[MPlayer-dev-eng] VAAPI/X11 video output driver

[Mark Thompson]

On 29/11/15 11:43, wm4 wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Nov 2015 00:17:38 +0000
> Mark Thompson <sw at jkqxz.net> wrote:
>>
>> I didn't see that before my previous message.  I guess I could have a
>> look at mpv to see what happens differently, but that could be an
>> arbitrarily large timesink.  Unclear how to proceed.
>
> mpv's vo_vaapi is based on the mplayer-vaapi repo's (just as your
> patches), but in addition to mpv's changes over mplayer in general, the
> vaapi code has been heavily changed. mpv also doesn't recommend using
> vo_vaapi at all, but prefer vo_opengl EGL interop instead. The vaapi
> video output API is pretty crap and tends to be buggy. It doesn't
> prevent tearing in all cases either. I don't think anyone at Intel
> really cares about the output API.


Well, how should we actually continue here, then?

The mplayer-vaapi-derived version is perfect for me on all the platforms 
I personally have (only Intel), but clearly fails on some others.  The 
problems Andy had did let me fix one issue which I hadn't found, but 
mainly show that it doesn't work properly for him.  Given that most of 
it isn't my code, I have little clue what I should be looking at to fix 
it.  I would be happy if it were accepted as-is (with known problems), 
or if someone else could like to take it over to try to fix the breakage.

Alternatively, the original independent version I wrote* is much simpler 
(no OSD, no alternate output types), and as a result might be more 
likely to work because there are fewer things to go wrong (particularly 
around combining surfaces, which it doesn't do).  If people would prefer 
that then I could relatively easily clean it up to a testable state? 
(Also fixing some of the problems found in the other version.)

Note that my actual aim here is to get sensible VAAPI encode in ffmpeg, 
and I would prefer not to get excessively distracted from that.  I was 
hoping that writing the mplayer driver would be a good first step in 
understanding how those pieces fit together, and could also have some 
value in itself.  (If anyone is interested, I have a working but 
ill-integrated VAAPI decode helper for ffmpeg (allows accelerated decode 
when transcoding - not very useful in itself).)

Thanks,

- Mark


* Attached to the first post in this thread 
<http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2015-November/073190.html>.