Monthly Archives: October 2010

Technically Correct VP8 Encoding

I know people are anxious to see what happens next with my toy VP8 encoder. First and foremost, I corrected the encoder’s DC prediction. A lot of rules govern that mode and if you don’t have it right, error cascades through the image. Now the encoder and decoder both agree on every fine detail of the bitstream syntax and rendering thereof. It still encodes to a neo-impressionist mosaic piece, but at least I’ve ironed the bugs out of this phase:



I also made it possible to adjust the quantization levels inside the encoder. This means that I’m finally getting some compression out of the thing, vs. the original approach of hardcoding the minimum quantizers.

VP8 Misplaced Plane

So I’m stubbornly plugging away at my toy VP8 encoder and I managed to produce this gem. See if you can spot the subtle mistake:



The misplaced color plane resulted from using the luma plane stride where it was not appropriate. I fixed that and now chroma planes are wired to use to the same naive prediction algorithm as the luma plane.

Also, I fixed the entropy encoder so that end of block conditions are signaled correctly (instead of my original, suboptimal hack to just encode all zeros). I was disappointed to see that this did not result in a major compression improvement. Then again, I’m using the lowest possible quantization settings for this outing, so perhaps this is to be expected.

Sigh… 4×4 luma prediction is next. Wish me luck.

Gallery of VP8 Encoding Naivete

I’ve been toiling away as a multimedia technology generalist for so long that it’s easy for me to forget that not everyone is as versed in the minutiae of the domain as I am. But I recently experienced what it’s like to be such an outsider when I posted about my toy VP8 encoder, expressing that it’s one of the hardest things I have ever tried to do. I heard from a number of people who do have extensive experience in video encoding, particularly with the H.264 and VP8 codecs. Their reactions were predictable: What’s so hard? Look, you might be a little too immersed in the area to really understand a relative beginner’s perspective.

And to all the people who suggested that I should get the encoder into FFmpeg ASAP: Are you crazy?! Did you see what the first pass of the encoder produced? Do you have lower standards than even I do?



Not Giving Up
I worked a little more on the toy encoder. Remember that the above image is what I’m hoping to encode somewhat faithfully for this experiment. In my first pass, I attempted vertical prediction for all planes. For my next pass, I forced the chroma planes to mid-level (which results in a greyscale image) and played with the 16×16 luma prediction modes. When implementing an extremely naive algorithm to decide which 16×16 prediction mode would be the best for a particular block, this is what the program produced:



For fun, here is what the image encodes to when forcing various prediction modes:
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WebM Cabal

I traveled to a secret clubhouse today to take part in a clandestine meeting to discuss exactly how WebM will rule over all that you see and hear on the web. I can’t really talk about it. But I can show you the cool hat I got:



Yeah, you’re jealous.

The back of the hat has an Easter egg for video codec nerds– the original Duck Corporation logo (On2’s original name):



Former employees of On2 (now Googlers) were well-represented. It was an emotional day of closure as I met the person — the only person to date — who contacted me with a legal threat so many years ago. He still remembered me too.

I met a lot of people involved in creating various Duck and On2 codecs and learned a lot of history and lore behind then– history I hope to be able to document one day.

I’m glad I got that first rough draft of a toy VP8 encoder done in time for the meeting. It was the subject of much mirth.