[Mesa-dev] GSoC : Video decoding state tracker for Gallium3d

[Stéphane Marchesin]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 14:44, Matt Turner <mattst88 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 4:28 PM, ★ Emeric <emeric.grange at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>> My name is Emeric, I am a 22 years old french student, and I am
>> currently looking to apply to the google summer of code 2011.
>> I saw the "Gallium H.264 decoding" idea on the X.Org GSoC page, and I
>> am particularly interested by this project.
>
> A couple days ago, a few developer talked in passing about this idea
> on IRC. One point made was that shader-based video is kind of, well,
> not ideal, for cards that have dedicated hardware since it's going to
> utilize most of the cards resources and also use quite a bit of power
> in the process. Now, shaders may be the best we can do in practice,
> given the difficulties in releasing documentation for AMD's UVD, for
> instance, but still.
>
> Since Google (and most of the free software community) is pushing WebM
> over H264, it might be a good idea to focus instead of WebM. Clearly
> there are no cards today that support WebM video decoding, so this
> would be neat. I don't know, but I'd guess a lot of the code needed
> for WebM decoding is also useful for H264 decoding.
>

I agree that WebM would be awesome. But what APIs are available that
do WebM right now? It would be nice to use an existing API there.

Stéphane