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

[Matt Turner]

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.

Matt