VMAFX Deprecations¶

This file tracks user-visible build configurations and CI modes that have been deprecated or removed. The table is the index; entries below are ordered newest-first.

2026-09-18 — 32-bit x86 CI lane (ADR-1258)¶

Status: Removed

The Ubuntu i686 gcc lane (formerly Build — Ubuntu i686 gcc (CPU, no-asm)), a compile-only 32-bit cross build with asm disabled, and the m32 stage of scripts/dev/preflight.sh that mirrored it are gone. ADR-0691 had removed the lane in May, but a merge restored it the same day, and it never ran a test.

Migration: none for users of the published containers or 64-bit builds. 32-bit x86 is unsupported; the fork is 64-bit only. If you build for 32-bit x86 yourself, add -msse2 -mfpmath=sse: without it the x87 FPU's 80-bit intermediates change scalar scores.

References: ADR-1258, ADR-0691

2026-05-28 — ansnr / float_ansnr feature extractor (ADR-0865)¶

Status: Removed

The ansnr and float_ansnr feature extractors were removed from all backends (CPU scalar, AVX2, AVX-512, NEON, CUDA, HIP, SYCL, Metal). ANSNR is a legacy pre-VMAF metric (circa 2001) that Netflix never adopted in any production VMAF model. Shipped models (such as vmaf_v0.6.1.json) do not reference ANSNR, and empirical feature importance analysis (Research-0733) confirmed zero contribution to modern VMAF scoring.

Migration: Callers requesting distortion-energy metrics should use PSNR (psnr_y, psnr_cb, psnr_cr) or PSNR-HVS (psnr_hvs), both of which remain actively maintained across CPU and GPU backends. For quality assessment, use VmafQualityRunner with standard models (vmaf_v0.6.1.json).

References: ADR-0865, ADR-0749, Research-0733, PR #38

2026-05-28 — VmafLegacyQualityRunner (ADR-0749)¶

Status: Removed (stub retained for import compatibility)

VmafLegacyQualityRunner drove the VmafFeatureExtractor float-path via the vmafexec binary, collecting the four legacy SVM features (vif, adm, ansnr, motion) and scoring them with model_V8a.model. It became broken when PR #38 dropped the float_ansnr feature from the C backend: the runner silently returned no ansnr scores or raised KeyError during SVM scoring.

Migration: Replace all uses of VmafLegacyQualityRunner with VmafQualityRunner and a current .json model (e.g. vmaf_v0.6.1.json) or vmaf_float_v0.6.1.pkl. The class stub is retained in compat/python-vmaf/core/quality_runner.py so existing import statements do not raise ImportError; instantiation raises NotImplementedError with the same migration pointer.

References: ADR-0749, PR #87

2026-05-28 — Legacy native build modes (ADR-0728): not carried out¶

Status: Withdrawn. ADR-0728 is superseded by ADR-1259.

This entry used to list 16 CI configurations as removed. None of them was removed by ADR-0728: its commit changed only this page, the ADR and a changelog fragment. Of the configurations it listed:

• Build — Ubuntu i686 gcc (CPU, no-asm) was removed on 2026-09-18 (see the entry above).
• Build — Ubuntu Vulkan (T5-1b runtime) and Build — macOS Vulkan via MoltenVK (advisory) went with the Vulkan backend (ADR-0726).
• Everything else still runs, under the short names it has had since #1286. The required Windows lanes are Windows UCRT64 (the MinGW64 lane migrated to UCRT64, ADR-1387), Windows MSVC+CUDA and Windows MSVC+SYCL; the other required lanes include Ubuntu gcc+DNN, Ubuntu clang+DNN, Ubuntu HIP, Cppcheck, Sanitizers (address), Sanitizers (thread) and Sanitizers (undefined). Not required: macOS clang+DNN, macOS Metal, Ubuntu gcc static, Ubuntu CUDA static, Ubuntu SYCL and Ubuntu SYCL+CUDA.

build.yml (Linux Intel LLVM, macOS Clang+Metal, Windows MSVC+CUDA) runs alongside libvmaf-build-matrix.yml; it did not replace it. A change that breaks a required lane blocks the merge. ADR-1259 and CI job display names list every lane and which checks are required.

2026-05-28 — python/vmaf/ standalone wheel publishing¶

Status: Confirmed never existed; no-op

The python/vmaf/ shim package (re-exporting from compat/python-vmaf/) was never published as a standalone wheel to PyPI. No CI job performed wheel publication for this package at the time of audit. ADR-0691 §4 records this as a no-op for traceability.

The Netflix Python harness (python/test/) continues to run via tox in every Linux lane without a GPU backend and every macOS lane, and the required Netflix CPU Golden job runs the golden assertions.