Kostya's Boring Codec World

This is a translation of this page by unknown author. It’s rather old but recently I remembered it for some reason and decided to share.

Day One

A hacker comes to a diner and sees that salt shaker can be opened by anyone and anything can be put inside. The hacker comes home and writes a letter to the diner manager: “I, meG@Duc, have found a salt shaker vulnerability in your diner. A malicious person can open it and put poison there! Please fix it!”

Day Two

Diner manager gets that mail along with other correspondence and shrugs: “What an imagination”

Day Five

The hacker comes to diner and puts some poison into every salt shaker. Three hundred people are dead, a criminal case against manager is closed after three months because there was no crime from his side. The hacker writes a letter “see now?”.

Day Ninety Six

Manager orders special salt shakers with a combination lock. Diner guests feel that they don’t get something.

Day Ninety Seven

Hacker discovers that holes in salt shaker pass salt in both direction (and other substances too). He writes a letter and pisses into ever salt shaker. Three hundred people don’t come there ever again, thirty people went to hospital with poisoning. Hacker sends manager a SMS “How d’ya like it?”. Manager spends three months being interrogated and a year on probation.

Day 188

Manager vows never to work at any diner ever again and be a lumberjack instead. Engineers are working on one-way salt shaker design. Meanwhile waiters remove all old salt shakers and give salt on demand.

Day 190

The hacker steals a salt shaker and researches it at home. Then he writes a new letter to the manager: “I, meG@Duc, stole a salt shaker and find this outraging! Anyone can steal a salt shaker from your diner!” So far abstinent manager goes home and drinks vodka.

Day 193

The hacker discovers that all salt shakers are chained to the tables. He talks about his achievements at the next hacker conference and receives an award for protecting society and customers’ needs. At least manages doesn’t find this out.

Day 194

All hackers from the conference make a devious plan. They go to the diner and take all salt from shakers. meG@Duc then writes another complaint about low customer service and that anyone can deprive everyone else of salt.

Thus a new salt shaker design is needed. Engineers are working on it while waiters still give salt on demand. Manages goes abroad and uses room service only — no cafes, bars or restaurants.

Day 200

Customers discover that in order to get salt they have to call waiter, show their ID and get special 8-digit one-time code for a salt shaker. Repeat the same for pepper.

It’s pretty obvious but I got requests to write this nevertheless.

All known containers suck, some of them suck gloriously, some of them plainly suck. And there’s Ogg Matroska Ogg.

There are several features that distinguish container usefulness:

• flexibility (supporting various codecs and number of streams);
• easy to parse;
• well-defined specification (there must be a format with such thing);
• metadata support;
• low overhead (bytes needed to define frame size and other properties);
• advanced features for insane people.

Now let’s review containers grouped by design.

Raw or raw with header. Those are the simplest and codec-specific. Besides being designed (usually) for only one stream and one codec, they often decide to save bits on frames and in result you have hard time implementing seeking (say hello to FLAC or Moosepack SV7). Some have seek table at least (old Monkey’s Audio has two — for byte and bit position).

Your favourite FLV belongs to this category — it has one audio and one video stream with no headers (and that’s why it has its own flavour of VP6 with frame dimensions stored at every frame) though one can abuse it to add a data stream. And of course some Chinese used it to store HEVC too in the stupidest way possible (for starters they have introduced half a dozen of different video codec IDs for it).

Chunk-based. The most popular category that refuses to go away. The best representative is RIFF (M$ ripoff of EA IFF format, there are many specific RIFF variants known — AVI, RMF, WAV, WebP) and runner-up is MOV/MP4. AVI is verily the pinnacle — flexible, extensible, every frame is its own chunk. What can go wrong with it? The usual thing: abuse. Too many idiots implemented their own AVI writers with whatever bugs they could introduce and it got even worse when codecs started to employ B-frames. Intel worked around by adding combined I+B-frame and dummy frame afterwards so decoder would handle it internally (you can see it both in Indeo 4 and their I.263). DiVX on the other tentacle… And variable framerate is not for AVI either (unless you simply use zero frames to define skips).

As for MOV/MP4 there seems to be a problem with parsing custom atoms (there are too many atom types around). And of course you have nice abuse like ASF packets stored inside MOV packets if you use Flip4Mac.

And if you replace chunks with an unholy mix of tags and UIDs you get MXF. That format doesn’t have a specification but rather a swarm of them so you don’t know which ones you’ll need to demux some file.

There’s NUT — probably the only format out there with two specifications and three or four implementations, each not agreeing with all other.

MPEG-TS inspired. MPEG-TS is one of overengineered container formats that nothing in this world would be able to demux a TS file with all possible features. And forget about seeking (unless you have an external index or build index yourself).

Of course such design inspired a lot of other formats that have some features of it but often those features are used without understanding why they are there. But result is good for streaming!!!1one

There’s ASF with crazy GUIDs for everything and fixed packet size (which means there’s no direct correspondence between ASF packet and stream packet anymore).

And there’s Ogg. Read this if you still haven’t.

Matroska. That’s a cancer — when you design container that should be able to contain everything and support any feature possible and it gets out of control you get Matroska. It’s based on binary XML, it can have any feature. And it stores every codec in its unique way — see what they call codec specs. So they save bytes here and there and demuxer should put them back, which is not nice, especially if you believe that demuxers and decoders do not need to know about each other.

If you wonder why I haven’t mentioned RealMedia, it’s because this format is an unholy mix of all categories:

• Old RealAudio is rather simple raw + header;
• RealMedia in general is chunk-based format (with a hack for B-frames even).
• Video frame can be split into several packets or several frames can be merged into single packet, a lot like MPEG-TS inspired formats.
• And they had mangled audio streams long before Matroska was here. Actually only some audio codecs data is stored as is, the rest is XORed or has permuted subpackets.

For the last few years I feel some disappointment with my work building up and now I try to explain why.

What kept me working on FFmpeg and later Libav?

Money? Well, I admit that it brought me ~$20000 during all those years of work and it was very helpful in my student years but it’s not that much really and wouldn’t be enough for living even in Ukraine.

Of course the main driving reason was fun of writing code and joy of being useful. I still remember being proud for a week for this commit. I still remember how it was fun (sometimes) to reverse engineer a codec and warm feeling when it’s done. I remember users thanking for the work done and asking for features.

Where did all go?

The project matured and now the situation got different. Previously you mostly had millions of clueless users asking how to transcode something to FLV that were tiring but easy to deal with, now you have more enterprise users that use our code often without acknowledging or contributing back (in the old times Picsearch gave us a database of audio and video files in Internet that used codecs we didn’t support — that’s one of the most valuable contributions ever). But that’s not what kills the fun, “security holes” do.

With an advance of automatic fuzz tools it’s easy to generate millions of damaged files that crash your decoder and yet there are no tools for generating correct patches. Fixing those crashes is tedious, requires a lot of thinking (should I disable it? will it affect decoding correct files? etc.) and in other words not fun at all. You have to balance between having decent code, ability to handle corrupted files and being robust — and in order to account for all possible corner cases in the code from the very beginning you should be more paranoid than FFmpeg leader. And somehow you cannot avoid it, you’re expected to fix it or else. This is like you’re on maintenance contract but without any form of compensation, you just get a mountain of corrupt samples and “have you fixed it yet?” every week. Or you get some “security vulnerability” reports with the same effect. I repeat, this is not fun — so why should I do it for free?

There is only one exception around called VideoLAN. Those guys really show (and not only show) some care and they give back to us. Just in my case I gave them all they wanted and I could give them.

As for the rest, world domination is not my goal, I don’t see fun in maintenance and noone is paying me to do it. Why should I continue?

So I’ll try to finish whatever projects I still have around and end it all. I’ve been around for 9.5 years after all, that’s long enough.

P.S. Maybe I should move to Oljonsbyn.