Sunday, May 18, 2008

Intra-coded macroblocks? Check

After a few weeks of work I've made some good progress. Basic rendering of intra-coded macroblocks is working. What this means is that if you view a video you'll see the occasional full frame displayed correctly, and some macroblocks from the frames in between displayed correctly. Intra-coded macroblocks are the simplest to deal with, since they don't depend on motion compensation; all the data is present and you just have to render it. Every nth frame of an MPEG2 stream is composed entirely of intra-coded macroblocks. It's these frames that are currently being displayed correctly. Other frames are composed of some intra-coded macroblocks, but mostly inter-coded macroblocks. Inter-coded macroblocks depend on motion compensation and their samples are usually differentials. These I haven't gotten yet.

I've also cleaned things up a bit, added some error checking, and added some more tests. It's taken a lot of stepping through Gallium code to get things right, in leau of documentation, but thanks to GDB, and even more to Insight, I've gotten this far. Stephane has answered my questions, mostly on how to efficiently do things, and even the folks in #mplayerdev have been helpful on XvMC and general decoding matters, so all in all I would say things are going smoothly.

One thing I'm sure of is that no one reads this thing currently. The X.Org folks have asked that their students keep a blog and also submit it to planet.freedesktop.org but I was told it only accepts RSS feeds. Currently this entire web site is maintained using a text editor, so I'll have to work out something more sophisticated in the near future. :-/ (Update: Since then I've been using BlogSpot and you're probably reading this post there instead of the old page.)

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