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• Fighting with the VP8 Spec

  4 juin 2010, par Multimedia Mike — VP8

  As stated in a previous blog post on the matter, FFmpeg’s policy is to reimplement codecs rather than adopt other codebases wholesale. And so it is with Google’s recently open sourced VP8 codec, the video portion of their Webm initiative. I happen to know that the new FFmpeg implementation is in the capable hands of several of my co-developers so I’m not even worrying about that angle.

  Instead, I thought of another of my characteristically useless exercises : Create an independent VP8 decoder implementation entirely in pure Python. Silly ? Perhaps. But it has one very practical application : By attempting to write a new decoder based on the official bitstream documentation, this could serve as a mechanism for validating said spec, something near and dear to my heart.

  What is the current state of the spec ? Let me reiterate that I’m glad it exists. As I stated during the initial open sourcing event, everything that Google produced for the initial event went well beyond my wildest expectations. Having said that, the documentation does fall short in a number of places. Fortunately, I am on the Webm mailing lists and am sending in corrections and ideas for general improvement. For the most part, I have been able to understand the general ideas behind the decoding flow based on the spec and am even able to implement certain pieces correctly. Then I usually instrument the libvpx source code with output statements in order to validate that I’m doing everything right.

  Token Blocker
  Unfortunately, I’m quite blocked right now on the chapter regarding token/DCT coefficient decoding (chapter 13 in the current document iteration). In his seminal critique of the codec, Dark Shikari complained that large segments of the spec are just C code fragments copy and pasted from the official production decoder. As annoying as that is, the biggest insult comes at the end of section 13.3 :

  While we have in fact completely described the coefficient decoding procedure, the reader will probably find it helpful to consult the reference implementation, which can be found in the file detokenize.c.

  The reader most certainly will not find it helpful to consult the file detokenize.c. The file in question implements the coefficient residual decoding with an unholy sequence of C macros that contain goto statements. Honestly, I thought I did understand the coefficient decoding procedure based on the spec’s description. But my numbers don’t match up with the official decoder. Instrumenting or tracing macro’d code is obviously painful and studying the same code is making me think I don’t understand the procedure after all. To be fair, entropy decoding often occupies a lot of CPU time for many video decoders and I have little doubt that the macro/goto approach is much faster than clearer, more readable methods. It’s just highly inappropriate to refer to it for pedagogical purposes.

  Aside : For comparison, check out the reference implementation for the VC-1 codec. It was written so clearly and naively that the implementors used an O(n) Huffman decoder. That’s commitment to clarity.

  I wonder if my FFmpeg cohorts are having better luck with the DCT residue decoding in their new libavcodec implementation ? Maybe if I can get this Python decoder working, it can serve as a more appropriate reference decoder.

  Update : Almost immediately after I posted this entry, I figured out a big problem that was holding me back, and then several more small ones, and finally decoded by first correct DCT coefficient from the stream (I’ve never been so happy to see the number -448). I might be back on track now. Even better was realizing that my original understanding of the spec was correct.

  Unrelated
  I found this image on the Doom9 forums. I ROFL’d :
  

  
  
  

  It’s probably unfair and inaccurate but you have to admit it’s funny. Luckily, quality nitpickings aren’t my department. I’m just interested in getting codecs working, tested, and documented so that more people can use them reliably.

• Firefox 4 with WebM Support in Beta

  8 juillet 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther)

  Congratulations to the Mozilla team on releasing the first Beta of Firefox 4. Downloads for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are available on the Mozilla site.

  

• Brute Force Dimensional Analysis

  15 juillet 2010, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking, Python

  I was poking at the data files of a really bad (is there any other kind ?) interactive movie video game known simply by one letter : D. The Sega Saturn version of the game is comprised primarily of Sega FILM/CPK files, about which I wrote the book. The second most prolific file type bears the extension ’.dg2’. Cursory examination of sample files revealed an apparently headerless format. Many of the video files are 288x144 in resolution. Multiplying that width by that height and then doubling it (as in, 2 bytes/pixel) yields 82944, which happens to be the size of a number of these DG2 files. Now, if only I had a tool that could take a suspected raw RGB file and convert it to a more standard image format.

  Here’s the FFmpeg conversion recipe I used :

   ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb555 -s 288x144 -i raw_file -y output.png
  

  So that covers the files that are suspected to be 288x144 in dimension. But what about other file sizes ? My brute force approach was to try all possible dimensions that would yield a particular file size. The Python code for performing this operation is listed at the end of this post.

  It’s interesting to view the progression as the script compresses to different sizes :

  
  
  

  That ’D’ is supposed to be red. So right away, we see that rgb555(le) is not the correct input format. Annoyingly, FFmpeg cannot handle rgb555be as a raw input format. But this little project worked well enough as a proof of concept.

  If you want to toy around with these files (and I know you do), I have uploaded a selection at : http://multimedia.cx/dg2/.

  Here is my quick Python script for converting one of these files to every acceptable resolution.

  work-out-resolution.py :
  

  PLAIN TEXT

  PYTHON :

  1. # !/usr/bin/python
  2.  
  3. import commands
  4. import math
  5. import os
  6. import sys
  7.  
  8. FFMPEG = "/path/to/ffmpeg"
  9.  
  10. def convert_file(width, height, filename) :
  11.  outfile = "%s-%dx%d.png" % (filename, width, height)
  12.  command = "%s -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb555 -s %dx%d -i %s -y %s" % (FFMPEG, width, height, filename, outfile)
  13.  commands.getstatusoutput(command)
  14.  
  15. if len(sys.argv) <2 :
  16.  print "USAGE : work-out-resolution.py <file>"
  17.  sys.exit(1)
  18.  
  19. filename = sys.argv[1]
  20. if not os.path.exists(filename) :
  21.  print filename + " does not exist"
  22.  sys.exit(1)
  23.  
  24. filesize = os.path.getsize(filename) / 2
  25.  
  26. limit = int(math.sqrt(filesize)) + 1
  27. for i in xrange(1, limit) :
  28.  if filesize % i == 0 and filesize & 1 == 0 :
  29.   convert_file(i, filesize / i, filename)
  30.   convert_file(filesize / i, i, filename)