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

[Alexander Strasser]

Hi Roberto!

On 2015-11-30 21:48 +0100, Roberto Togni wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Nov 2015 11:30:19 +0100
> Alexander Strasser <eclipse7 at gmx.net> wrote:
[...]
> > > 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).)
> > 
> >   That is the bigger problem. If we are going to integrate
> > your code, IMHO we still need someone "looking after it";
> > a maintainer for that code in MPlayer. E.g. like someone who
> > regularly compiles MPlayer with vaapi and uses it and is
> > subscribed to at least this mailing list.
> > 
> I can compile it, but I won't use it much (I can decode h264 in
> software anyway, and newer codecs like hevc and vp9 are not supported
> on my hw).

  Sure OK for me then!

  AFAIU hwaccel will not be used by default. As vo could be used
without hwaccel it would be probably be good to not have vaapi
very high at the top of the array for vo preference.

  When making the next release we could cover how to activate it
in the news, so some users might actually use vo vaapi with
hwaccel.

  So far no more comments about this topic by me. I will try to
see if I can test this stuff on one of my machines too, but don't
hold your breath.

Thank you for following up so quickly,
  Alexander