Kostya's Boring Codec World

The adjective is referring to the hype that the company that made this codec is run by designers (unlike some other companies where even design is made by developers or — even worse — marketers). And let’s call it AWIC or iNtermediate codec for short. Let’s not mention its name at all.

It is a rather old codec and it codes 8-bit YUV420 in 16×16 macroblocks with DCT, quantisation and static codes. Frame is divided into slices in such way so that there are not more than 32 slices on one line (and slice height is one macroblock). The main peculiarity is having scalable mode — every macroblock is partitioned into 8×8 sub-macroblock (i.e. 8×8 luma block and two 4×4 chroma blocks) with the following data for the rest of the block, and this is exploited for decoding frames in half-width, half-height or half-width half-height modes.

Maybe I’ll write a decoder for it after all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 12th, 2013 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Intermediate Video Codecs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.