Analysis of Google’s VP8

From Jason Garrett-Glaser’s analysis of Google’s VP8 (emphasis mine):

But first, a comment on the spec itself.

AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code — up to and including TODOs, “optimizations”, and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec. I may have complained about the H.264 spec being overly verbose, but at least it’s precise. The VP8 spec, by comparison, is imprecise, unclear, and overly short, leaving many portions of the format very vaguely explained. Some parts even explicitly refuse to fully explain a particular feature, pointing to highly-optimized, nigh-impossible-to-understand reference code for an explanation. There’s no way in hell anyone could write a decoder solely with this spec alone.

And the result of this type of spec?

The encoder and decoder share a staggering amount of code. This means that any bug in the common code will affect both, and thus won’t be spotted because it will affect them both in a matching fashion.

A patch to fix a bug in the decoder has already been removed instead of fixing the same bug in the encoder.

Mac OS X Flash Player Hardware Decoding H.264

Adobe has release a preview of its upcoming Flash Player 10.1 with hardware decoding of H.264 video using recently added APIs into OS X 10.6.3.

It seems to work quite well in Safari, although 720p YouTube videos still use a fair chunk of CPU. Hardware decoding doesn’t seem to kick in at all on Chrome.

SublimeVideo – HTML5 Video Player

Jilion’s HTML5 plugin-free video player shows us what a video on the web may look like in a few years time.

One Downside of Being an Atheist…

…is that doing something like this out of church will make you look like you’re on drugs.

Also see part 1 and part 2.

World Squash Championships 2008 Highlights

For those of you too cheap to buy the full replays from PSALive.tv, Channel M have highlights of the World Squash Championships in Manchester this year that you can watch online for free.

Currently only the women’s highlights on available for view, although the men’s should be up soon.

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene

Very interesting research into using still photographs to enhance a video of the same scene by increasing the resolution, enhance the dynamic range and exposure, and even object touch-up and removal.

It Is Over

I take back what I said, on Guitar Hero III, completing DragonForce’s Through the Fire and Flames on Expert with 100% notes hit isn’t impossible. But it is fucking hard.

“I Thought Europe Was a Country?”

When you have grown adults showing this amount of ignorance, all you can do is laugh.

You Get What You Pay For

Some seriously bad knockoffs of Pixar’s Ratatouille and Cars, called Ratatoing and The Little Cars. (Via MetaFilter.)

Kris Holm: Extreme Unicyclist

Kris Holm does stuff that is hard enough to on a real bike on his unicycle. Drops, gaps, trails, North Shore, you name it, he does it.

Slob Evolution

Dove Evolution Parody.

Will it Blend?

An iPhone is blended on YouTube to black powdery goodness.

Woman Gets Owned Trying To Buy Multiple iPhones

A woman buys a guys place in line for an iPhone for $800 with the intention of buying the entire stock at the AT&T store to sell on eBay. Then she is told there is a one phone per customer limit, hilarity ensues.

I hope this guy likes his G5

Because his isn’t going to be able to go back to his old G4.

I didn’t hear about this until today when this movie was released, but it seems that some guy at HelpMeGetAG5.com said that if he got enough donations for a new G5 PowerMac, he would blow up his old G4. Well, he did get enough money, and he did blow it up, an dhe has the video to prove it. The sites down now probably due to the sheer number of people trying to watch the video, so you can enjoy it here, free of charge. How nice of me.

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