SoC x264 2009

x264 has loads of possibilities for SoC 2009 projects.

This is part of the VideoLAN candidature for Google Summer of Code 2009.

• Mentor (and author of this page): Dark Shikari
• Possible backup mentor: pengvado

Introduction to x264

x264 is probably the most efficient, compression-wise, open source video encoder there is. It is quite competitive with commercial encoders, outclassing a large number of them.

While not actually part of VLC or ffmpeg (it has its own codebase), it is a major library used by both, licensed under the GPL, in addition to being a standalone encoder. As the only major open-source H.264 encoder, x264 has a near-complete monopoly on H.264 encoding in the consumer world, along with being used by many major corporations, including Youtube and Facebook. Some companies, such as Avail Media, have in the past offered bounties on improvements to the encoder.

An overview of x264's algorithm can be found here.

Projects

We are probably only accepting one or two 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.

Optimization (x86)

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.

This is probably the hardest task, as x264 is already so absurdly optimized that going significantly further is going to be very difficult. As such, the qualification task for this project (see below) requires you to prove that you can get at least somewhere. The goal here is at least a 5-10% performance increase in x264 on x86 (and ideally, other CPUs too, but processor-specific optimizations are allowed here). Some unconventional ideas in addition to the obvious tasks of writing loads of assembly and finding cases where the C code can be further optimized:

• Cache profiling: try to minimize cache misses.
• Code size profiling: find the inherent "value" in clock cycles of a line of cache and use this to try to optimize the code size of existing assembly.
• Aliasing optimizations: find places where aliasing is hurting the compiler's ability to optimize.

Not recommended for anyone other than hardcore assembly gurus.

ARM Support

x264 currently focuses on x86--and to a lesser extent--PowerPC. ARM is becoming more and more important every year--yet currently x264 cannot even run on some ARMs, and there's no configure support. Let alone the fact that there's no ARM assembly. This task would be to set up ARM support in configure, fix all unaligned accesses in the C code (there's probably only one), and then writing ARM assembly for all major DSP functions. There are already some similar ARM functions in ffmpeg for H.264 decoding which could be useful to you in this task. The goal here is to make x264 at least 4-5 times faster on ARM by implementing all the major assembly functions on ARM.

Also not recommended for anyone other than hardcore assembly gurus.

4:4:4 and 4:2:2 Colorspaces

x264 currently only supports the 4:2:0 colorspace, also known as YV12. However, many profession applications require higher precision in the form of 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 chroma subsampling. Furthermore, such sampling is useful for many artificial video sources, like video game captures and presentations, where sharp chroma edges are blurred by the 4:2:0 sampling. This is a large project that, unlike the previous two, probably does not involve modifying any assembly if you don't want to. In cases where things would be easier if the assembly was modified, the other developers will probably be willing to do it for you if you aren't an assembly guru.

The project mostly covers changing every place in the code where YV12 was assumed--and making it variable. It also involves handling the potential new syntax elements and adding a new Hadamard transform for the new chroma DC channels. It also may involve modifying x264_scan8, which could be a rather obnoxious task given how many parts of x264 assume certain properties of it.

This project will involve a lot of coding and a lot of debugging, but none of it should be particularly complex.

GPU Motion Estimation

In practice, this probably means CUDA, as OpenCL is not supported by anything yet.

While porting x264 entirely to CUDA is an insane task, putting a lookahead motion estimation on the GPU could be useful both for quality and performance. Tricky catches here include:

• The motion estimation method has to support x264's threading model. The easiest way to do this might be, as suggested, to make it into a lookahead function that is run on entire frames before the main encoding begins.
• The algorithm has to be able to make some sorts of basic mode decisions well enough to to be comparable with x264's basic SATD mode decision. This means you will have to implement the hpel and qpel interpolation algorithms, along with the SATD (Sum of Hadamard Transformed Differences) comparison method.
• Interlaced mode.

The general algorithm that has been agreed on after a great deal of discussion is the hierarchical search method. 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.

Weighted P-frame Prediction

Of the projects listed, this is the only one with the potential to significantly improve encoding quality. Weighted P-frame prediction lets you assign weights to the frames in a reference list for the current frame, values to multiply all the pixels by. This is incredibly useful in dealing with fades, camera flashes, etc. However, it would require both a good enough algorithm to find optimal weighting factors and an efficient enough algorithm to be useful in practice.

A patch already exists for this--but it is so old (from the early days of x264) that it is practically useless except as a guide to how to start implementing it now.

Note that the challenge here is twofold: add support for weighted P-frame prediction and make an algorithm good enough and fast enough to make the feature useful.

Qualification tasks

This year, the qualification tasks will represent the start of your summer project. 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 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.

Optimization

If you're interested in the optimization task, the qualification task is to speed up x264 on x86 (32 or 64-bit) by 1-2% on "normal settings" without changing the output. This is much harder than it sounds.

ARM Support

If you're interested in the ARM task, your qualification task will be to:

• Fix the unaligned access bug in the bitstream writer.
• Write NEON SIMD assembly for at least a few of the simpler significant DSP functions (SAD, SATD, etc).

4:4:4 and 4:2:2 Colorspaces

If you're interested in working on this project, your task is to produce an x264-encoded bitstream in 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 format. It does not actually have to be remotely viewable (that is, you don't have to implement any of the code to handle motion compensation, deblocking, or anything else involving 4:4:4/4:2:2 chroma data), but the bitstream has to be written correctly (correct syntax elements). The patch you write for this will be the starting point for your main project.

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. 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 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.

• Do a final refine at no downscale at all.

Weighted P-frame Prediction

The task for this project is to add support for Weighted P-frame Prediction--but not to write any sort of handling of it from an algorithmic standpoint, so no algorithm to decide the weights. That is, all the weights are just set to some constant value until we come up with a better way to do things. As with the other tasks, you can make many simplifications here to avoid corner cases, such as ignoring multithreading. Another simplification you can make is to only allow a weight on the first reference frame, or even have the program be completely ignorant of the weighted version of the frame until the final encode. All that matters is you get the basic framework working.

Contact info

If you are interested, drop by #videolan, #x264, or #x264dev on Freenode.

You should also contact the admin jb.