SOCIS x264 2011

Introduction to x264 and Summer of Code

x264 is one of the most popular video compression libraries in the world, used worldwide for applications such as web video, television broadcast, and Blu-ray authoring. It outclasses practically all commercial implementations both speed and compression-wise. While not actually part of VLC or ffmpeg, it is a major library used by both, licensed under the GPL. Due to its popularity in the commercial world (for example, Youtube and Facebook rely on it), many companies have offered bounties in the past for features and improvements that they found useful.

But don't let that all scare you. There's still plenty of projects that a student can effectively get involved in -- we've had tons of successful students, both in Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In, most of whom knew nothing about video compression before applying.

• Lead mentor (and author of this page): Jason Garrett-Glaser (Dark Shikari)
• Possible other mentors: Ronald Bultje (BBB)?, Kieran Kunhya (kierank)

An overview of x264's structure and algorithms can be found here. It is somewhat outdated, but still mostly accurate. Do note that understanding this is not necessary for all projects.

On a lighter note, feel free to check out the x264 developer quotes page.

Guide to getting involved

• Hop on IRC--whenever! We have a friendly community that's happy to help and to talk about pretty much whatever. #x264 is the general discussion/user help channel and #x264dev is the development-only channel (Freenode server). If you've never used IRC, grab Chatzilla. There is no such thing as a stupid question--only stupid people--so don't worry about sounding dumb. Just get involved!
• Ask questions--I cannot stress this enough. We've had students who couldn't get anywhere because they were stuck--but didn't ask questions! There's no shame in asking questions; that's how everyone here got involved.
• Stay on IRC. Even if you have nothing to say, being around lets you get to know the community, get a feel for what's going on, and even sometimes help out by pointing the semicolon I left at the end of my if statement. This applies during the project period too: we expect all students to always be on IRC. This doesn't mean you have to be actually active all the time, but whenever you're free, you should be at least pingable on IRC, and whenever you're working on Summer of Code, you should be active on IRC.
  • The best option for staying online is to get a remote shell account of some sort and leave an IRSSI client on 24/7 in a screen. This lets you easily come back in the morning and see if you missed anything important. checkers can provide you with a shell if you end up being accepted as a student.
• Even if you don't get a slot as a student, or you don't qualify for Summer of Code, we will happily provide you with the exact same support that we would give a student: it is quite reasonable and not at all uncommon for us to have projects of similar scale to Summer of Code be done by students who are not part of the Summer of Code program.

Skills needed

These are required for all listed projects and probably anything not listed, too.

• Basic C programming.
• Basic understanding of video encoding, or at least willingness to do the appropriate reading up on the topic before the summer begins. Most people who get involved don't know much to start with; we don't expect you to!
• To work on anything related directly to the encoder core (not all projects), you'll need to do some significant background reading on relevant topics.
  • A PDF with a chapter that can serve as a primer to video compression can be found here. It also has some more specific chapters on MPEG-4 Part 10 (H.264).

Projects

We are probably only accepting 3-4 students this year. Thus, you will have to prove that you are absolutely able to do your project over the summer--see the qualification tasks. Do remember that the project ideas listed here are merely suggestions; other ideas are always possible if they fit the time and difficulty constraints of SoC. For example, if you have an idea to improve compression (e.g. implementing a new algorithm) that you think we can benefit from, feel free to bring it up.

Optimization (ARM)

x264 prides itself on being one of the most optimized programs in existence while still being reasonably readable and maintainable. This project is about furthering that goal: make it even faster without sacrificing code quality.

x264's ARM NEON assembly code is well behind its x86 assembly and is missing many optimizations. This project would involve finishing up the ARM assembly (originally done as part of Summer of Code 2009), giving us a much-needed performance boost on ARM.

NEON knowledge is highly recommended but not required -- but you will have to learn somehow or another. We have a few NEON experts in the community who can help, but none are available for full-time mentoring, so keep this in mind when picking this project. There are also experts from ARM Shanghai who are optimizing x264 who may also be able to help.

GPU motion estimation

While porting x264 entirely to CUDA or OpenCL is an insane task, there are three possible methods that could be used to offload some work to the GPU:

• High-complexity motion search designed to get useful predictors to be used by the main motion search.
• Massively parallelized lookahead motion search, designed to do a lot of the work normally done in the lookahead thread. May also improve B-frame decision and other parts of the lookahead.
• Motion search designed to completely replace x264's main motion search: would require a lot of threading trickery to sync it perfectly with the main encoder threads.

The general algorithm that has been agreed on after a great deal of discussion is the hierarchical search method. If you have a better idea, feel free to propose it, of course. More description of this method is in the Qualification Tasks section.

This project is not recommended unless you have a very significant amount of experience with CUDA or OpenCL.

Qualification tasks

Unlike many other projects, such as ffmpeg, x264's policy for qualification tasks is to use tasks that are directly useful to you for your summer project. That is, the projects directly lead you into the start of your project and create a base for you to work off for the rest of the summer. This is, in our opinion, much better than making you work on something completely unrelated. We're willing to give all the technical help you need, but of course we won't write the code for you. "Passing" a qualification task is at the mentor's discretion. Note these are designed to be relatively difficult and help lead you into your main project. If you can't do the qualification task for the project, you surely cannot do the project either!

Again, to reiterate, we will guide you through as much of the codebase as you need to do your work. This page is not supposed to give you all the information you need to do these tasks: you are expected to contact us for more information. Feel free to ask tons of questions. On #x264dev IRC channel on Freenode, of course.

None of these tasks are supposed to take more than a few days to a week of work. If you successfully complete one, we will almost surely accept you as a student.

Optimization (ARM)

If you're interested in the optimization task, the qualification task is to speed up x264 on ARM by at least 2% by writing new NEON functions.

GPU Motion Estimation

Your task for this project will be to write a C version of your final algorithm. It doesn't need to deal with any of the corner cases; all it has to do is run before the main encoding loop, deciding the motion vectors for the frame. It doesn't even have to work with threading. It doesn't have to support sub-16x16 partitions either. Assuming you didn't propose another, the hierarchical search works via the following algorithm:

• Set N equal to 2^M, where M is an integer. A common M is 4.
• WHILE N is greater than 1:

• Downscale the image (from the original) by a factor of N.
• Do an ordinary diamond motion search on the image with block size 16x16. Assume the predicted motion vector to be equal to the median of the top, left, and top right motion vectors (as per H.264 MV prediction)... but use the motion vectors from the previous iteration, not the current for these (this is what allows you to parallelize things with CUDA).
• For each block after searching, split the motion vectors of that block into 4 separate (but equal) motion vectors. These will be used as the starting point for the searches in the next iteration. Each iteration progressively refines the result at a progressively lesser downscale.
• N = N/2

• Do a final refine at no downscale at all.

Contact info

If you are interested, drop by #x264dev or #x264 on Freenode and ping Dark Shikari.