xv acceleration and the ps3

[Alan Jones]

Hi All,

I've started getting things sorted to try get spu accelerated movie
playback in linux on the ps3. The decoding would be done by adding
support to ffmpeg, but then there is still the issue of rescaling
videos - which isn't handled by ffmpeg, but by $VIDEOPLAYER
(mplayer/vlc/xine/etc)

While I could add support to a player so that it could use the spus to
handle rescaling it occured to me that I might be able to instead
implement a virtual xv driver/plugin (sorry not sure what it's called)
that uses the spus to accelerate graphics seeing we have no direct
access to the graphics card in linux on the ps3.

I'm not sure how video players interact with xv - though most of them
seem to have support for it (which is why I thought it may be a better
route to providing acceleration). Would it be feasible to implement
this? It'd be nice to benefit all players rather than just one - plus
not all of them support framebuffers. I guess it'd also help any other
applications which happen to use xv to assist in drawing to screen.

Thanks for any advice and suggestions.

Cheers,

Alan.