The rules of the specification with regard to picture buffering for pyramid coding are widely ignored.
x264's b-pyramid implementation, despite being practically identical to that proposed by the original paper, was technically not compliant.
Now it is.
Two modes are now available:
1) strict b-pyramid, while worse for compression, follows the rule mandated by Blu-ray (no P-frames can reference B-frames)
2) normal b-pyramid, which is like the old mode except fully compliant.
This patch also adds MMCO support (necessary for compliant pyramid in some cases).
MB-tree still doesn't support b-pyramid (but will soon).