[x264-devel] x264 Development Newsletter: Vol 3

[Jason Garrett-Glaser]

This is the third x264 development newsletter.  If you missed the
first two, 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.

Fixes:

The sigint handler in x264cli is now volatile, like it should have
been.  This likely didn't actually affect anything on any real system,
but it's more correct.

-DNDEBUG broke the filtering system.  This is now fixed.

The bugfix from last week regarding intra refresh predicting from
topright blocks didn't work with 8x8dct.  This is now fixed.

2-pass ratecontrol now works with CBR HRD.  Previously, it ignored
filler bits, and thus broke horribly.  In general, you don't need
2-pass for CBR (and it probably doesn't help), but it should work
better now.

A missing mod4-stack check was added; this should fix ICC builds on Phenom CPUs.

Improvements:

The build tree has been cleaned a bit.  A bunch of old stuff, like the
non-working regression test and doxy, have been removed.

Some of the information in doc/ has been updated to be less absurdly
out of date, or at least inform the reader that it is absurdly out of
date.

DTS compression has been moved out of the libx264 API and into the
muxers, because it's a giant hack and it was making things ugly and
messy (and starting to interfere with ratecontrol).

Various asm functions have been improved, particularly the qpel MC
functions.  Should help performance a bit on Core 2 and similar CPUs.

Upcoming:

High bit depth assembly code is coming soon, which should give a nice
(3x+) improvement to high bit depth encoding speed.

HQDN3D (denoiser) and YADIF (deinterlacer) will be making their way
into the x264CLI filter framework.  This was previously being blocked
by the high-bit-depth modifications to the filter framework.

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.

Dark Shikari

The x264 Development Team