[FFmpeg-devel] hardware aided video decoding

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hello,
On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 09:45:26AM +0200, Attila Kinali wrote:
> In view of the slowly progressing open graphics project[1]
> I wanted to ask how the people here would accelerate video
> decoding with help of the graphics card. Respectively,
> what functions would you expect the graphics card to have
> to help FFmpeg/lavc to decode video.

While I haven't tried hardware-supported H.264, the one for MPEG-2
usually isn't much faster than all-CPU, and I think most of the speed
advantage comes from less data being transferred of the bus.
IMO if you want it to be flexible you can only do parts of the decoding
like idct on the card, but that might often mean transferring the data
in both directions, so unless you have PCIe you can just forget that.
My personal opinion: Don't bother. A faster CPU would be cheaper than a
special chip on the graphics card. At most consider implementing the
parts of OpenGL programmability that might be most useful for this
first and maybe expose it also in a non-OpenGL way (though there is a
simplified OpenGL even for embedded devices).

Greetings,
Reimar D?ffinger