IJG swings again, and misses

Earlier this month the IJG unleashed version 8 of its ubiquitous libjpeg library on the world. Eager to try out the “major breakthrough in image coding technology” promised in the README file accompanying v7, I downloaded the release. A glance at the README file suggests something major indeed is afoot:

Version 8.0 is the first release of a new generation JPEG standard to overcome the limitations of the original JPEG specification.

The text also hints at the existence of a document detailing these marvellous new features, and a Google search later a copy has found its way onto my monitor. As I read, however, my state of mind shifts from an initial excited curiosity, through bewilderment and disbelief, finally arriving at pure merriment. Continue reading

IJG is back

When FFmpeg released version 0.5 earlier this year, nearly five years had passed since the previous release, during which time the project had attracted frequent criticism for the lack of regular releases. There exists, however, a project whose release interval dwarves that of FFmpeg. I speak of the Independent JPEG Group’s libjpeg, version 7 of which was recently released after 11 years of silence.

So what have they been doing during the last 11 years? Not a lot, it seems. The only change log entry I find noteworthy is the addition of arithmetic entropy coding, previously omitted due to patent concerns. Contrast this with the TO DO note from the previous release:

The major thrust for v7 will probably be improvement of visual quality. The current method for scaling the quantization tables is known not to be very good at low Q values.  We also intend to investigate block boundary smoothing, “poor man’s variable quantization”, and other means of improving quality-vs-file-size performance without sacrificing compatibility.

In future versions, we are considering supporting some of the upcoming JPEG Part 3 extensions — principally, variable quantization and the SPIFF file format.

As always, speeding things up is of great interest.

Eleven years is of course plenty of time for the developers to change their minds, or perhaps even lose them. The TO DO note in version 7 reads thus:
Continue reading

Ogg timestamps explored

Ogg is the name of a multimedia container format invented by the Xiph Foundation. Moreover, it is a deeply flawed format. One of its many flaws relates to timestamps, an aspect of Ogg I shall explore in this article.

Ogg structure

The Ogg format splits elementary stream data into a sequence of packets which are then distributed arbitrarily across pages. A page can contain any number of packets, and a packet can span any number of pages. This two-level packetisation scheme is used since the packet headers would otherwise, due to design shortfalls elsewhere, become prohibitively large.

Timestamps in Ogg

Each Ogg page (not packet) header contains a timestamp, or granule position in Ogg terms, encoded as a 64-bit number. The precise interpretation of this number is not defined by the Ogg specification; it depends on the codec used for each elementary stream. The specification does, however, tell us one thing:

The position specified is the total samples encoded after including all packets finished on this page (packets begun on this page but continuing on to the next page do not count).

The meaning of samples is, again, left unspecified. It is merely suggested that it could refer to video frames or audio PCM samples.

Timestamping the end of packets, instead of the start, is impractical for a number of reasons including, but not limited to, the following:

  • Scheduling decoded samples for playback is more easily done based on the desired start time than on the end time.
  • Virtually every other container format ties timestamps to the start of the first following sample. Doing it differently only complicates players and other tools supporting multiple formats without providing any advantage.
  • Inferring the timestamp of the first sample of the stream is impossible without first decoding, at least partially, every packet in the first page.

Timestamp interpretation

As mentioned previously, the meaning of the 64-bit timestamps associated with an elementary stream depends on the codec of the stream. I conducted a survey of codecs with defined Ogg mappings looking specifically at their timestamp definitions. Continue reading