple Lossless. So, there are at least MPEG-4 ALS, Monkey’s Audio and WavPack decoders can be added.

I will work on WavPack decoder and ALS (I hope standard will appear soon). What about Monkey’s Audio? Yes, it’s popular but it has following difficulties for implementation:

  1. It has incredibly large  frame sizes (it may be more than one million samples) while competitors stick around 64k or less (hence the compression gain for MA). Current FFmpeg design cannot handle such frames.
  2. Source code is a mess – for almost every action there are at least several if(ver >= …) or if(ver< ...). Format is too unstable for me.

Well, I still hope it will be implemented some day.

Posted in Lossless Audio | 7 Comments »

VC-1 Simple/Main Profile: 93,8%

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

OK, Now B-frames for simple and main profile work. Now there are only some exotic features left to implement as spatial downsampling and sync markers. And a lot of RE’ing to implement old WMV3 P-frames decoding and complex profile.

As for advanced profile, B-frames are still not implemented.

Posted in VC-1 | Comments Closed

Codec Completeness: Report

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

Today I’ve committed (I hope) the last patches to VMware Video decoder (videos looked rather funny without mouse pointer).

So, here are the stats for decoders:

  • VMware Video: 98% (some blocks are unknown but don’t interfere with decoding process)
  • VC-1 Simple/Main Profile: 75% (downscaled frames won’t be supported and B/BI frames are in progress)
  • VC-1 Advanced Profile: 40% (interlaced mode is not supported and BDU coding is not parsed – samples, anyone?)

Posted in Screen Codecs, VC-1 | 6 Comments »

A Work for the Weekend

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

I got free Monday so I decided to spend some time on any small codec and took VMware codec used by VMware emulator to capture screen output. As Alex discovered, this is merely recorded session of RFB protocol (used in VNC applications) but slightly mangled.
My further investigation show that bytes 1-2 in big-endian order contain number of rectangles updated and if that value is equal to 8 then the first chunk is ServerInitialization struct with marker ‘WMVi’ inserted before pixel format data. Otherwise frame may contain one or several FramebufferUpdate messages with standard HexTile encoding.
I’ve committed decoder to FFmpeg and I hope to find more samples and clarify some details about it (there are seven markers from ‘WMVd’ to ‘WMVh’ but what they mark is known only for ‘WMVi’, palette mode is not tested too).
OOPS, I’ve just discovered three more samples at MPHQ and they are not decoded correctly, so I have some more work to do.

Posted in Screen Codecs | 1 Comment »