[x264-devel] x264 Development Newsletter: Vol 11

[Jason Garrett-Glaser]

This is the eleventh x264 development newsletter.  If you missed the
first nine, 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:

Fix various regressions introduced in VBV emergency.

Fix AVX detection on OSs that don't support AVX.

Fix a crash on Phenom that could occur with the lookahead disabled and
a calling application that tweaks the SSE control flags.

Fix a divide-by-zero crash in the MKV/FLV muxers that could occur if
encoder initialization failed.

Fix a race condition that resulted in slightly wrong frame durations
calculated for VFR input.

Fix an overflow in i16x16 NEON planar prediction, backported from ffmpeg.

In x86inc.asm, error on duplicate functions instead of silently
renaming one of them.

Improvements:

Enable FastShuffle on crippled Nehalem/Penryn CPUs without SSE4.

Output pic_struct information in the libx264 API.

Allow weightp_fake in interlaced mode: it seems to work fine as-is.

In Windows, restore the old console title after encoding.  MSDN says
this is supposed to happen automatically, but MSDN is wrong.

Make x264cli update its progress every 0.25 seconds instead of every
certain number of frames.  This should be more visually consistent and
fix some problems with extremely fast-updating status bars (e.g. from
FFMS indexing of large files) in some situations.

Upcoming:

--device and automatic --level restriction support is in the works, as
part of Google Code-In.  The patch is done, but needs review.

A per-option help system is in the works, as part of Google Code-In.
The patch is done, but needs editing of the help entries.

Adaptive MBAFF development is actually coming along for once this
time.  Inter frames are mostly done.

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 one-legged paraplegic
three-toed sloth swimming down a river of frozen helium while chained
to an osmium anchor stuck inside a black hole).

Jason Garrett-Glaser

The x264 Team