HEVC: NAL unit trace file for each NUL unit produc

Question

I'm using HM 14.0 as a reference. Is there a way to get some specific information about NAL units like

(a) type
(b) num_bytes
(c) frame_no
(d) decode_time
(e) priority
(f) timestamp

The first two I can have it through annexBbytecount, but what about the rest?

Answer 1

The reference codec comes with a built in tracer which is quite powerful!

Enable it like this:

diff --git a/source/Lib/TLibCommon/TComRom.h b/source/Lib/TLibCommon/TComRom.h
index 5a59809..1930809 100644
--- a/source/Lib/TLibCommon/TComRom.h
+++ b/source/Lib/TLibCommon/TComRom.h
@@ -158,7 +158,7 @@ extern const UChar g_aucDCTDSTMode_Hor[NUM_INTRA_MODE];
 extern       Char   g_aucConvertToBit  [ MAX_CU_SIZE+1 ];   // from width to log2(width)-2

 #ifndef ENC_DEC_TRACE
-# define ENC_DEC_TRACE 0
+# define ENC_DEC_TRACE 1
 #endif

As an example, I encoded and decoded the first 20 frames of BQMall_832x480_60.yuv with trace enabled.

After encoding/decoding using:

./TAppEncoderStatic -c ../cfg/encoder_intra_main.cfg  -c ../cfg/per-sequence/BQMall.cfg
./TAppDecoderStatic -b str.bin 

trace-files are produced (rather huge ones!)

$ ll -rt 
total 247100
drwxrwxr-x 12 xx xx      4096 jun 27 10:01 ../ 
-rwxrwxr-x  1 xx xx   2912618 jun 27 10:06 TAppDecoderStaticd*
-rwxrwxr-x  1 xx xx    627714 jun 27 10:06 TAppDecoderStatic*
-rwxrwxr-x  1 xx xx   4036611 jun 27 10:06 TAppEncoderStaticd*
-rwxrwxr-x  1 xx xx   1133295 jun 27 10:06 TAppEncoderStatic*
-rwxrwxr-x  1 xx xx     87319 jun 27 10:06 annexBbytecountStaticd*
-rwxrwxr-x  1 xx xx     29963 jun 27 10:06 annexBbytecountStatic*
-rwxrwxr-x  1 xx xx    369365 jun 27 10:06 convert_NtoMbit_YCbCrStaticd*
-rwxrwxr-x  1 xx xx    113252 jun 27 10:06 convert_NtoMbit_YCbCrStatic*
-rw-rw-r--  1 xx xx    442122 jun 28 21:29 str.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 xx xx  11980800 jun 28 21:29 rec.yuv
-rw-rw-r--  1 xx xx 168288021 jun 28 21:29 TraceEnc.txt    <----
drwxrwxr-x  2 xx xx      4096 jun 28 21:31 ./
-rw-rw-r--  1 xx xx  62975377 jun 28 21:31 TraceDec.txt    <----

Have a look at TraceEnc.txt and TraceDec.txt they contain everything you need to know!