Kostya's Boring Codec World

Recently I’ve been contacted by some guy working on a mod campaign for Heroes of Might and Magic III. The question was about the encoder for videos there. And since the original one is not likely to exist, I just wrote a simple one that would take PGMYUV image sequence and encode it. Here’s the gzipped source.

It took a couple of evenings to do that mostly because I still have weak symptoms of creeping perfectionism (thankfully it’s treated with my laziness). BIKb does not have Huffman-coded bundles, so the simplest straightforward encoding would be: write block type bundle (13-bit size and 4-bit elements), write empty other bundles, write several bundles containing pixels and you’re done. There’s a proper approach: write a full-featured encoder that takes input in several formats and that encodes using all possible features selecting the best quality for the target bitrate. There’s a hacky approach—translate later versions of Bink into BIKb (and then you remember that it has different motion compensation scheme so this approach won’t work). I’ve chosen something simple yet with some effectiveness: write an encoder that employs only vector quantisation and motion compensation for non-overlapped blocks plus add a quality setting so users can play with output size/quality if they really need it.

So how does the block encoding work? Block truncation coding, the fast and good way to quantise block into two colours (many video codecs back in the day used it and only some dared to use vector quantisation for more than two different values per block). Essentially you just calculate average pixel value and select two values depending on how many pixels in the block are larger than average and by how much they deviate. And here’s where quality parameter comes into play: depending on it encoder sets the threshold above which block is coded as is (aka full mode) instead as two colours and pattern in which they occur (of course if it’s a solid-colour fill it’s always coded as such). As I said, it’s simple but quite effective. Motion compensation is currently lossless i.e. encoder will try to find only the block that matches exactly (again, it can be improved but that would only lead to longer implementation times and even longer debugging times). This makes me appreciate the work on Smacker and Bink 1 video codecs and encoders for them even more.

Overall, it was a nice diversion from implementing Duck decoders for NihAV but I should probably return to it. The sooner it’s done the sooner I can move to something more exciting like finally experimenting with vector quantisation, or trying to write a player, or something else entirely. I avoid making plans but there are many possibilities at hoof so I just need to pick one.

Since obviously I have nothing better to do, here’s a description of loop filter in Bink2 as much as I understand it (i.e. not much really).

First, the loop filter makes decision on two factors: motion vector difference between adjacent blocks is greater than two or it selects filter strength depending on number of coefficients coded in the block (that one I don’t remember seeing before). The filter is the same in all cases (inter/intra, luma/chroma, edge/inside macroblock), only the number of pixels filtered varies between zero and two on each side (more on that later). This is nice and elegant design IMO.

Second, filtering is done after each macroblock, horizontal edges first, vertical edges after that—but not necessarily for all macroblocks. Since BIKi or BIKj encoder can signal “do not deblock macroblocks in these rows and columns” by transmitting set of flags for columns and rows.

Third, in addition to normal filtering decoder can do something that I still don’t understand but it looks like whole-block overlapping in both directions (and it is performed in actual decoding but I don’t know what happens with the result of it).

And the filter itself is not that interesting (assuming we filter buf[0] buf[1] | buf[2] buf[3]:

    diff0 = buf[2] - buf[1] + 8 >> 4;
    diff1 = diff0 * 4 + 8 >> 4;
    if (left_strength >= 2)
        buf[0] = clip8(buf[0] + diff0);
    if (left_strength >= 1)
        buf[1] = clip8(buf[1] + diff1);
    if (right_strength >= 1)
        buf[2] = clip8(buf[2] - diff1);
    if (right_strength >= 2)
        buf[3] = clip8(buf[3] - diff0);

Strength is determined like this: 0 — more than 8 coefficients coded, 1 – MV difference or 4-7 coefficients coded, 2 — 1-3 coefficients coded, 3 — no coefficients coded.

Overall, the loop filter is nice and simple if you ignore the existence of some additional filter functions and very optimised implementation that is not that much fun to untangle.

Update: the alternative function seems to be some kind of block reconstruction based on DCs. In case it’s intra block with less than four coefficients coded it will take all neighbouring DCs, select those not differing by more than a frame-defined threshold and smooth the differences. I still don’t understand its purpose in full though.

Inter block residue decoding is not different from intra block decoding except that DCs are expected to be in -1023…1023 range instead of 0…2047 and quantisation matrix for luma is different.

Posts about reconstruction process might follow.

Chroma block coding is similar to luma but with some changes since there are only 4 blocks coded here.

Thus, CBP is coded as two nibbles (real CBP and VLC switch) and it does not try to reuse nibbles from last CBP in code.

There are only 4 DCs here but they are decoded the same way.

AC block decoding is completely the same.