xv acceleration and the ps3

[Stephane Marchesin]

Alan Jones wrote:
> 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.
>
I have some advice, although maybe not the kind you'd expect.

My advice is that there is hardware to do Xvideo in the ps3. It just 
happens to be hidden behind an hypervisor. They are purposedly hiding 
this hardware funcitonality from linux. Not really what I'd call "linux 
support".

What is the solution ? Just ask sony to unlock it. If enough people do, 
that might work.

Stephane