Decode H.263 video using the <video> tag

H.263 was written in 1996 for video telephony over ordinary phone lines, and became the basis of MPEG-4 Part 2 and of the video track in early 3GP phones. It shares its decoder with H.261: ffmpeg-h26x_1 is a build of FFmpeg reduced to those two decoders and nothing else. avidmx_1 reads the AVI and tags the pid from the H263 compressor fourcc, and libx264_1 with isobmff_1 produce the MP4. All 50 frames come out at 59.5 dB PSNR against a native FFmpeg decode.

Code snippet

<video is="universal-video_1" src="testcard.avi" using="solver_1"
        with="avidmx_1;ffmpeg-h26x_1;isobmff_1;libx264_1" controls> </video>

The same module also carries rfh263, so a bare .263 elementary stream plays with with="ffmpeg-h26x_1;isobmff_1;libx264_1" and no demultiplexer at all. The container is used here only for the frame rate: H.263 numbers its pictures with a temporal reference but never states how many there are per second, so a raw stream falls back to the 15 fps of the recommendation and plays slower than it was encoded.

CIF is coded as 352x288 samples but displayed 4:3, so the sample aspect ratio is 12:11 and the player reports the picture as 384x288. The stored frame is unscaled; only the display geometry differs.

Specifications :

The specifications of the test sequence are :