Re: project extension proposal

> I guess most reference implementations are like that. At least MPEG-4
> versions are. They grew over years, being changed all the time. Once they
> compile they are good to "fix" a bitstream format and test for compliance,
> but learning from them it difficult. 

    Not confirmed, but I have heard that the roots of the H.264 reference
software go to MPEG-2.  It evolved to H.263 and now to H.264.  Too
many (de)generations...
  
> My suggestions is: Do it the way XVID did. 
> Start more or less with the reference implementation, so you have a
> running plattform. Then replace more and more code by more readable and
> hopefully faster code until finally all old code has been replaced.  
> Starting from scrathc, without a running encoder, developing is no fun.
> You have to see the codec advancing, getting faster, getting more
> efficient.

    Your are very rigth, there is no fun in developing a codec without
getting inmediate results, but there is also no fun at all in refactoring
functions of hundreds of lines that do nine or ten different things at the same
time and whose name has nothing to do with any of them.  And if those
functions use heavily global data things get even worst... :-(

> If you (and others) are willing to create a java model: Great! Many people
> will benefit from it. 
> But I doubt that many people will be as altruistic, to create a new
> version that runs even slower than the present one. 
> Much more people will be interested to help create a _faster_
> and therefore _usable_ version.

    Your are again rigth, but may be so much complexity in the reference software
will make people think twice before trying to hack into it.  Someone with
great insight of it should start with a deep cleaning and refactoring to make
it more amenable to general hacking.

    /AITOR




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