Return of the Xvid: Check Your Outputs!

Dec 22, 2008, 22:01 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Mitch Meyran)

[ Thanks to steve hill for this link. ]

"Xvid is free software, and as such it can run on many platforms: x86-32, x86-64, Power, ARM… And since assembly is platform-specific, the Xvid developers decided to share as much work as they could across those platforms: so, they used an intermediary platform and language that could be matched to assembly with minimal loss. This platform is NASM. In short, whatever platform NASM supports, Xvid can run faster on. For all the others, there is the plain C reference implementation.

"At the time of Xvid 1.1, NASM didn't support SSE2, much less 3, and didn't support x86-64; so, for a while, Xvid on 64-bit AMD and Intel systems made use of YASM, a mostly compatible implementation of NASM that supported 64-bit. Since then though, NASM caught up and Xvid dropped YASM support. Still, NASM's 64-bit support is very young."

Complete Story

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