ANS Support

[jobrover]

Hello,

My organization is considering using Lepton. Ideally, we would like to eventually port the software over to an FPGA platform however that would require that ANS support as there is no way the VP8 encoder could reasonably fit.

I haven't seen much development happening with respect the ANS encoder that is presently hidden behind an experimental feature flag. Is this encoder fully supported yet? Will this encoder be supported going forward?

Thanks

[danielrh]

We plan to deprecate that. However there may be new ideas to use simpler entropy coding schemes (like huffman) for faster and simpler decodes--those ideas are still on the drawing board
the ANS support was simply no faster and required too much memory to encode. That said, it wouldn't be too difficult to modernize it and reduce the memory requirements