Daala Quickstart Windows

This is a simple guide to getting the code and encoding a simple video within Windows.

There is also a Daala Quickstart page for Linux/MacOS.

Pre-requisites

• Visual Studio 2008 or 2010
• git
• libogg (v1.3 or later)

Visual Studio

The solution files were created using Visual Studio (VS) 2008 Team System and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. Even though the provided solutions might work with the express versions of VS, this has not been tested.

Libogg

The solution files were tested with libogg 1.3.2. This can be downloaded from this link: downloads.xiph.org

Installation Procedure

• Clone the Daala.git repository (this can take several minutes)

   git clone https://git.xiph.org/daala.git

• Unpack libogg into a folder named ogg.

If you cloned the Daala repository onto the root of your C drive, your folder structure should look like this:

   C:\daala
   C:\ogg

Make sure you run the git clone operation on the same machine where you intend to use the code.
Checking out a copy on Windows and then trying to use it on Linux will not work, as executable permissions and line-endings will not be set properly.

Building the executables

• Open the file Daala_static.sln located at \win32\Visual Studio\VSXXXX\ folder.
• Build the solution.

This will generate 3 static libraries and 2 executables:

• Libdaalabase.lib
• Libdaalaenc.lib
• Libdaaladec.lib
• encoder_example.exe
• decoder_example.exe

Encoding a Video

If you do not have one, get a sample video or two in .y4m format from media.xiph.org. These videos are relatively large and will take a long time to encode. There are also subsets of 1 second long videos for faster encoding:

• video-1-short

We also maintain a set of still-image collections in .y4m format:

• Subset 1 (50 images, small training set)
• Subset 2 (50 images, small testing set)
• Subset 3 (1000 images, large training set)
• Subset 4 (1000 images, large testing set)

Encode the video:

   ./examples/encoder_example -v 30 video.y4m -o video.ogv

where

• video.y4m is the input video you want to encode,
• video.ogv is the name of the encoded video file to output,
• -v specifies the quality (currently from 0 to 511, where 0 is lossless)

Decoding a Video

you can decode the video back to .y4m with

   ./examples/dump_video video.ogv -o decoded_video.y4m

Many other players can play back these .y4m files, and other tools can convert them to various other formats.

Creating y4m from other formats

You can use the ffmpeg tool to generate y4m from any of it supported video formats:

   ffmpeg -i video.webm -pix_fmt yuv420p video.y4m

Note that ffmpeg is optimized for speed. You may not get repeatable results across machines.