[XviD-devel] b-frames api question

[Radek Czyz]

Hey,

I think I'll try to re-design b-frames decision again. The idea came
to me because of many b-frames reports at forums (doom9 and more) and
because I myself encoded some (well, two) movies recently - I haven't
done that before. Experience is good, I guess.

However, nothing is obvious here - in particular, there are two groups
of users - some people like bframes and are unable to see any
artifacts related to it (such as infamous dark blocks). At the other
hand, there are people who say that bframes look very bad and they
are not using them at all.

My current idea is that we could need a possibility to control the
number of bframes not only in terms of maximum, but simply in terms of
'sensitivity'. This would affect the possibility that the _first_
bframe is inserted - something we can't do yet.

Now, there are two options.

1. Add new integer value to the API. The bad side is that I don't feel
like adding new integer to api, especially because b-frames are
controled by 3 (!) integers already. The good thing is that it would
be possible to set this integer to very high/very low value, disabling
the dynamic decision at all.

2. Use current MAX setting to alter not only maximum, but also
sensitivity. This wouldn't give huge control (I'm not saying that's
bad). It wouldn't allow users to disable the dynamic decision. It
wouldn't change the API.

What do you think? I'm in favour of the second solution, but maybe the
first has better future...