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• Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

  9 février 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Controversy arose last week when Google accused Microsoft of stealing search engine results for their Bing search engine. It was a pretty novel sting operation and Google did a good job of visually illustrating their side of the story on their official blog.

  This reminds me of the fact that Google’s YouTube video hosting site uses FFmpeg for converting videos. Not that this is in the same league as the search engine shenanigans (it’s perfectly legit to use FFmpeg in this capacity, but to my knowledge, Google/YouTube has never confirmed FFmpeg usage), but I thought I would revisit this item and illustrate it with screenshots. This is not new information— I first empirically tested this fact 4 years ago. However, a lot of people wonder how exactly I can identify FFmpeg on the backend when I claim that I’ve written code that helps power YouTube.

  Short Answer
  How do I know YouTube uses FFmpeg to convert multimedia ? Because :

  1. FFmpeg can decode a number of impossibly obscure multimedia formats using code I wrote
  2. YouTube can transcode many of the same formats
  3. I screwed up when I wrote the code to support some of these weird formats
  4. My mistakes are still present when YouTube transcodes certain fringe formats

  Longer Answer (With Pictures !)
  Let’s take a video format named RoQ, developed by noted game designer Graeme Devine. Originated for use in the FMV-heavy game The 11th Hour, the format eventually found its way into the Quake 3 engine as well as many games derived from the same technology.

  Dr. Tim Ferguson reverse engineered the format (though it would later be open sourced along with the rest of the Q3 engine). I wrote a RoQ playback system for FFmpeg, and I messed up in doing so. I believe my coding error helps demonstrate the case I’m trying to make here.

  Observe what happened when I pushed the jk02.roq sample through YouTube in my original experiment 4 years ago :

  
  
  

  Do you see how the canyon walls bleed into the sky ? That’s not supposed to happen. FFmpeg doesn’t do that anymore but I was able to go back into the source code history to find when it did do that :

  
  
  

  Academic Answer
  FFmpeg fixed this bug in June of 2007 (thanks to Eric Lasota). The problem had to do with premature colorspace conversion in my original decoder.

  Leftovers
  I tried uploading the video again to see if the problem persists in YouTube’s transcoder. First bit of trivia : YouTube detects when you have uploaded the same video twice and rejects the subsequent attempts. So I created a double concatenation of the video and uploaded it. The problem is gone, illustrating that the backend is actually using a newer version of FFmpeg. This surprises me for somewhat esoteric reasons.

  Here’s another interesting bit of trivia for those who don’t do a lot of YouTube uploading— YouTube reports format details when you upload a video :

  
  
  

  So, yep, RoQ format. And you can wager that this will prompt me to go back through the litany of unusual formats that FFmpeg supports to see how YouTube responds.

• How to contribute to open source, for companies

  18 octobre 2010, par Dark Shikari — development, open source, x264

  I have seen many nigh-incomprehensible attempts by companies to contribute to open source projects, including x264. Developers are often simply boggled, wondering why the companies seem incapable of proper communication. The companies assume the developers are being unreceptive, while the developers assume the companies are being incompetent, idiotic, or malicious. Most of this seems to boil down to a basic lack of understanding of how open source works, resulting in a wide variety of misunderstandings. Accordingly, this post will cover the dos and don’ts of corporate contribution to open source.

  Do : contact the project using their preferred medium of communication.

  Most open source projects use public methods of communication, such as mailing lists and IRC. It’s not the end of the world if you mistakenly make contact with the wrong people or via the wrong medium, but be prepared to switch to the correct one once informed ! You may not be experienced using whatever form of communication the project uses, but if you refuse to communicate through proper channels, they will likely not be as inclined to assist you. Larger open source projects are often much like companies in that they have different parts to their organization with different roles. Don’t assume that everyone is a major developer !

  If you don’t know what to do, a good bet is often to just ask someone.

  Don’t : contact only one person.

  Open source projects are a communal effort. Major contributions are looked over by multiple developers and are often discussed by the community as a whole. Yet many companies tend to contact only a single person in lieu of dealing with the project proper. This has many flaws : to begin with, it forces a single developer (who isn’t paid by you) to act as your liaison, adding yet another layer between what you want and the people you want to talk to. Contribution to open source projects should not be a game of telephone.

  Of course, there are exceptions to this : sometimes a single developer is in charge of the entirety of some particular aspect of a project that you intend to contribute to, in which case this might not be so bad.

  Do : make clear exactly what it is you are contributing.

  Are you contributing code ? Development resources ? Money ? API documentation ? Make it as clear as possible, from the start ! How developers react, which developers get involved, and their expectations will depend heavily on what they think you are providing. Make sure their expectations match reality. Great confusion can result when they do not.

  This also applies in the reverse — if there’s something you need from the project, such as support or assistance with development of your patch, make that explicitly clear.

  Don’t : code dump.

  Code does not have intrinsic value : it is only useful as part of a working, living project. Most projects react very negatively to large “dumps” of code without associated human resources. That is, they expect you to work with them to finalize the code until it is ready to be committed. Of course, it’s better to work with the project from the start : this avoids the situation of writing 50,000 lines of code independently and then finding that half of it needs to be rewritten. Or, worse, writing an enormous amount of code only to find it completely unnecessary.

  Of course, the reverse option — keeping such code to yourself — is often even more costly, as it forces you to maintain the code instead of the official developers.

  Do : ignore trolls.

  As mentioned above, many projects use public communication methods — which, of course, allow anyone to communicate, by nature of being public. Not everyone on a project’s IRC or mailing list is necessarily qualified to officially represent the project. It is not too uncommon for a prospective corporate contributor to be turned off by the uninviting words of someone who isn’t even involved in the project due to assuming that they were. Make sure you’re dealing with the right people before making conclusions.

  Don’t : disappear.

  If you are going to try to be involved in a project, you need to stay in contact. We’ve had all too many companies who simply disappear after the initial introduction. Some tell us that we’ll need an NDA, then never provide it or send status updates. You may know why you’re not in contact — political issues at the company, product launch crunches, a nice vacation to the Bahamas — but we don’t ! If you disappear, we will assume that you gave up.

  Above all, don’t assume that being at a large successful company makes you immune to these problems. If anything, these problems seem to be the most common at the largest companies. I didn’t name any names in this post, but practically every single one of these rules has been violated at some point by companies looking to contribute to x264. In the larger scale of open source, these problems happen constantly. Don’t fall into the same traps that many other companies have.

  If you’re an open source developer reading this post, remember it next time you see a company acting seemingly nonsensically in an attempt to contribute : it’s quite possible they just don’t know what to do. And just because they’re doing it wrong doesn’t mean that it isn’t your responsibility to try to help them do it right.

• How to port signal() to sigaction() ?

  28 septembre 2016, par Shark

  due to recent problems discovered with NDK12 and NDK13b2, i’m thinking of ’porting’ libx264’s use of signal() (and missing bsd_signal() in ndk12) to use sigaction() instead.

  The problem is, I’m not quite sure what’s the simple&fastest way to replace signal() calls with sigaction() ones.

  For all i see, it’s mainly used in x264-snapshot/common/cpu.c in the following manner :

  using the following signal handler :

  static void sigill_handler( int sig )
  
  {
  
      if( !canjump )
  
      {
  
          signal( sig, SIG_DFL );
  
          raise( sig );
  
      }
  
  
  
      canjump = 0;
  
      siglongjmp( jmpbuf, 1 );
  
  }

  This is the problematic x264_cpu_detect function... currently, i’m guessing i only need to tackle the ARM version, but i’ ; ; still have to replace all occurances of signal() with sigaction() so i might just cover both of them to get the thing building...

  FYI - the NDK13 beta2 still has "unstable" libc and the build doesn’t fail on this part, but rather the first invocation of the rand() function somewhere else... So i’m out of luck and replacing the signal() calls might be better than just waiting for the official NDK13 release. I’m doing this to get rid of text-relocations so i can run the library (and doubango) on API 24 (Android N)

  the problematic part of function that invokes signal() :

  #elif SYS_LINUX
  
  
  
  uint32_t x264_cpu_detect( void )
  
  {
  
      static void (*oldsig)( int );
  
  
  
      oldsig = signal( SIGILL, sigill_handler );
  
      if( sigsetjmp( jmpbuf, 1 ) )
  
      {
  
          signal( SIGILL, oldsig );
  
          return 0;
  
      }
  
  
  
      canjump = 1;
  
      asm volatile( "mtspr 256, %0\n\t"
  
                    "vand 0, 0, 0\n\t"
  
                    :
  
                    : "r"(-1) );
  
      canjump = 0;
  
  
  
      signal( SIGILL, oldsig );
  
  
  
      return X264_CPU_ALTIVEC;
  
  }
  
  #endif
  
  
  
  #elif ARCH_ARM
  
  
  
  void x264_cpu_neon_test( void );
  
  int x264_cpu_fast_neon_mrc_test( void );
  
  
  
  uint32_t x264_cpu_detect( void )
  
  {
  
      int flags = 0;
  
  #if HAVE_ARMV6
  
      flags |= X264_CPU_ARMV6;
  
  
  
      // don't do this hack if compiled with -mfpu=neon
  
  #if !HAVE_NEON
  
      static void (* oldsig)( int );
  
      oldsig = signal( SIGILL, sigill_handler );
  
      if( sigsetjmp( jmpbuf, 1 ) )
  
      {
  
          signal( SIGILL, oldsig );
  
          return flags;
  
      }
  
  
  
      canjump = 1;
  
      x264_cpu_neon_test();
  
      canjump = 0;
  
      signal( SIGILL, oldsig );
  
  #endif
  
  
  
      flags |= X264_CPU_NEON;
  
  
  
      // fast neon -> arm (Cortex-A9) detection relies on user access to the
  
      // cycle counter; this assumes ARMv7 performance counters.
  
      // NEON requires at least ARMv7, ARMv8 may require changes here, but
  
      // hopefully this hacky detection method will have been replaced by then.
  
      // Note that there is potential for a race condition if another program or
  
      // x264 instance disables or reinits the counters while x264 is using them,
  
      // which may result in incorrect detection and the counters stuck enabled.
  
      // right now Apple does not seem to support performance counters for this test
  
  #ifndef __MACH__
  
      flags |= x264_cpu_fast_neon_mrc_test() ? X264_CPU_FAST_NEON_MRC : 0;
  
  #endif
  
      // TODO: write dual issue test? currently it's A8 (dual issue) vs. A9 (fast      mrc)
  
  #endif
  
      return flags;
  
  }
  
  
  
  #else
  
  
  
  uint32_t x264_cpu_detect( void )
  
  {
  
      return 0;
  
  }

  So the question is really this : what would be the quickest/easiest//fastest way to replace the signal() calls with sigaction() ones while preserving the current functionality ?

  EDIT :
  The reason i’m trying to get rid of signal() are these build errors :

  /home/devshark/SCRATCH/doubango/thirdparties/android/armv5te/lib/dist/libx264.a(cpu.o):cpu.c:function sigill_handler: error: undefined reference to 'bsd_signal'
  
  
  
  /home/devshark/SCRATCH/doubango/thirdparties/android/armv5te/lib/dist/libx264.a(cpu.o):cpu.c:function x264_cpu_detect: error: undefined reference to 'bsd_signal'
  
  /home/devshark/SCRATCH/doubango/thirdparties/android/armv5te/lib/dist/libx264.a(cpu.o):cpu.c:function x264_cpu_detect: error: undefined reference to 'bsd_signal'
  
  
  
  /home/devshark/SCRATCH/doubango/thirdparties/android/armv5te/lib/dist/libx264.a(cpu.o):cpu.c:function x264_cpu_detect: error: undefined reference to 'bsd_signal'

  I already know that this is a known NDK12 problem, that might be solved by bringing bsd_signal back to the libc in NDK13. However, in it’ beta state with it’s unstable libc - it’s currently missing the rand() function and simply waiting for it might not do the trick. But in the worst-case scenario, i guess i’ll just have to wait for it and retry after it’s release.

  But as it currently is, the prebuilt version of the library i want to use has text-relocations and is being rejected by phones running newer API / version of the android OS.

  EDIT2 :
  I also know that signal() usually works by using sigaction() under the hood, but maybe i won’t get bsd_signal related build-errors... since i’m suspecting that this one isn’t using it. It’s obviously using bsd_signal, which may or may not be the same underlying thing :/