[x264-devel] x264 Development Newsletter: Vol 8

[Jason Garrett-Glaser]

This is the eighth x264 development newsletter.  If you missed the
first seven, this is a regular email containing updates on fixes and
improvements in the most recent x264 push, along with updates on
what's coming next.  Previous versions can be found in the mailing
list archives.

Fixes:

Weightp analysis now calculates offsets correctly in high bit depth mode.

High bit depth intra pred x86 asm functions are now fixed (and thus re-enabled).

That nasty gnu ld alignment bug on windows (ld refuses to align .bss
to 16 bytes even when asked nicely) has been squashed with
-fno-zero-initialized-in-bss.

Improvements:

.gitignore is now even more useful than before.

Another bit of memory saved in high bit depth weightp.

The regression test script now tests interlaced compression.

8x8dct is now allowed with cavlc+lossless and subme>=6, for a slight
compression improvement.

Frame-packing SEI support is now in, for official 3D support in x264.

A metric crapload of new high bit depth asm functions are now in
(thanks, Google Code-In!)

x264 now supports Windows threads in addition to pthreads.  Thanks to
Pegasys Inc. for the original patch.

Upcoming:

--device and automatic --level restriction support is in the works, as
part of Google Code-In.

A per-option help system is in the works, as part of Google Code-In.

VBV Emergency Mode is finally completed, with just fine-tuning and
bugfixing left.  This makes x264 able to deal gracefully with extreme
input combined with VBV restrictions (e.g. noise, Doremi Labs test
boxes).  This is important for some broadcast applications.

Adaptive MBAFF development is coming along, with B-frames being
finished up currently.

x262 is under development: a best-in-class MPEG-2 encoder built using
the x264 framework.  Basic structure is done, with intra coding
finished and inter coding begun.

Work is planned to integrate x264 with the Sandy Bridge's encoding
ASIC for improved encoding performance.  Current status is: waiting on
Intel (these guys move at the speed of a paraplegic three-toed sloth swimming
down a frozen river of bricks).

Jason Garrett-Glaser

The x264 Team