[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH][RFC] Lagarith Decoder.

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 04:36:45PM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> Reimar D?ffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> writes:
> 
> > On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 02:46:07AM -0600, Nathan Caldwell wrote:
> >> 2009/9/5 Loren Merritt <lorenm at u.washington.edu>:
> >> > On Tue, 1 Sep 2009, Nathan Caldwell wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> Here are the latest lagarith patches.
> >> >
> >> > Your decoder disagrees with the official version on the 2nd frame of http://akuvian.org/stuff/lagarith_bork.avi
> >> 
> >> Finally got a chance to look into this, and found the problem, but I'm
> >> not sure how to fix it.
> >> What happens is on this clip when the probabilities get scaled in
> >> lag_read_prob_header(), one of the values gets rounded up instead of
> >> rounding down like reference does. For the offending value reference
> >> gives 0x6ff while the code below gives 0x700.
> >
> > Besides a "told you so" as to using floating point giving no end of
> > issues for lossless, the exact input values would be the minimum
> > necessary to help out.
> > Adding a volatile float or volatile double at the right place might
> > be all that is necessary to make it work (well as far as it can be
> > called "working" while using floating point).
> 
> WTF?  How would adding volatile change anything whatsoever?

It can force rounding to IEEE precision of intermediate results, or a
specific evaluation order.

> If it
> does, it's an accidental side-effect and NOT THE RIGHT SOLUTION.  98%
> of all "solutions" involving volatile are wrong.

Well, I didn't call it a solution, I said "make it work". If you are
using floating point for such code, using volatile is not going to make
it any worse.
As to those asking how the reference code manages: Probably by relying
on luck that the encoder and the decoder will happen to use the same
instructions and thus the same rounding errors.
I'd expect it to be the kind of code that fails when e.g.
you try to upgrade your compiler or use ICL instead of VC compiler and
things like that (i.e. "I managed to write C code that is less portable
than plain asm code"). Of course I'd be happy to be wrong...