Problem with etnaviv and gstreamer 1.0

[Nicolas Dufresne]

Le mardi 05 décembre 2017 à 19:39 +0000, Luís Mendes a écrit :
> I understand, but there is still some gain, because there are several
> applications that are only VDPAU/VAAPI aware. It would require a
> great
> effort to modify all those applications to make use of the specific
> CODA unit, since AFAIK there is no other standard API available for
> Linux that is widely used by applications. It is true that Kodi has
> support for the i.MX6 CODA unit, but only through the proprietary
> drivers and APIs, it currently cannot work with the open-source
> drivers. Looking into chromium, is just the same, it is possible to
> patch and recompile chromium to support CODA, but again only for the
> proprietary drivers.

This is incorrect. The state full CODEC interface for the kernel can be
used generically. It is supported by Chromium, in fact Chromium
supports both V4L2 state full and upcoming V4L2 state less kernel
interface. In recent Chromium you can build VAAPI, V4L2 and V4L2 Frame
decoder support all together and it will be detected properly. As a
matter of fact,the V4L2 state full kernel interface is widely
implemented by userspace these days, specially that FFMPEG gain support
for it (that enabled notably mplayer and VLC, but should enable Firefox
too).

> If the same approach is followed for each specific VPU unit, we will
> have proliferation of code and effort replication to support each
> specific VPU unit, instead of using a standard API.

This is also wrong, since V4L2 is a standard and generic kernel API,
much more generic then GPU kernel interfaces.

> I am not very acquainted with gstreamer... but I do know gstreamer is
> complex, is versatile and can perform complex manipulation on
> streams,
> but AFAIK is not yet a "de-facto standard" and is not exactly a
> replacement of VAAPI or VAAPI.
> If you happen to have suggestions for alternatives, or if I'm wrong,
> please provide your opinion.

VAAPI is not a multimedia framework, it's like comparing orange with
Apples. It simply provide an framework to enable state less hardware
codecs. VAAPI is, like mesa, an abstraction layer for CODEC that
requires a lot of HW specific code. Just try to write a simple media
player with it, and you'll quickly understand. On the other hand,
multimedia framework, like FFMPEG and GStreamer will help you out a
lot.

regards,
Nicolas
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