2011-03-07 v0.9.6 "Bali" Our second named release, focused on a faster, higher quality, encoder. - Upgrading: This release is backwards compatible with Aylesbury (v0.9.5). Users of older releases should refer to the Upgrading notes in this document for that release. - Enhancements: vpxenc --psnr shows a summary when encode completes --tune=ssim option to enable activity masking improved postproc visualizations for development updated support for Apple iOS to SDK 4.2 query decoder to determine which reference frames were updated implemented error tracking in the decoder fix pipe support on windows - Speed: Primary focus was on good quality mode, speed 0. Average improvement on x86 about 40%, up to 100% on user-generated content at that speed. Best quality mode speed improved 35%, and realtime speed 10-20%. This release also saw significant improvement in realtime encoding speed on ARM platforms. Improved encoder threading Dont pick encoder filter level when loopfilter is disabled. Avoid double copying of key frames into alt and golden buffer FDCT optimizations. x86 sse2 temporal filter SSSE3 version of fast quantizer vp8_rd_pick_best_mbsegmentation code restructure Adjusted breakout RD for SPLITMV Changed segmentation check order Improved rd_pick_intra4x4block Adds armv6 optimized variance calculation ARMv6 optimized sad16x16 ARMv6 optimized half pixel variance calculations Full search SAD function optimization in SSE4.1 Improve MV prediction accuracy to achieve performance gain Improve MV prediction in vp8_pick_inter_mode() for speed>3 - Quality: Best quality mode improved PSNR 6.3%, and SSIM 6.1%. This release also includes support for "activity masking," which greatly improves SSIM at the expense of PSNR. For now, this feature is available with the --tune=ssim option. Further experimentation in this area is ongoing. This release also introduces a new rate control mode called "CQ," which changes the allocation of bits within a clip to the sections where they will have the most visual impact. Tuning for the more exact quantizer. Relax rate control for last few frames CQ Mode Limit key frame quantizer for forced key frames. KF/GF Pulsing Add simple version of activity masking. make rdmult adaptive for intra in quantizer RDO cap the best quantizer for 2nd order DC change the threshold of DC check for encode breakout - Bug Fixes: Fix crash on Sparc Solaris. Fix counter of fixed keyframe distance ARNR filter pointer update bug fix Fixed use of motion percentage in KF/GF group calc Changed condition for using RD in Intra Mode Fix encoder real-time only configuration. Fix ARM encoder crash with multiple token partitions Fixed bug first cluster timecode of webm file is wrong. Fixed various encoder bugs with odd-sized images vp8e_get_preview fixed when spatial resampling enabled quantizer: fix assertion in fast quantizer path Allocate source buffers to be multiples of 16 Fix for manual Golden frame frequency Fix drastic undershoot in long form content