Archive for August, 2011

Some notes on codecs I’d like to RE but don’t have time to do so

Saturday, August 27th, 2011

There are some codecs that I’d like to RE (mostly for completeness sake) but I don’t have time for that.

Intel Audio Codec

This one seems to be a lot like its predecessor IMC (Intel Music Codec), it even codes coefficients the same way but with different codebooks. I’ve tried to hack IMC decoder to make it use proper tables but it still decodes garbage.

Along with Indeo4 decoder it would make our Intel codec family complete, but unfortunately we have decoder for neither.

ClearVideo

The codec that was present in AVI, QT and RealMedia. My investigations showed that it was not-so-fractal codec, it still codes blocks with DCT and even does that in simpler fashion than H.263. Though a patent assigned to Iterated System describes what can be the base of this codec: DCT-based codec that uses fractal search to determine the best code for the current block or something like this. Maybe that’s the reason why there are no Huffman tables in decoder while it obviously uses some.

RALF

That’s rather special lossless codec that stands aside from other RealMedia codecs: the file format was altered for that codec (so far I’ve seen only standalone RALF files, not, say, RV40+RALF).

It looks like the codec is rather simple and employs context-dependent codes instead of generic ones. I remember finding about eight hundred static Huffman tables in decoder for that purpose.

Also codec developers were very grateful to their source of inspiration, that’s why codec IS is “LSD:”.

WMA Lossless

Nothing much to say about it. As I remember, it uses infinite impulse response filters for compression and least squares method for finding (and maybe updating) filter coefficients. Should be not so hard to RE but nobody bothered so far.

M$ Screen 1 and 2 (aka WM Screen)

I’ve dabbled in REing MSS1, not MSS2 (which was later relabeled as WM Screen) but they should be related.

MSS1 was rather simple screen codec based on classic arithmetic coding (with adaptive models too IIRC) and binary partitioning. So decoding process was simple: get point for subframe division (horizontal and vertical) and modes for decoding those partitions (fill, skip, subdivide).

VoxWare MetaSound

This codec is obviously based on TwinVQ, it even has similar huge tables for different samplerates and bitrates and I found almost the same header reading code.

In conclusion I want to say that if somebody wants to RE those codecs he’ll be more than welcome (especially for Apple ProRes but I don’t care about it much).

Posted in RealVideo, Useless Rants | 2 Comments »

That is not dead which can eternal buffer, And with strange aeons RALF may be implemented.

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

And now for something completely different, a post about our favourite eldritch abomination (the word “buffering” should tell it all).

I’ve decided to spend some time on RealVideo codecs.

  • RM demuxer — the one in Libav is based on some scarce guesswork and does many things incorrectly (reporting incorrect FPS, reporting PTS while container stores only DTS, ignoring interleavers, selecting video codec by version reported in its extradata, etc.). I hope improve it a bit or kill trying.
  • RV1/2 — our decoder is based mostly on guesswork, I’ve looked at it and tried to correct header parsing at least. For these codecs internal version number actually matters for bitstream reading. Another funny fact: Real didn’t develop RV2 fully by themselves, they based it on Intel ILVC sources (even some header from Helix distribution says it and I wondered why some functions in RV2 have Hive* names like in Indeo 4 and 5). Also decoder sports some artefacts related to motion vectors outside picture boundaries, maybe it will be fixed too.
  • RV3 — there was a problem with chroma drift, it’s finally fixed.
  • RV4 — there’s well-known problem caused by lack of weighted MC. I’ve finally implemented it, after some cleaning and related work on RV3/4 decoder it should appear in Libav soon.

P.S. So far there are two codecs not supported by Libav, RALF (yet another pointless lossless audio format in its own special container too, or in slightly twisted RM at least) and ClearVideo (yes, it was possible to have non-RV there, anybody remembers that fractal codec?). While RALF is unlikely to be implemented ever (I think I wrote about it once), ClearVideo might be supported eventually but don’t hold your breath on it.

Posted in RealVideo | 5 Comments »

Är du från Norrland?

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

That’s the question you may ask when you see what I’ve eaten. Since it’s August, it’s the best time to try the famous Norrlandish product (if you ever dare, most people don’t).

A Tin of You-Know-What

A Tin of You-Know-What

I would lie if I say that I’ve eaten it all, I’ve managed to eat only two or three bits (with hard bread from Wasa and local milk). That should be enough for a lifetime.

As for common beliefs: yes, it’s easy to open the tin without getting sprayed by fluid (though I wore a T-shirt with FFmpeg logotype just in case); the stench is not that vile (especially if you freeze or cool it before opening and you can bear garbage dumps in heat) though it’s definitely better to open the tin outside and away from houses and maybe catching cold; the taste is rich, salty and quite peculiar so it’s better left to the gourmets.

At least it’s an excuse to drink a bottle of Trocadero.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed