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• Anatomy of an optimization : H.264 deblocking

  26 mai 2010, par Dark Shikari — H.264, assembly, development, speed, x264

  As mentioned in the previous post, H.264 has an adaptive deblocking filter. But what exactly does that mean — and more importantly, what does it mean for performance ? And how can we make it as fast as possible ? In this post I’ll try to answer these questions, particularly in relation to my recent deblocking optimizations in x264.

  H.264′s deblocking filter has two steps : strength calculation and the actual filter. The first step calculates the parameters for the second step. The filter runs on all the edges in each macroblock. That’s 4 vertical edges of length 16 pixels and 4 horizontal edges of length 16 pixels. The vertical edges are filtered first, from left to right, then the horizontal edges, from top to bottom (order matters !). The leftmost edge is the one between the current macroblock and the left macroblock, while the topmost edge is the one between the current macroblock and the top macroblock.

  Here’s the formula for the strength calculation in progressive mode. The highest strength that applies is always selected.

  If we’re on the edge between an intra macroblock and any other macroblock : Strength 4
  If we’re on an internal edge of an intra macroblock : Strength 3
  If either side of a 4-pixel-long edge has residual data : Strength 2
  If the motion vectors on opposite sides of a 4-pixel-long edge are at least a pixel apart (in either x or y direction) or the reference frames aren’t the same : Strength 1
  Otherwise : Strength 0 (no deblocking)

  These values are then thrown into a lookup table depending on the quantizer : higher quantizers have stronger deblocking. Then the actual filter is run with the appropriate parameters. Note that Strength 4 is actually a special deblocking mode that performs a much stronger filter and affects more pixels.

  One can see somewhat intuitively why these strengths are chosen. The deblocker exists to get rid of sharp edges caused by the block-based nature of H.264, and so the strength depends on what exists that might cause such sharp edges. The strength calculation is a way to use existing data from the video stream to make better decisions during the deblocking process, improving compression and quality.

  Both the strength calculation and the actual filter (not described here) are very complex if naively implemented. The latter can be SIMD’d with not too much difficulty ; no H.264 decoder can get away with reasonable performance without such a thing. But what about optimizing the strength calculation ? A quick analysis shows that this can be beneficial as well.

  Since we have to check both horizontal and vertical edges, we have to check up to 32 pairs of coefficient counts (for residual), 16 pairs of reference frame indices, and 128 motion vector values (counting x and y as separate values). This is a lot of calculation ; a naive implementation can take 500-1000 clock cycles on a modern CPU. Of course, there’s a lot of shortcuts we can take. Here’s some examples :

  • If the macroblock uses the 8×8 transform, we only need to check 2 edges in each direction instead of 4, because we don’t deblock inside of the 8×8 blocks.
  • If the macroblock is a P-skip, we only have to check the first edge in each direction, since there’s guaranteed to be no motion vector differences, reference frame differences, or residual inside of the macroblock.
  • If the macroblock has no residual at all, we can skip that check.
  • If we know the partition type of the macroblock, we can do motion vector checks only along the edges of the partitions.
  • If the effective quantizer is so low that no deblocking would be performed no matter what, don’t bother calculating the strength.

  But even all of this doesn’t save us from ourselves. We still have to iterate over a ton of edges, checking each one. Stuff like the partition-checking logic greatly complicates the code and adds overhead even as it reduces the number of checks. And in many cases decoupling the checks to add such logic will make it slower : if the checks are coupled, we can avoid doing a motion vector check if there’s residual, since Strength 2 overrides Strength 1.

  But wait. What if we could do this in SIMD, just like the actual loopfilter itself ? Sure, it seems more of a problem for C code than assembly, but there aren’t any obvious things in the way. Many years ago, Loren Merritt (pengvado) wrote the first SIMD implementation that I know of (for ffmpeg’s decoder) ; it is quite fast, so I decided to work on porting the idea to x264 to see if we could eke out a bit more speed here as well.

  Before I go over what I had to do to make this change, let me first describe how deblocking is implemented in x264. Since the filter is a loopfilter, it acts “in loop” and must be done in both the encoder and decoder — hence why x264 has it too, not just decoders. At the end of encoding one row of macroblocks, x264 goes back and deblocks the row, then performs half-pixel interpolation for use in encoding the next frame.

  We do it per-row for reasons of cache coherency : deblocking accesses a lot of pixels and a lot of code that wouldn’t otherwise be used, so it’s more efficient to do it in a single pass as opposed to deblocking each macroblock immediately after encoding. Then half-pixel interpolation can immediately re-use the resulting data.

  Now to the change. First, I modified deblocking to implement a subset of the macroblock_cache_load function : spend an extra bit of effort loading the necessary data into a data structure which is much simpler to address — as an assembly implementation would need (x264_macroblock_cache_load_deblock). Then I massively cleaned up deblocking to move all of the core strength-calculation logic into a single, small function that could be converted to assembly (deblock_strength_c). Finally, I wrote the assembly functions and worked with Loren to optimize them. Here’s the result.

  And the timings for the resulting assembly function on my Core i7, in cycles :

  deblock_strength_c : 309
  deblock_strength_mmx : 79
  deblock_strength_sse2 : 37
  deblock_strength_ssse3 : 33

  Now that is a seriously nice improvement. 33 cycles on average to perform that many comparisons–that’s absurdly low, especially considering the SIMD takes no branchy shortcuts : it always checks every single edge ! I walked over to my performance chart and happily crossed off a box.

  But I had a hunch that I could do better. Remember, as mentioned earlier, we’re reloading all that data back into our data structures in order to address it. This isn’t that slow, but takes enough time to significantly cut down on the gain of the assembly code. And worse, less than a row ago, all this data was in the correct place to be used (when we just finished encoding the macroblock) ! But if we did the deblocking right after encoding each macroblock, the cache issues would make it too slow to be worth it (yes, I tested this). So I went back to other things, a bit annoyed that I couldn’t get the full benefit of the changes.

  Then, yesterday, I was talking with Pascal, a former Xvid dev and current video hacker over at Google, about various possible x264 optimizations. He had seen my deblocking changes and we discussed that a bit as well. Then two lines hit me like a pile of bricks :

  <_skal_> tried computing the strength at least ?
  <_skal_> while it’s fresh

  Why hadn’t I thought of that ? Do the strength calculation immediately after encoding each macroblock, save the result, and then go pick it up later for the main deblocking filter. Then we can use the data right there and then for strength calculation, but we don’t have to do the whole deblock process until later.

  I went and implemented it and, after working my way through a horde of bugs, eventually got a working implementation. A big catch was that of slices : deblocking normally acts between slices even though normal encoding does not, so I had to perform extra munging to get that to work. By midday today I was able to go cross yet another box off on the performance chart. And now it’s committed.

  Sometimes chatting for 10 minutes with another developer is enough to spot the idea that your brain somehow managed to miss for nearly a straight week.

  NB : the performance chart is on a specific test clip at a specific set of settings (super fast settings) relevant to the company I work at, so it isn’t accurate nor complete for, say, default settings.

  Update : Here’s a higher resolution version of the current chart, as requested in the comments.
  

  http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git ;a=commit ;h=b9ec3ea27812288485329ac7771143021cd4917b

• Media Fragment URI Specification in Last Call WD

  9 juillet 2010, par silvia

  After two years of effort, the W3C Media Fragment WG has now created a Last Call Working Draft document. This means that the working group is fairly confident that they have addressed all the required issues for media fragment URIs and their implementation on HTTP and is asking for outside (...)

• Why iFrame is a good idea

  15 octobre 2009

  I’ve seen some hilariously uninformed posts about the new Apple iFrame specification. Let me take a minute to explain what it actually is.

  First off, as opposed to what the fellow in the Washington Post writes, it’s not really a new format. iFrame is just a way of using formats that we’ve already know and love. As the name suggests, iFrame is just an i-frame only H.264 specification, using AAC audio. An intraframe version of H.264 eh ? Sounds a lot like AVC-Intra, right ? Exactly. And for exactly the same reasons - edit-ability. Whereas AVC-Intra targets the high end, iFrame targets the low end.

  Even when used in intraframe mode, H.264 has some huge advantage over the older intraframe codecs like DV or DVCProHD. For example, significantly better entropy coding, adaptive quantization, and potentially variable bitrates. There are many others. Essentially, it’s what happens when you take DV and spend another 10 years working on making it better. That’s why Panasonic’s AVC-Intra cameras can do DVCProHD quality video at half (or less) the bitrate.

  Why does iFrame matter for editing ? Anyone who’s tried to edit video from one of the modern H.264 cameras without first transcoding to an intraframe format has experienced the huge CPU demands and sluggish performance. Behind the scenes it’s even worse. Because interframe H.264 can have very long GOPs, displaying any single frame can rely on dozens or even hundreds of other frames. Because of the complexity of H.264, building these frames is very high-cost. And it’s a variable cost. Decoding the first frame in a GOP is relatively trivial, while decoding the middle B-frame can be hugely expensive.

  Programs like iMovie mask that from the user in some cases, but at the expensive of high overhead. But, anyone who’s imported AVC-HD video into Final Cut Pro or iMovie knows that there’s a long "importing" step - behind the scenes, the applications are transcoding your video into an intraframe format, like Apple Intermediate or ProRes. It sort of defeats one of the main purposes of a file-based workflow.

  You’ve also probably noticed the amount of time it takes to export a video in an interframe format. Anyone who’s edited HDV in Final Cut Pro has experienced this. With DV, doing an "export to quicktime" is simply a matter of Final Cut Pro rewriting all of the data to disk - it’s essentially a file copy. With HDV, Final Cut Pro has to do a complete reencode of the whole timeline, to fit everything into the new GOP structure. Not only is this time consuming, but it’s essentially a generation loss.

  iFrame solves these issues by giving you an intraframe codec, with modern efficiency, which can be decoded by any of the H.264 decoders that we already know and love.

  Having this as an optional setting on cameras is a huge step forward for folks interested in editing video. Hopefully some of the manufacturers of AVC-HD cameras will adopt this format as well. I’ll gladly trade a little resolution for instant edit-ability.