Kostya's Boring Codec World

Surprisingly, there’s still some life in NihAV and some progress time from time.

So I’ve debugged RealVideo 2 decoding and verified B-part of PB-frame reconstruction in Intel.263 decoder against the binary specification. Mind you, the latter is not likely to be seen supported by libavcodec ever. First, it’s a fringe feature for extremely old video codecs nobody cares about any more and, second, unlike later codecs, B-part is stored along with P-frame data (i.e. first you have macroblock header for P- or I-macroblock, then macroblock header for B-macroblock, then macroblock coefficients for P-part and then macroblock coefficients for B-part). Other codecs simply pack B-frame along with reference frame but here data is interleaved. I’ve added some support for skipping B-part in libavcodec H.263 decoder (exactly nine years ago!) but decoding two frames in parallel would require some serious hacking of infamous MpegEncContext-using core so it’s very unlikely to happen.

And directions for near future still include RealVideo 3/4 and all RealAudio codecs. Fun fact: two of those are patent-free now—ATSC A/52 aka DNET and AAC-LC (but probably not SBR extension used in racp version). So if you implement them now you can flip a middle finger to both D*lby and Ferkel-herzen-Gesellschaft since new decoders can’t be covered by patent licenses. Not that I cared about it before.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2018 at 6:38 am and is filed under NihAV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.