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• Playing Video on a Sega Dreamcast

  9 mars 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Sega Dreamcast

  Here’s an honest engineering question : If you were tasked to make compressed video play back on a Sega Dreamcast video game console, what video format would you choose ? Personally, I would choose RoQ, the format invented for The 11th Hour computer game and later used in Quake III and other games derived from the same engine. This post explains my reasoning.

  Video Background
  One of the things I wanted to do when I procured a used Sega Dreamcast back in 2001 was turn it into a set-top video playback unit. This is something that a lot of people tried to do, apparently, to varying degrees of success. Interest would wane in a few years as it became easier and easier to crack an Xbox and install XBMC. The Xbox was much better suited to playing codecs that were getting big at the time, most notably MPEG-4 part 2 video (DivX/XviD).

  The Dreamcast, while quite capable when it was released in 1999, was not very well-equipped to deal with an MPEG-type codec. I have recently learned that there are other hackers out there on the internet who are still trying to get the most out of this system. I was contacted for advice about how to make Theora perform better on the Dreamcast.
  
  Interesting thing about consoles and codecs : Since you are necessarily distributing code along with your data, you have far more freedom to use whatever codecs you want for your audio and video data. This is why Vorbis and even Theora have seen quite a bit of use in video games, "internet standards" be darned. Thus, when I realized this application had no hard and fast requirement to use Theora, and that it could use any codec that fit the platform, my mind started churning. When I was programming the DC 10 years ago, I didn’t have access to the same wealth of multimedia knowledge that is currently available.

  Requirements Gathering
  What do we need here ?

  • Codec needs to run on the Sega Dreamcast ; this eliminates codecs for which only binary decoder implementations are available
  • Must decode 320x240 video at 30 fps ; higher resolutions up to 640x480 would be desirable
  • Must deliver decent quality at 12X optical read speeds (DC drive speed)
  • There must be some decent, preferably free, encoder readily available ; speed of encoding, however, is not important ; i.e., "take as long as you need, encoder"

  Theora was the go-to codec because it’s just commonly known as "the free, open source video codec". But clearly it’s not suitable for, well... any purpose, really (sorry, easy target ; OW ! stop throwing things !). VP8/WebM — Theora’s heir apparent — would not qualify either, as my prior experiments have already demonstrated.

  Candidates
  What did the big boys use for video on the Dreamcast ? A lot of games relied on CRI’s Sofdec middleware which was MPEG-1 video and a custom ADPCM format. I don’t know if I have ever seen DC games that used MPEG-1 video at a higher resolution than 320x240 (though I have not searched exhaustively). The fact that CRI used a custom ADPCM format for this application may indicate that there wasn’t enough CPU power left over to decode a perceptual, transform-based audio codec alongside the 320x240 video.

  A few other DC games used 4X Technologies’ 4XM format. The most notable licensee was Alone in the Dark : The New Nightmare (DC version only ; PC version used Bink). This codec was DCT-based but incorporated 16-bit RGB colorspace into its design, presumably to optimize for applications like game consoles that couldn’t directly handle planar YUV. AITD:TNN’s videos were 640x360, a marked improvement over the typical Sofdec fare. I was about to write off 4XM as a contender due to lack of encoder, but the encoding tools are preserved on our samples site. A few other issues, though : The FFmpeg decoder doesn’t seem to work correctly as of this writing (and nobody has noticed yet, even though it’s tested via FATE).

  What ideas do I have ? Right off the bat, I’m thinking vector quantizer (VQ). Vector quantizers are notoriously slow to compress but are blazingly fast to decompress which is why they were popular in the early days of video compression. First, there’s Cinepak. I fear that might be too simple for this application. Plus, I don’t know if existing (binary-only) compressors are very decent. It seems that they only ever had to handle small videos and I’ve heard that they can really fall over if anything more is demanded of them.

  Sorenson Video 1 is another contender. FFmpeg has an encoder (which some allege is better than Sorenson’s original compressor). However, I fear that the wonky algorithm and colorspace might not mesh well with the Dreamcast.

  My thinking quickly converged on RoQ. This was designed to run fullscreen (640x480) video on i486-class hardware. While RoQ fundamentally operates in a YUV colorspace, it’s trivial to convert it to any other colorspace during decoding and the image will be rendered in that colorspace. Plus, there are open source encoders available for the format (namely, several versions of Eric Lasota’s Switchblade encoder, one of which lives natively in FFmpeg), as well as the original proprietary encoder.

  Which Library ?
  There are several code choices here : FFmpeg (LGPL), Switchblade (GPL), and the original Quake 3 source code (GPL). There is one more option that I think might be easiest, which is the decoder Dr. Tim created when he reverse engineered the format in the first place. That has a very liberal "do whatever you like, but be nice and give me credit" license (probably qualifies as BSD).

  This code is no longer at its original home but the Wayback Machine still had a copy, which I have now mirrored (idroq.tar.gz).

  Adaptation
  Dr. Tim’s code still compiles and runs great on Linux (64-bit !) with SDL output. I would like to get it ported to the Dreamcast using the same SDL output, which KallistiOS supports. Then, there is the matter of fixing the longstanding chroma bug in the original sample decoder (described here). The decoder also needs to be modified to natively render RGB565 data, as that will work best with the DC’s graphics hardware.

  After making the code work, I want to profile it and test whether it can handle full-frame 640x480 playback at 30 frames/second. I will need to contrive a sample to achieve this.

  Unfortunately, things went off the rails pretty quickly when I tried to get the RoQ decoder ported to DC/KOS. It looks like there’s a bug in KallistiOS’s minimalistic standard C library, or at least a discrepancy with my desktop Linux system. When you read to the end of a file and then seek backwards to someplace that isn’t the end, is the file still in EOF state ?

  According to my Linux desktop :

  open file ;          feof() = 0
  seek to end ;        feof() = 0
  read one more byte ; feof() = 1
  seek back to start ; feof() = 0
  

  According to KallistiOS :

  open file ;          feof() = 0
  seek to end ;        feof() = 0
  read one more byte ; feof() = 1
  seek back to start ; feof() = 1
  

  Here’s the seek-test.c program I used to test this issue :

  PLAIN TEXT

  C :

  1. #include <stdio .h>
  2.  
  3. int main()
  4. {
  5.   FILE *f ;
  6.   unsigned char byte ;
  7.  
  8.   f = fopen("seek_test.c", "r") ;
  9.   printf("open file ;     feof() = %d\n", feof(f)) ;
  10.   fseek(f, 0, SEEK_END) ;
  11.   printf("seek to end ;    feof() = %d\n", feof(f)) ;
  12.   fread(&byte, 1, 1, f) ;
  13.   printf("read one more byte ; feof() = %d\n", feof(f)) ;
  14.   fseek(f, 0, SEEK_SET) ;
  15.   printf("seek back to start ; feof() = %d\n", feof(f)) ;
  16.   fclose(f) ;
  17.  
  18.   return 0 ;
  19. }

  EOF
  Speaking of EOF, I’m about done for this evening.

  What codec would you select for this task, given the requirements involved ?

• VP8 Documentation and Test Vector Contributions

  14 octobre 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther)

  Janne Salonen of the WebM team in Oulu, Finland (formerly On2 Finland) has added a tabular description of the VP8 syntax to the VP8 Bitstream Guide. The new annex provides a concise reference of the elements in the bitstream and we hope will make implementing and testing VP8 decoders easier. The updated document and source can be downloaded from our documentation page.

  We’re working on more improvements to the bitstream guide and invite other community members to help. As with the VP8 code, we gladly give attribution credit to documentation contributors and have added an AUTHORS file to the bitstream-guide Git repository.

  New VP8 Test Vectors

  The Oulu team has also produced some new VP8 test vectors. We analyzed a large set of WebM videos and produced two important corner use cases. The first produces the worst-case memory bandwidth (i.e., lots of global motion, all fractional motion vectors). The second produces the worst-case boolean decoder bin rate over dozens of consecutive frames. These vectors have been added to the VP8 test repository. Our team will consider other corner cases in the next batch of streams we add to the repository.

  Aki Kuusela is Hantro Embedded Engineering Manager at Google.

  

• FFmpeg and Code Coverage Tools

  21 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — FATE Server, Python

  Code coverage tools likely occupy the same niche as profiling tools : Tools that you’re supposed to use somewhere during the software engineering process but probably never quite get around to it, usually because you’re too busy adding features or fixing bugs. But there may come a day when you wish to learn how much of your code is actually being exercised in normal production use. For example, the team charged with continuously testing the FFmpeg project, would be curious to know how much code is being exercised, especially since many of the FATE test specs explicitly claim to be "exercising XYZ subsystem".

  The primary GNU code coverage tool is called gcov and is probably already on your GNU-based development system. I set out to determine how much FFmpeg source code is exercised while running the full FATE suite. I ran into some problems when trying to use gcov on a project-wide scale. I spackled around those holes with some very ad-hoc solutions. I’m sure I was just overlooking some more obvious solutions about which you all will be happy to enlighten me.

  Results
  I’ve learned to cut to the chase earlier in blog posts (results first, methods second). With that, here are the results I produced from this experiment. This Google spreadsheet contains 3 sheets : The first contains code coverage stats for a bunch of FFmpeg C files sorted first by percent coverage (ascending), then by number of lines (descending), thus highlighting which files have the most uncovered code (ffserver.c currently tops that chart). The second sheet has files for which no stats were generated. The third sheet has "problems". These files were rejected by my ad-hoc script.

  Here’s a link to the data in CSV if you want to play with it yourself.

  Using gcov with FFmpeg
  To instrument a program for gcov analysis, compile and link the target program with the -fprofile-arcs and -ftest-coverage options. These need to be applied at both the compile and link stages, so in the case of FFmpeg, configure with :

    ./configure \
      —extra-cflags="-fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage" \
      —extra-ldflags="-fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage"
  

  The building process results in a bunch of .gcno files which pertain to code coverage. After running the program as normal, a bunch of .gcda files are generated. To get coverage statistics from these files, run 'gcov sourcefile.c'. This will print some basic statistics as well as generate a corresponding .gcov file with more detailed information about exactly which lines have been executed, and how many times.

  Be advised that the source file must either live in the same directory from which gcov is invoked, or else the path to the source must be given to gcov via the '-o, --object-directory' option.

  Resetting Statistics
  Statistics in the .gcda are cumulative. Should you wish to reset the statistics, doing this in the build directory should suffice :

    find . -name "*.gcda" | xargs rm -f
  

  Getting Project-Wide Data
  As mentioned, I had to get a little creative here to get a big picture of FFmpeg code coverage. After building FFmpeg with the code coverage options and running FATE,

  for file in `find . -name "*.c"` \
  do \
    echo "*****" $file \
    gcov -o `dirname $file` `basename $file` \
  done > ffmpeg-code-coverage.txt 2>&1
  

  After that, I ran the ffmpeg-code-coverage.txt file through a custom Python script to print out the 3 CSV files that I later dumped into the Google Spreadsheet.

  Further Work
  I’m sure there are better ways to do this, and I’m sure you all will let me know what they are. But I have to get the ball rolling somehow.

  There’s also TestCocoon. I’d like to try that program and see if it addresses some of gcov’s shortcomings (assuming they are indeed shortcomings rather than oversights).

  Source for script : process-gcov-slop.py

  PLAIN TEXT

  PYTHON :

  1. # !/usr/bin/python
  2.  
  3. import re
  4.  
  5. lines = open("ffmpeg-code-coverage.txt").read().splitlines()
  6. no_coverage = ""
  7. coverage = "filename, % covered, total lines\n"
  8. problems = ""
  9.  
  10. stats_exp = re.compile(’Lines executed :(\d+\.\d+)% of (\d+)’)
  11. for i in xrange(len(lines)) :
  12.   line = lines[i]
  13.   if line.startswith("***** ") :
  14.     filename = line[line.find(’./’)+2 :]
  15.     i += 1
  16.     if lines[i].find(":cannot open graph file") != -1 :
  17.       no_coverage += filename + ’\n’
  18.     else :
  19.       while lines[i].find(filename) == -1 and not lines[i].startswith("***** ") :
  20.         i += 1
  21.       try :
  22.         (percent, total_lines) = stats_exp.findall(lines[i+1])[0]
  23.         coverage += filename + ’, ’ + percent + ’, ’ + total_lines + ’\n’
  24.       except IndexError :
  25.         problems += filename + ’\n’
  26.  
  27. open("no_coverage.csv", ’w’).write(no_coverage)
  28. open("coverage.csv", ’w’).write(coverage)
  29. open("problems.csv", ’w’).write(problems)