Xiph & Mozilla's Daala codec

[LigH]

It is in fact very interesting and entertaining. Things to avoid in your algorithms to avoid patent infrigement ... that requires a fundamentally different look on very conventional methods to encode video. Just one example: Do not calculate differences between pixels of video frames to get the residual as base for motion prediction; instead, calculate differences of already transformed parameters.

Highlight of the video around 42:10 is the demonstration of a Daala decoder implemented in JavaScript.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Originally Posted by ckmox

technical explanation about Daala https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmho4gcRvQ4

Well that's interesting - they claim currently better than x265 at texture and, above 1bit per pixel, also on clean edges. I wonder how this compares for the overall image quality?

[ckmox]

this is the javascript demo of daala he presented on the youtube video https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/de...yer-demo.shtml

the bitrate is high though, i wish they made a low bitrate video one like 400kbps to really compare its video quality to x265 at the moment

[vivan]

Nice demo ;D


Those parts that decode correctly look pretty badly, so I see no point in decreasing bitrate even more...

[foxyshadis]

Originally Posted by LigH

Just one example: Do not calculate differences between pixels of video frames to get the residual as base for motion prediction; instead, calculate differences of already transformed parameters.

I thought they got rid of that. Well, the logs say that Frequency Domain Intra Prediction was removed, which is what a couple of Monty's demos were about, but I'm not sure if they've reworked it since.

Daala's had quite a bit of activity this week, more than in the last two months! Here's a fresh build.

Edit: Haha, vivan, very nice.

[LigH]

The encoder_example still does not yet support piping a video source?

And: For me as half-educated video enthusiast, motion compensation is inter-frame prediction, not intra, correct? But yes, there were more topics covered in this video. And some parts may cover previous efforts as well as current ones.

[foxyshadis]

It supports y4m, ffmpeg and all of the common avisynth pipes work with it. 8-bit YV12 only, though.

[LigH]

Well, the help screen does not mention any way to feed it with something that's not a physical file.

Usage: encoder_example [options] video_file
...
 encoder_example accepts only uncompressed YUV4MPEG2 video.

Documentation is very sparse here. If "-" as input file name is supported for piping, then I guess Selur may add it to Hybrid soon...

BTW: I am impressed how small the static-built encoder still is.

[Kurtnoise]

Originally Posted by LigH

Well, the help screen does not mention any way to feed it with something that's not a physical file.

it's just an example of how to use the library...this should be tuned as well in the future.

[LigH]

OK, a command line like this works:

avs2yuv *.avs -o - | encoder_example -o *.ogm -

Count the dashes carefully.

[Tommy Carrot]

Thanks for the build, Foxyshadis.

Originally Posted by Nintendo Maniac 64

Well that's interesting - they claim currently better than x265 at texture and, above 1bit per pixel, also on clean edges. I wonder how this compares for the overall image quality?

Daala is nowhere near as mature as the other codecs. It still has fairly strong ringing and chroma artifacts, and the overall efficiency is not competitive with them yet. However, daala has some promising characteristics, like it tries to preserve the low contrast textures, so the fine details or the grain doesn't get smoothed out, like in x265 or vp9.

The latest build is quite a big improvement on the last one, the motion stability has improved a lot in the last month. If the development continues at this pace, and they can fix the ringing without blurring out the image, in half a year or so daala could become quite interesting.

[LigH]

A little something to compare: Tears of Steel, 640×272, 60 s action

x265 --crf 25 (v1.4+424-2b93cf2a5ac8)

Daala encoder_example -v 50 (daala-20150127, ^foxyshadis)

Most annoying: The Daala player_example runs in full CPU speed...

File sizes are as close as it gets without trying for hours in 1-pass quality modes...

[foxyshadis]

Oh yeah, I guess it'd be handy to specify that the exact git rev was bf0663a65926 (still the current head).

[Gravitator]

Originally Posted by vivan

Nice demo ;D


Those parts that decode correctly look pretty badly, so I see no point in decreasing bitrate even more...

Imperceptibly this artifact from the speech > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmho...ailpage#t=2548

[uneedme]

Using -v 30 to encode a clip, the output is pretty good. But I found no player could play the daala-clip.

Should it be any containers support?

[LigH]

The player_example in the daala package is about the only player supporting this video format at all. The development may still be too early and experimental for authors of usual players and decoder libraries (libav, ffmpeg, vlc) to consider including it already.

Unfortunately, it plays it as fast as the decoder works, doesn't care about frame rates.

[qyot27]

VLC supports playing back Daala-encoded files (I even mentioned it in this thread back in September), but unless something's changed with the official builds, you'd have to build it yourself to get it to do that since the decoder is disabled by default.

The particular posts on VLC-devel about API stability concerns:
https://mailman.videolan.org/piperma...st/099405.html
https://mailman.videolan.org/piperma...st/099407.html


I'd far prefer it to get in libavcodec instead, since I really don't want to try building VLC for Windows. I'm in the mplayer (well, mpv now) camp, always have been. mpv is simple to build for Windows.

[foxyshadis]

You don't really need to build all of VLC to build the daala decoder, it's just more convenient that way. You could build it from Daala, too, so I might try that with my next build. It's handy that VLC already has all the glue code ready to go, it's just a matter of keeping it up to date.

[qyot27]

I meant that enabling Daala support in VLC requires rebuilding VLC, because VLC doesn't have its libdaala support enabled by default, not that building Daala itself doesn't build the decoder.

When I build Daala, I usually rename/move the *_example binaries to alternate names in the /bin directory. player_example becomes daalaplay, decoder_example becomes daaladec, encoder_example becomes daalaenc.

[foxyshadis]

Because it's just a dll/so, you should be able to build libdaala in and add it into the codecs folder, without rebuilding everything. I haven't tried it yet, but as long as the headers aren't too tangled, it should be fairly simple. Software that uses monolithic codec files like ffmpeg are more annoying.