[x264-devel] Old PAFF patch

[Kieran Kunhya]

Somebody on IRC asked about PAFF and I attach an old patch rewritten almost entirely from Pegasys code but applicable to git HEAD: http://pastebin.com/12VMHQ0s Lots has changed so it may not even work but the vast majority of the code is written. This patch is vastly better than previous attempts to hack in PAFF.

I would like to point out again that all the "hardware compatibility" issues with MBAFF are merely because someone had a working file and a non-working file, decided to open up mediainfo and didn't understand what they were seeing. Basically they saw that the file marked "MBAFF" didn't play and the file marked "Interlaced" (i.e PAFF) did play and came to the incorrect conclusion that the hardware player didn't support MBAFF instead of looking at other parameters like reference-frames etc. So TL;DR cargo-cult bug-fixing.

We use x264 widely for interlaced encoding and have not seen any genuine MBAFF issues - many other hardware encoders also heavily use MBAFF. Therefore this patch is only really useful for low-latency interlaced encoding or as a stepping stone to MBAFF+PAFF adaptive.

Kieran