Archive for February, 2022

VP7 encoder: various bits

Sunday, February 27th, 2022

As the world tries to avert attention from an insane dictator re-enacting 1939 (it gets funnier since I observe it from Germany), I should also do something to take my mind off constant worrying about my parents and other relatives in one of the Ukrainian cities under attack. Hence this significantly less unpleasant thing.

Now my encoder is conceptually done, all that is left to do is to fix a leftover bug or two, improve a thing of two, clean the code up and integrate it nicely with the rest of nihav-duck crate by splitting off common parts with VP6 encoder. Meanwhile I can talk about some things implemented since the last time and what wasn’t.
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The Prayer

Thursday, February 24th, 2022

I do not like to state my political views publicly but sadly this is the right occasion.

I’m not a religious man so I know only just one prayer, the main Ukrainian prayer:

Дякую тобі, Боже, що я не москаль.

(translation: “thank you, God, that I’m not a Russian”). We live in a sad world where I’m really grateful for that.

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The problem with opensource encoders

Sunday, February 20th, 2022

Disclaimer: this post is about the general situation with existing (and even more, with non-existing) opensource encoders (for both audio and video) and not about the flaws in those encoders.

When I was developing my toy(ish) VP6 encoder, I got questions about it and general encoding technologies from many people (as in “one, two, many” but still it’s above the expected amount of zero). And then I remembered the reasons why there was no opensource VP6 encoder before I wrote one.

The main problem with opensource encoders is the shortage of talented people and the lack of environment to grow more of them. As the result, those who know how to write or tune encoders keep doing that or move to some other stuff (nowadays most of them who are remaining active seem to be sucked into rav1e and those who don’t know how to write encoders have very hard time learning how it should be done.
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Basic VP7 encoder: cutting corners

Thursday, February 17th, 2022

I’ve more or less completed a basic failure of VP7 encoder. Now it can encode inter-frames using various size of motion compensation (and the resulting file can be decoded too!). There’s still a lot of work to be done (rate control, MB features and multiple frame analysis) but there are some things that I can talk about as well.

As I wrote in the previous post, there are too many coding parameters to try so if you want to have a reasonable encoding done in reasonable time you need to cut corners (or “employ heuristics” if you want to sound more scientific) in various ways. So here I want to present what has been done in my decoder to make it run fast.
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Looking at Zig programming language

Saturday, February 5th, 2022

Back when I wrote my rant about C++ and its bad influence on C (yeah, about three quarters of year ago) I got recommendations to look at Zig and finally decided to download 0.9.0 release and play it. Long story short: it’s an interesting language with some good ideas but not the one I’d use.
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