Indeo 3: codebooks

As you probably remember, Indeo 3 has 21 codebook. In theory you’d expect them to correspond to coarser quantisers, in reality it’s not that easy. For starters, codebooks 8-15 trigger requantisation of the reference, i.e. in intra mode the top line used for prediction is replaced with coarser values. Yes, it really modifies previously decoded data. And for inter mode it does the same on the previous frame for the first line of the reference block. I’ve decided to enable codebooks 8-15 only for intra mode and not even attempt to use codebooks 16-20 at all. So, what can I achieve with those?

I’ve started experimenting with rate control so I encoded various kinds of samples (albeit small and short) and here are the results:

  • codebook set 0-7 and 8-15 give about the same frame sizes (i.e. it does not matter if you take e.g. codebook 2 or 10);
  • an average intra frame size decreases with codebook number but with inter frames some codebooks result in larger frames (sometimes codebook 2 resulted in larger P-frames than with any other codebook but codebook 6; in other case codebook 5 gave the smallest frames);
  • not forcing a codebook noticeably improves compression of P-frames compared to always using codebook 0 and has almost no effect on I-frames;
  • I-frame to P-frame size ratio varies greatly on the content: for realistic content with a lot of changes it is about 1:1, for videos with low motion and changes it can get to 1:3 or even more.

Maybe the compression ratio can be improved by fiddling with the (completely arbitrary) thresholds I use for some decisions (e.g. if the cell should be coded or marked as skipped). I’ve made them options so all zero people who want to play with it should be able to do that.

So far I think I’ll make rate control in a simple manner: all frames will be treated as potentially of equal size, codebook number will be adjusted depending on the expected and obtained frame sizes and if it overshoots I’ll try to re-encode it with a neighbouring codebook (as this may change frame size drastically).

I’ll write about the results when I have them.

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