v0.2.4

This release fixes a bunch of bugs and general usability issues. We skipped 0.2.2 and 0.2.3 because I increased the version number to 0.2.3 pre-emptively in the source, and that was a while ago. There is a small 0.5% - 1% improvement in BD-rate due to bug fixes.

Features:

• Linked release against normal VS2010 DLLs instead of debug ones. Non-developers might not have the debug DLLs installed.
• Added long parameter support.
  • And new parameters (--no-deblock, --deblock, --no-sao, --aud).
  • And aliases for old parameters (--frames, --qp, --period).
• Added many parameters to add VUI (Video Usability Information) to the bitstream (--sar, --overscan, --videoformat, --range, --colorprim, --transfer, --colormatrix, --chromaloc).
• Improved lambda cost list resulting in more even encoding results with different QPs. Overall BD-rate remained roughly the same.

Fixed bugs:

• Fixed several crashes.
  • When QP < 15.
  • When motion vectors points way outside the picture.
  • Overflow during initialization that resulted in a crash on Linux.
• Fixed artifacts that sometimes happened at the bottom of intra frames.
• Fixed bug in motion vector cost estimation that resulted in long motion vectors some sequences (such as all black).
• Fixed a bug that added an extra frame at the end of the video.

v0.2.1

Changes

• Intra frame period added as a command line option (-p).
• Stdin support (give dash as input filename). (thanks @jeeb)
• New unit test framework.
• Replaced broken x86 cpuid asm implementation with a single implementation for both x86 and x64 using x264asm abstraction layer. We will be using x264asm for asm from now on.
• Fixed Makefile to give correct build options for Mac and 32-bit Linux. (thanks @dirk and @rmustacc)
• Fixed a small per frame memory leak.
• Quality and bitrate improvements.
  • Merged a branch for changes related to intra 4x4 prediction block coding that isn't in use yet but fixed something resulting in improved quality.
  • Fixed bug in intra mode search resulting in increased intra quality.
  • Fixed CU split cost calculation, resulting in decreased bitrate.

We measured a cumulative average decrease in bitrate for a given quality (BD-rate) of 15% in LP configuration from v0.2.0 to v0.2.1. Although that was with a limited test set of just one 600 frame video.

v0.2.0 First public release

First public release of kvazaar HEVC encoder. Only the most basic features are supported. Many features require recompiling to turn on and off.

Some supported features

• I-frames
• P-frames
• Deblocking
• Edge SAO
• RDOQ
• Basic CU-splitting (No transform splitting or asymmetric/symmetrics splits yet)
• Integer motion estimation
• All intra modes supported
• Residual coding