Finally the large chunk is finished: NihAV has finally got support for RealVideo 3 and 4!
Since I’ve learned a great deal more about codecs since the last time I wrote RealVideo 3/4 decoder (and specifications for both were leaked—they have mistakes but still clarify some things), I was able to write a new decoder that also seems to reconstruct frames better.
Some words on the design: I’ve split it into several parts as usual—common RV3/4 code, RV3/4 DSP, RV3 bitstream parser, RV3 DSP and RV4 bitstream parser and DSP. That’s the approach I’ve been using before and I’ll probably use it in future decoders as well. The only more or less interesting thing is how I did weighted motion compensation: instead of temporary buffer I allocate 16×16 frame that I use for storing temporary results and which is used later to average results (since motion compensation routines in RealVideo 3 and 4 differ while weighted averaging is the same it makes sense to split it into separate operation).
And now for the juicy part: benchmarks and performance. I’ve tested one of the RealVideo 4 trailers (namely swordfish.rmvb) and avconv -threads 1 -cpuflags 0 decodes it in 15 seconds, nihav-tool needs almost 25.
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