Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

Researching The HTML 5 Video Tag

Discussions of the proposed <video> tag in HTML5 invariably make my ears perk up, maybe because it could be perceived — under the right circumstances — as alleged competition against what I do at my day job. But I’m still interested in all topics concerning multimedia technology, and this sounds like a big one. Plus, Mozilla recently announced that it would donate 100 grand to Wikimedia to help improve Ogg and Theora.


100 Grand candy bar

Quick glossary/refresher on key terminology: Vorbis = audio codec; Theora = video codec; Ogg = container format that wraps and delivers Vorbis, Theora and several other types of media.

So, the video tag is supposed to be the promised land of video on the web (just like SVG is supposed to be the open answer to Flash). I’m looking at this from a purely pragmatic perspective. Here are 2 big questions about media meant for delivery via the media tag:

  1. How do people create the media?
  2. How do people consume the media?

I want to ponder these questions. Continue reading →

Second Class Citizens

Not all builds should be treated equally. Some are more important than others. I propose that the FATE should distinguish between important and less important configurations. My motivation for this is that I want to implement a meter that indicates the health of the overall code base. While it would be ideal for all FATE configurations to be 100% green at all times, I don’t think it’s fair to penalize the entire FFmpeg codebase just because some less prevalent platforms aren’t performing up to spec.

What platforms should be considered first class? I’m thinking latest gcc 4.3 and 4.2 series for Linux on x86_32, x86_64, and PowerPC, at a minimum.

In other FATE news, I have started computing percentages of test coverage. According to my numbers, FATE currently tests 58% of FFmpeg’s total mux/demux/encode/decode features. It’s a start, I suppose.

FFmpeg Perceptual Audio Test Plan

There have been some problems with FATE audio testing. First off, the qt-ima4-stereo test spec was testing against the wrong file for the past year. Stereo IMA ADPCM decoding could have broken in QuickTime and we might have never been alerted. Sloppy.

More seriously, I found out that many of my existing, bitexact audio tests have not been constructed properly. This is due to the fact that these 2 commands:

ffmpeg -i file.ext file.wav
ffmpeg -i file.ext -f wav - > file.wav

do not yield equivalent sets of bytes inside file.wav. Part of the reason is that, after writing out all the audio samples, the muxer needs to rewind to the header so that it can write the data payload length. When writing data to stdout, the program does not have the option to rewind the output stream. However, I don’t understand the entire discrepancy. Using the file qt-ima4-mono with the above command lines:

1156652 surge.wav
1146924 surge-stdout.wav

The file that is routed through stdout is notably smaller (9728 bytes smaller). I was going to write this off as the stdout file failing to be flushed. However, the behavior is consistent across all machines and platforms.

My proposed solution is to update all of the audio tests to use this raw format target:

ffmpeg -i file.ext -f s16le -

Since the output is equivalent to:

ffmpeg -i file.ext -f s16le file.s16le

1156608 surge.s16le
1156608 surge-stdout.s16le

Moving right along, there is the much bigger task of testing perceptual audio decoders. Working down the FATE Test Coverage list, these perceptual audio codecs will get the naive, one-off wave reference treatment in lieu of a proper conformance suite: ATRAC3, RealAudio Cooker, DCA (DTS), IMC, Nellymoser, Qcelp, QDesign, RealAudio 28.8, Truespeech, Vorbis, and WMA v1.

Then there is the matter of MPEG audio codecs for which we have access to extensive conformance suites. Thanks to Kostya and Benjamin for furnishing pointers to precise information discussing how to verify if your MP1/2/3 or AAC audio decoder is up to snuff. This page at Underbit describes exactly how the spec describes conformance for MPEG 1, layers 1, 2, and 3, and also evaluates the conformance of various implementations. The comparison ostensibly predates FFmpeg. This Mp4-tech mailing list post shows the way regarding AAC conformance.

So I need to automate the MP1/2/3 and AAC test entries. I estimate the automated process will work something like this:

  • Decode encoded file
  • Run comparison of decoded wave against original wave
    • For MP1/2/3, this seems to entail converting both the FFmpeg output and the original wave output floating point numbers to a normalized range of -1.0..1.0, computing the root mean square of the difference signal, and verifying that the RMS is less than 1 / (32768 * sqrt(12))
    • For AAC, well, I’m still researching the precise criteria
  • If the decoded wave is within tolerance, add a new test

The part where I get a bit fuzzy is: what should the test spec be? Should I generate a reference wave and test future decoded waves against it using my one-off wave reference method? Or, should I just go ahead and compute the RMS of the difference signal? I assume that if I use the nifty numpy library for the task, it couldn’t possibly make any measurable difference in the performance of FATE testing vs. using the one-off wave reference method (computing absolute value of the difference signal and checking that no discrete points exceed 1).

One trade-off is that I would need to store the full 24-bit reference waves in order to properly compute RMS, which is 50% more data than I would need with the one-off method. And I’m still not sure how to process the 24-bit data in any event.

Less Frequent Tasks

Michael suggested on the FFmpeg-devel list that Doxygen documentation ought to be continuously generated so that any errors and warnings during documentation generation can be caught, logged, analyzed, and minimized. However, the consensus was that it’s not especially useful to add this to the master FATE suite of test specs.

Another item that came up in the discussions of a possible release is that one of our tests should be the processing of an entire DVD-length movie to catch any problems (like memory leaks) that only manifest over a long runtime. Obviously, that’s not especially appropriate for a normal FATE test spec.

And another type of test that I envisioned when I was originally brainstorming the system (for a year and a half) is a way to continuously fuzz-test FFmpeg. But, like the previous 2 items, it does not need to be performed on every code commit.

I realized that all of these tasks (and probably more– be creative) can be run on a less frequent basis — say, once per day — and on one machine (like the fastest machine on my farm). It can be set up as an adjunct project to FATE.

Now I need a good FFmpeg command line for converting a ripped DVD image to another format that will maximally stress the program, in a multithreaded manner, no less.