[Nouveau] GSOC '08 hardware accelerated video decoding

[Garnet MacPhee]

Hi, I am one of those who doesn't care about 3D, but I would very much like to have a fast 2d driver to replace the nvidia 
closed-source one. My primary requirement is the ability to play 1080i video (HDTV). I am doing this now with the nvidia 
driver with good results. My hardware is a 6200A video card (NV4A), a DVI-D monitor with 1920x1200 resolution, and a 3ghz 
Pentium 4 cpu. I can achieve good results with just the blitter, and I do not have XvMC turned on.

Here is the mplayer control statement I use: mplayer dvb:// -ao alsa -vo xv:port=387 -fs

The nouveau driver is much too slow to play 1080i video, no matter which adapter is used.

Good luck with the project. I may be able to help a little with testing, but I do not have the knowledge necessary to 
contribute to the coding.

Garnet

Younes M wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm considering submitting a project for this year's Google Summer of
> Code program that would involve making progress on hardware
> accelerated video decoding for the nouveau driver and wanted some
> feedback.
> 
> I know that this isn't a big priority at the moment amongst the
> regular contributors, but I think it would make a good GSOC project
> because of it's somewhat narrow scope. I think for a lot of people 3D
> eye candy isn't a feature they're desperate for, they just care about
> a functional and efficient 2D driver, and having video acceleration
> would complement that nicely and entice them to switch from the Nvidia
> binary driver and the old nv driver long before the people who want
> the 3D features.
> 
> I've read through jb17bsome's notes on XvMC and I think all the work
> he's done so far is a great head's up on what's involved. I've also
> read through the VAAPI page and I think that would also be a great
> feature to try and support given all the non-MPEG2 video content out
> there, it would probably entice even more people to use nouveau.
> 
> The only thing I'm concerned about at this point is that the only
> Nvidia hardware I currently have is a GeForce FX GO 5200, so I'm not
> sure how much help I could really be given the limited features of
> that GPU.
> 
> If anyone has any comments or suggestions on this, or thinks that some
> other area would make a better project I would love to hear your
> comments.
> 
> Thanks all.