Kostya's Boring Codec World

After long considerations and much hesitation NihAV finally accepts its first developer (that would be me). And for a change it will be written in Rust. First, it’s an interesting language worth learning; second, it seems to offer needed functionality without much hassle; third, it offers new features that are tempting to try. By new features I mostly mean enums, traits and functions bound to structures.

Previously I expressed the intent to do a completely new design of multimedia (mostly decoding) framework with decoders being assembled from smaller blocks. For example, if I’d implement VIVO H.263 decoder (just as a troll) it would contain these bits:

• generic 8×8 block decoder interface that does common stuff for such decoders (maintaining block indices, filling frame information e.g. block type, motion vectors etc etc);
• trait for 8×8 block decoder implementation that does actual bitstream decoding (functions for decoding GOP/picture/slice headers, MV prediction, block data decoding and such);
• IPB frame shuffler as implementation of generic frame shuffler (i.e. that piece of code that selects which frames to use as references and which frame to output after decoding the current one);
• maybe even custom codebook accessor (the piece of code that tells codebook generator what is the code and symbol at position N) so it doesn’t need to be converted into some fixed form.

There’s not much code written yet but there are some bits implemented: rudimentary universal bitstream reader, bytestream reader (the same for memory and file I/O) and semi-working framework for demuxing. That’s a start at least.

Side rant: it seems that visible languages (i.e. not completely obscure ones) that use := form assignment have rather unpleasant evangelists (full of themselves in the best case, actively pushing their language to replace everything else in the worst case). That includes Go, Oberon and Wolfram Language. I don’t mean that other languages are free of that problem but in these cases looks like the majority of posts or articles about such language are written from this position.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 6th, 2017 at 5:32 am and is filed under NihAV, Useless Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.