Codecs: FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder

FFDShow from mplayer to enhance visual quality of low bitrate movies, and is based on original DirectShow filter from XviD, which is GPL'ed educational implementation of MPEG4 encoder.



Notes about FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder 2005-11-15 :

- All files from FFDShow 2005-11-15 are GCC.

Notes about FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder 20041012 :

- This build should fix Windows XP explorer crashes.
- Three editions are available: special for SSE and SSE2* capable CPUs and Generic for all others.

SSE a SSE2 build were compiled using Intel C++ Compiler 8.1, generic build was compiled with Microsoft VC6.

Known bug:

- in SSE and SSE2 builds Avisynth image processing filter in ffdshow isn't working.
- Subtitles correction may not work correctly in all cases (but should not crash).
These feature was ported from SubRip and if SubRip will give different resulf for a given subtitles, please send them to me.
* Only for CPUs with support for SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2) instructions. Check if your CPU has support for SSE2 instructions using Cpu-Z, a small tool which shows infos about CPU.

First of all, the FFDSHOW consumes way less CPU power than original DivX codecs, even with maximum post-processing. At the same time the post-processing seems to give excellent quality results and allows more configuring than the original DivX 5 codec. It can even automaticly reduce post-processing if your CPU is getting overloaded. The noise filter adds a kind of a rasterising effect to the picture - might be useful in some cases. The alpha version also includes experimental playback for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 files (such as VCD and SVCD movies), which works pretty damn well. Only problem is that MPEG-2 playback can't play the SVCD clips directly from the CD, but requires the video to be extracted to the HDD by using VCDGear first.

Features of FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder :

- various compression methods:
· MPEG 4 compatible (Xvid, DivX 4, DivX 5) using libavcodec or XviD
· Divx 3 compatible, MSMPEG4v2, MSMPEG4v1
· WMV1/7, WMV2/8
· H263, H263+
· HuffYUV in YV12 colorspace
· MJPEG
· MPEG 1
· Theora (not for regular use, format isn't stabilized yet)
· MPEG 2 by using mpeg2enc code from MJPEGtools project
· all Windows Media Video 9 supported encoders with output to asf/wmv file or AVI
- all common encoding modes: constant bitrate, fixed quantizer, fixed quality, two pass encoding (depends on compressor features)
- for libavcodec and XviD detailed selection of motion estimation method
- minimum and maximum I frames interval
- minimum and maximum quantizer selection, quantizer type and trellis quantization selection for libavcodec
- adaptive quantization (aka. masking) for libavcodec and XviD, single coefficient elimination
- selectable compression of starting and ending credits
- two curve compression algorithms for second pass of two pass encoding - thanks to XviD developers
- second pass simulation: although not very precise, still helpful for tweaking advanced curve compression parameters
- ability to use libavcodec internal two pass code
- image preprocessing with ffdshow image filters (latest ffdshow version must be installed)
- graph during encoding: if your encoding program doesn't provide one
- B frames support: from one to eight consecutive B frames
- support for MPEG 4 quarterpel and GMC
- selectable interlaced encoding
- decompression

Changes in FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder 2005-11-15 :

- fixed CorePNG decoding
- fixed (or at least found a workaround) for old video renderer crashes when in background and resized
- fixed DCT filter crash on non mod8 widths
- fixing fast bilinear resizing
- updated uclibc++
- fixed crash in hq2x and probably also in some other SIMD code
- updated japanese translation

Changes from FFDShow 20041010 to FFDShow 20041012 :

- MS ADPCM support
- two preferred vobsubs languages
- configurable swscaler gaussian blur strength for vobsubs
- support bmp and gif as bitmap overlay image
- option to use WAVEFORMATEX instead of WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE on output if no custom channelmapping
- bug fix: don't always recompute letterboxing size and don't always check for subtitles file
- more blending modes
- IDR interval and deblock parameters for x264
- working on image overlay
- vobsubs scaling
- proper alignment in ICL+GCC libavcodec build
- key shortcut for subtitles language cycling
- possibilty to override vobsubs position
- dwstring substr and c_str related fix
- recognize cz for Czech in idx, don't show duplicate languages in vobsub config
- don't set merit to "not used" if it previously had different value than one of defined in ffdshow
- yet another fix in corrections
- another subtitles correction fix
- fix in capital letters correction
- more keys working
- keyboard shortcuts and remote messages for cycling presets
- orthography correction from subrip
- separate page for text subtitles options, more complete subtitles correction from Subrip
- adding text subtitles correction from subrip
- support for 8-bit samples on input
- fixed another crash in vobsub
- fixed crash in getNext with pictFull==true and pictHalf==true
- enabled trellis quantization for H.263(+)