Monthly Archives: July 2008

MVI and CMV

New format showcase time! Gregory Montoir contributed to FFmpeg a playback system for MVI files, which are a custom container for transporting Motion Pixels video data. Another format down.


Motion Pixels video codec in ffplay

It’s a little unclear how this format differs from the more familiar MVI1 and MVI2 codecs that are encapsulated inside AVI files. But this is probably a big step towards supporting those formats as well.

Peter Ross/Suxen drol is up to his old tricks by contributing a decoder for CMV files. Here’s what our one sample looks like:


EA CMV format -- NHL Hocky 95

After a brief hiccup, FATE is back online, and with some new tests: motionpixels and ea-cmv, for the formats listed above, and duck-dk4.

Bad Compilers

I had to disable the gcc-svn configurations corresponding to 32- and 64-bit x86 architectures on the FATE Server. When I upgraded the compilers to the latest ones from gcc SVN repository, the compiled results were hanging indefinitely in some cases (such as the HuffYUV regression test on x86_32). This makes FATE significantly less productive since the ‘make test’ test spec has such a long timeout. That reminds me of another reason why I wanted to split out those regressions into individual test specs.

It sounds bugworthy, as is the fact that the gcc-svn compiler for PowerPC has about a 50% chance of compiling FFmpeg without encountering an internal compiler error. It would be responsible of me to report these bugs to gcc. I think the main thing that stops me is that the guidelines for submitting gcc bugs are even more frightening than those for FFmpeg. The HuffYUV hang bug really scares me since it implies tracking down incorrectly compiled code.