[MPlayer-dev-eng] Status of CoreAVC (last time) and using win32 codecs on x86_64

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Anatoli Marinov wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> Why we need such kind of closed decoder like coreAVC? Now ffh264 works
> slower but I think it will be better if we try to optimize it, to add
> threads like in closed decoder, to support multiple CPU and similar
> things.
> Of course this is a lot of work but my opinion is that this is the right way.
>
> What do you think?

Why not do both?

CoreAVC solves the problem of playing h264 1080p video NOW. Of course it 
would be nice to have ffh264 support multithreading, but it doesn't now 
and it's probably quite a bit into the future before it will.

I have done testing on an Core2Duo E6400 using linux, and playing VC-1 
isn't quick enough using the single threaded codec available right now so 
I get frame skips, so basically there is no way of playing 1080p VC-1 in 
Linux that I am aware of.

Using ffh264 for h.264 is the same (frame skips, 100% cpu most of the 
time), but with the CoreAVC patches I get smooth playback at between 
80-130% CPU utilization using CoreAVC since is multithreaded.

So the question is, is it better to do an interim solution that works, or 
do we want to wait until a "proper" solution is in place and deny people 
the ability to play 1080p media in the interim?

I think it's better to do both, aim for the proper solution for the 
future, but solve the immediate problem.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se