[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Fast half-float to float conversion

[Frank Barchard]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 8:07 AM, Reimar D?ffinger
<Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de>wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 07:55:04AM -0700, Frank Barchard wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 7:08 AM, Reimar D?ffinger
> > <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de>wrote:
> > > Personally I don't think there is any need for such optimization for
> the
> > > first implementation of such a rare format as OpenEXR, it can still be
> > > added after the rest has passed review (though Michael sometimes has a
> > > different opinion on these kinds of things), and hopefully in a way
> that
> > > can
> > > be properly optimized with assembly (whether ARM NEON or SSE2 or
> > > whatever).
> >
> > I agree.    A small/simple version that can be done in hardware would be
> > good for now.
> > Graphic chips are starting to support half float.  So at some point we'll
> > just want to pass the images along to be rendered as is.
>
> It seems more like the opposite way to me: they supported half float since
> a
> long time, but use it less and less nowadays and may eventually remove
> support
> for it.
>
> > Conversion could be done in swscaler.
>
> That may well be nicer, but also more effort.


Ultimately, I expect we'll want float channels.  But thats almost a
rearchitecting.  Its becoming very interesting for images / textures, but
not all that necessary for movies.

>
> > Also a test that converts from half float to float and back again
> losslessly
> > would be good.
>
> Well, that depends a bit on what kind of data we are talking about. To be
> honest,
> for image data supporting NaN and INF seems rather pointless to me
> (actually when
> it comes to contrast/brightness adjustments I'd think most users would
> prefer it
> if it wasn't supported). Also FFmpeg in general is compiled to not
> distinguish
> between +0.0 and -0.0.


nan and inf are bad... guaranteed to cause problems.  And they shouldnt come
up much.
denormals are somewhat interesting, in that they extend the range of valid
half floats and floats.
Reguardless of what we'd like half floats to be, I would pick a hardware
implementation to be compatible with.
CPU's tend to take the fancy approach of supporting denormals, nan and inf,
while GPU's are simplier.
The table approach at least allows half float to float to work any way.  But
on export, you would like the float to convert back to the same half float.


>
> _______________________________________________
> ffmpeg-devel mailing list
> ffmpeg-devel at mplayerhq.hu
> https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel
>