[FFmpeg-devel] Regarding Video Acceleration API

Benjamin Zores ben
Tue Aug 28 19:28:00 CEST 2007


Hi,

As some of you may know or not, Intel is working on a XvMC replacement
called VA-API (Video Acceleration API).
XvMC being resticted to MPEG-1/2 decoding, its indeed not very useful
these days.

This new API (see http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi )
aims at providing GPU assistance to MPEG-1/2/4, H.264, VC-1 decoding
for capable cards (almost all are these days with adequate Windows
drivers/players).

Good point is that it aims at not being Xorg-restricted (which also
means one can probably use h/w specialized decoder, not necessarly a
video card) and not an extension to some video driver (like it was for
XV). So one can possibly use it with several video outputs i guess.

I bet it'll be available for Intel chips first but will probably be
used by nVidia/VIA/ATI ones once mature.

However, this API is only useful if decoders can make use of it and
all are actually FFMPEG-based, hence the needed support. I guess it'd
be interesting that someone from FFMPEG with enough knowledge in this
area may participate with Intel in VA-API specifications at least,
otherwise, I fear we'll end up with either a broken, unusable API,
which would be a shame, especially as FFMPEG will probably be one of
the only library to directly make use of it.

Besides, there's probably more to gain to have parts of decoding done
by DSPs than having multi-threaded software decoder.

How does the idea sounds ?

Ben

-- 
"My life, and by extension everyone else's is meaningless."
Bender, Futurama




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