Moving along

Things are moving along in the right direction. I finally got a chance to push my work to date to Nouveau's mesa git, you can check it out here. I have I, P, and B macroblocks working correctly when rendering frame pictures and using frame-based motion compensation. All that's left is to implement is field-based motion compensation (which is surprisingly very common, even in progressive content), and rendering field-based pictures (i.e. interlaced content). I think I've figured out a way to efficiently render macroblocks that use field-based prediction in one pass. Frame-based prediction works by grabbing a macroblock from a previously rendered surface and adding a difference to form the new macroblock. Field-based prediction works the same way, but references two macroblocks on the previously rendered surface, one for even scanlines and other for odd. My plan is to read from both reference macroblocks every scanline and choose which one to keep based on whether or not the scanline is even or odd. This can easily be done with a lerp(). It would be preferable to avoid the unecessary texture read, but it's simple and works in a single pass. Other alternatives include rendering the macroblock twice (once with even scanlines only, then with odd scanlines, using texkill to discard alternating scanlines), and rendering even and odd scanlines using line lists (which I understand makes sub-optimal usage of various caches in the pixel pipeline).