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• Announcing the first free software Blu-ray encoder

  25 avril 2010, par Dark Shikari — blu-ray, x264

  For many years it has been possible to make your own DVDs with free software tools. Over the course of the past decade, DVD creation evolved from the exclusive domain of the media publishing companies to something basically anyone could do on their home computer.

  But Blu-ray has yet to get that treatment. Despite the “format war” between Blu-ray and HD DVD ending over two years ago, free software has lagged behind. “Professional” tools for Blu-ray video encoding can cost as much as $100,000 and are often utter garbage. Here are two actual screenshots from real Blu-rays : I wish I was making this up.

  But today, things change. Today we take the first step towards a free software Blu-ray creation toolkit.

  Thanks to tireless work by Kieran Kunyha, Alex Giladi, Lamont Alston, and the Doom9 crowd, x264 can now produce Blu-ray-compliant video. Extra special thanks to The Criterion Collection for sponsoring the final compliance test to confirm x264′s Blu-ray compliance.

  With x264′s powerful compression, as demonstrated by the incredibly popular BD-Rebuilder Blu-ray backup software, it’s quite possible to author Blu-ray disks on DVD9s (dual-layer DVDs) or even DVD5s (single-layer DVDs) with a reasonable level of quality. With a free software encoder and less need for an expensive Blu-ray burner, we are one step closer to putting HD optical media creation in the hands of the everyday user.

  To celebrate this achievement, we are making available for download a demo Blu-ray encoded with x264, containing entirely free content !

  On this Blu-ray are the Open Movie Project films Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream, available under a Creative Commons license. Additionally, Microsoft has graciously provided about 6 minutes of lossless HD video and audio (from part of a documentary project) under a very liberal license. This footage rounds out the Blu-ray by adding some difficult live-action content in addition to the relatively compressible CGI footage from the Open Movie Project. Finally, we used this sound sample, available under a Creative Commons license.

  You may notice that the Blu-ray image is only just over 2GB. This is intentional ; we have encoded all the content on the disk at appropriate bitrates to be playable from an ordinary 4.7GB DVD. This should make it far easier to burn a copy of the Blu-ray, since Blu-ray burners and writable media are still relatively rare. Most Blu-ray players will treat a DVD containing Blu-ray data as a normal Blu-ray disc. A few, such as the Playstation 3, will not, but you can still play it as a data disc.

  Finally, note that (in accordance with the Blu-ray spec) the disc image file uses the UDF 2.5 filesystem, which may be incompatible with some older virtual drive and DVD burning applications. You’ll also need to play it on an actual Blu-ray player if you want to get the menus and such working correctly. If you’re looking to play it on a PC, a free trial of Arcsoft TMT is available here.

  What are you waiting for ? Grab a copy today !

  UPDATE : Here is an AVCHD-compliant version of the above, which should work better when burned on a DVD-5 instead of a BD-R. (mirror)
  

  What’s left before we have a fully free software Blu-ray creation toolkit ? Audio is already dealt with ; AC3 audio (aka Dolby Digital), the format used in DVD, is still supported by Blu-ray, and there are many free software AC3 encoders. The primary missing application is a free software Blu-ray authoring tool, to combine the video and audio streams to create a Blu-ray file structure with the menus, chapters, and so forth that we have all come to expect. But the hardest part is dealt with : we can now create compatible video and audio streams.

  In the meantime, x264 can be used to create streams to be authored using Blu-Print, Scenarist, Encore or other commercial authoring tools.

  More detailed documentation on the new Blu-ray support and how to use it can be found in the official commit message. Do keep in mind that you have to export to raw H.264 (not MKV or MP4) or else the buffering information will be slightly incorrect. Finally, also note that the encoding settings given as an example are not a good choice for general-purpose encoding : they are intentionally crippled by Blu-ray restrictions, which will significantly reduce compression for ordinary non-Blu-ray encoding.

  In addition to Blu-ray support, the aforementioned commit comes with a lot of fun extras :

  x264 now has native variable-framerate ratecontrol, which makes sure your encodes get a correct target bitrate and proper limiting of maximum bitrate even if the duration of every frame is different and the “framerate” is completely unknown. This helps a lot when encoding from variable-framerate container formats such as FLV and WMV, along with variable-framerate content such as anime.

  x264 now supports pulldown (telecine) in much the same fashion as it is handled in MPEG-2. The calling application can pass in flags representing how to display a frame, allowing easy transcoding from MPEG-2 sources with pulldown, such as broadcast television. The x264 commandline app contains some examples of these (such as the common 3:2 pulldown pattern).

  x264 now also exports HRD timing information, which is critical for compliant transport stream muxing. There is currently an active project to write a fully DVB-compatible free software TS muxer that will be able to interface with x264 for a seamless free software broadcast system. It will likely also be possible to repurpose this muxer as part of a free software Blu-ray authoring package.

  All of this is now available in the latest x264.

  http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/bluray%20fail.png

• How to best convert Flash compatible mp4 files with FFMPEG ?

  15 décembre 2014, par espenhogbakk

  I am trying to convert different files to a flash compatible .mp4 file with ffmpeg, but I can’t seem to get it to work. Of course the objective is to get the greatest quality with the smallest file size.

  So far I have this, which works, but it doesn’t play in a flash player for some reason. The result isn’t that great, how can I improve this conversion ?

  This is the command I’m using :

  ffmpeg -i input.file -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -r 25 -b 560000 -s 610x340 -acodec aac -ac 2 -ab 64 -ar 44100 output.file

• Bit-field badness

  30 janvier 2010, par Mans — Compilers, Optimisation

  Consider the following C code which is based on an real-world situation.

  struct bf1_31 
      unsigned a:1 ;
      unsigned b:31 ;
   ;
  void func(struct bf1_31 *p, int n, int a)
  
  
  
      int i = 0 ;
  
      do 
  
          if (p[i].a)
  
              p[i].b += a ;
  
       while (++i < n) ;
  
  
  

  How would we best write this in ARM assembler ? This is how I would do it :
  

  func :
          ldr     r3,  [r0], #4
          tst     r3,  #1
          add     r3,  r3,  r2,  lsl #1
          strne   r3,  [r0, #-4]
          subs    r1,  r1,  #1
          bgt     func
          bx      lr
  

  The add instruction is unconditional to avoid a dependency on the comparison. Unrolling the loop would mask the latency of the ldr instruction as well, but that is outside the scope of this experiment.

  Now compile this code with gcc -march=armv5te -O3 and watch in horror :

  func :
          push    r4
          mov     ip, #0
          mov     r4, r2
  loop :
          ldrb    r3, [r0]
          add     ip, ip, #1
          tst     r3, #1
          ldrne   r3, [r0]
          andne   r2, r3, #1
          addne   r3, r4, r3, lsr #1
          orrne   r2, r2, r3, lsl #1
          strne   r2, [r0]
          cmp     ip, r1
          add     r0, r0, #4
          blt     loop
          pop     r4
          bx      lr
  

  This is nothing short of awful :

  • The same value is loaded from memory twice.
  • A complicated mask/shift/or operation is used where a simple shifted add would suffice.
  • Write-back addressing is not used.
  • The loop control counts up and compares instead of counting down.
  • Useless mov in the prologue ; swapping the roles or r2 and r4 would avoid this.
  • Using lr in place of r4 would allow the return to be done with pop {pc}, saving one instruction (ignoring for the moment that no callee-saved registers are needed at all).

  Even for this trivial function the gcc-generated code is more than twice the optimal size and slower by approximately the same factor.

  The main issue I wanted to illustrate is the poor handling of bit-fields by gcc. When accessing bitfields from memory, gcc issues a separate load for each field even when they are contained in the same aligned memory word. Although each load after the first will most likely hit L1 cache, this is still bad for several reasons :

  • Loads have typically two or three cycles result latency compared to one cycle for data processing instructions. Any bit-field can be extracted from a register with two shifts, and on ARM the second of these can generally be achieved using a shifted second operand to a following instruction. The ARMv6T2 instruction set also adds the SBFX and UBFX instructions for extracting any signed or unsigned bit-field in one cycle.
  • Most CPUs have more data processing units than load/store units. It is thus more likely for an ALU instruction than a load/store to issue without delay on a superscalar processor.
  • Redundant memory accesses can trigger early flushing of store buffers rendering these less efficient.

  No gcc bashing is complete without a comparison with another compiler, so without further ado, here is the ARM RVCT output (armcc --cpu 5te -O3) :

  func :
          mov     r3, #0
          push    r4, lr
  loop :
          ldr     ip, [r0, r3, lsl #2]
          tst     ip, #1
          addne   ip, ip, r2, lsl #1
          strne   ip, [r0, r3, lsl #2]
          add     r3, r3, #1
          cmp     r3, r1
          blt     loop
          pop     r4, pc
  

  This is much better, the core loop using only one instruction more than my version. The loop control is counting up, but at least this register is reused as offset for the memory accesses. More remarkable is the push/pop of two registers that are never used. I had not expected to see this from RVCT.

  Even the best compilers are still no match for a human.