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

[Corbin Simpson]

2011/3/25 Stéphane Marchesin <stephane.marchesin at gmail.com>:
> 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.

If I recall correctly, one of the fun parts of VDPAU was being able to
advertise the different supported formats and pick and choose what's
decodeable and what isn't. If there isn't a VP8 codec for VDPAU at the
moment, we can always get that added to the libvdpau headers.

Also, from a conversation last year with ajax, I do remember that
Theora could definitely be an alternative first target, since it
shares much of its decoding pipeline with h.264 and VP8, and there are
lots of players out there that grok Theora.

~ C.

-- 
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? ~ Keynes

Corbin Simpson
<MostAwesomeDude at gmail.com>