[Intel-gfx] Installing drivers and needed packages for decoding

[Jonathan Haws]

I am building a system where I will be encoding and decoding H.264 streams.  I have an Ivy Bridge system running Fedora 17 booting the stock kernel on a minimal installation.

Here are my questions:

1. I would like this system to be headless, thus I don't want a window manager or anything else (though I am guessing I need to keep X around?).  What packages are absolutely required?  It seems (from looking at some diagrams I have found) that the DRMlib will communicate directly with the kernel driver, bypassing the X server.  Is this true?  The reason I want this to be headless is that I will have video streams (analog or H.264 encoded) that I would like to feed into my system and have it output H.264 encoded streams to disk automatically.  A different machine will be used to view the video.

2. Is there any documentation anywhere that details how to get everything installed and how to verify the installation?  The closest thing I found was this -- http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/enabling_hardware_accelerated_playback_fedora_16_v.pdf, but it adds all sorts of extra stuff.  The decode examples from VA-API on freedesktop.org don't run because I don't have the right drivers installed (or so it would seem from this output).

libva info: VA-API version 0.33.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/local/lib/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
lt-mpeg2vldemo: mpeg2vldemo.cpp:160: int main(int, char**): Assertion `va_status == 0x00000000' failed.


3. Is there a particular kernel version that is known to work well?  Or will the latest release do?

Anyway, I have searched and searched, but have been unable to find answers to these questions.  Maybe I am just looking in the wrong places...

Thanks for the help!
Jonathan