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• Revision 56188 : On se permet de sauter de la version 2 à la version 3... parce que c’est ...

  2 janvier 2012, par marcimat@… — Log

  On se permet de sauter de la version 2 à la version 3... parce que c’est plus simple d’appeler ce nouveau plugin Champs Extras 3 pour SPIP 3 avec sa nouvelle implémentation utilisant Saisies...
   Champs Extras 2 étant ce plugin pour SPIP 2.x (ancienne implementation sans saisies)
   Champs Extra étant le très vieux plugin basé sur des extras serializés, et relégué dans le grenier, qui avaient été sortis du core en 2.0…

• 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

• Announcing the World’s Worst VP8 Encoder

  5 octobre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — Outlandish Brainstorms, VP8

  I wanted to see if I could write an extremely basic VP8 encoder. It turned out to be one of the hardest endeavors I have ever attempted (and arguably one of the least successful).

  Results
  I started with the Big Buck Bunny title image :

  
  
  

  And this is the best encoding that this experiment could yield :

  
  
  

  Squint hard enough and you can totally make out the logo. Pretty silly effort, I know. It should also be noted that the resultant .webm file holding that single 400×225 image was 191324 bytes. When FFmpeg decoded it to a PNG, it was only 187200 bytes.

  The Story
  Remember my post about a naive SVQ1 encoder ? Long story short, I set out to do the same thing with VP8. (I wanted to the same thing with VP3/Theora for years. But take a good look at what it would entail to create even the most basic bitstream. As involved as VP8 may be, its bitstream is absolutely trivial compared to VP3/Theora.)
  

  With the naive SVQ1 encoder, the goal was to create a minimally compliant SVQ1 encoded bitstream. For this exercise, I similarly hypothesized what it would take to create the most basic, syntactically correct VP8 bitstream with the least amount of effort. These are the overall steps I came up with :

  • Intra-only
  • Create a basic bitstream header that disables any extra features (no modification of default tables)
  • Use a static quantizer
  • Use intra 16×16 coding for each macroblock
  • Use vertical prediction for the 16×16 intra coding

  For coding each macroblock :

  • Subtract vertical predictor from each row
  • Perform forward transform on each 4×4 sub block
  • Perform forward WHT on luma plane DCT coefficients
  • Pack the coefficients into the bitstream via the Boolean encoder

  It all sounds so simple. But, like I said in the SVQ1 post, it’s all very much like carefully bootstrapping a program to run on a particular CPU, and the VP8 decoder serves as the CPU. I’m confident that I have the bitstream encoding correct because, at the very least, the decoder agrees precisely with the encoder about the numbers represented by those 0s and 1s.

  What’s Wrong ?
  Compromises were made for the sake of getting some vaguely recognizable image encoded in a minimally valid manner. One big stumbling block is that I couldn’t seem to encode an end of block (EOB) condition correctly. I then realized that it’s perfectly valid to just encode a lot of zero coefficients rather than signaling EOB. An encoding travesty, I know, and likely one reason that the resulting filesize is so huge.

  More drama occurred when I hit my first block that had all zeros. There were complications in that situation that I couldn’t seem to avoid. So I forced the first AC coefficient to be 1 in that case. Hey, the decoder liked it.

  As for the generally weird look of the decoded image, I’m thinking that could either be : A) an artifact of forcing 16×16 vertical prediction or ; or B) a mistake in the way that I transformed and predicted stuff before sending it to the decoder. The smart money is on a combination of both A and B.

  Then again, as the SVQ1 experiment demonstrated, I shouldn’t expect extraordinary visual quality when setting the bar this low (i.e., just getting some bag of bits that doesn’t make the decoder barf).