[MPlayer-users] VIA CLE266 MPEG2 decoding

[Dermot McGahon]

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 22:06:22 +0100, Ian Molton <spyro at f2s.com> wrote:

> Hi.
>
> Is this possible on a 2.6 kernel? if so is there a howto? I can only  
> find 2.4 stuff.

Good question. Are you referring to this:

http://www.ivor.it/cle266/

Maybe Ivor Hewitt would be the person to ask (I've cc'd him).

With respect to mplayer, my understanding is that the devs were
approached by VIA over a year ago with an offer of specs, but in
the end nothing happened (NDA problems?).

The xine devs did work with VIA on this and the result was
vexp (VIA enabled xine player). I'm not sure how well maintained
vexp is. Reports seem to indicate that it is buggy.

As the webpage above suggest, four parts are needed for this to
be supported:

(1) V4L support - I need to check if this has been committed to
     mainline or whether patches are uptodate (or can easily be
     made uptodate for 2.6.

(2) XFree support - again, has this been submitted to mainline;
     and before the XOrg fork? The comments suggest that with some
     changes to V4L that this patch would become unnecessary. Who
     could make those changes?

(3) libddmpeg.so - should be just a matter of compiling and
     installing the reverse engineered version (really excellent
     work Ivor).

(4) MPlayer support. What would need to be done here? A new
     video codec, decoding mpeg-2 frames using the libddmpeg
     API? Surely relatively easy to implement compared to a
     full s/w codec.

A little more info:

http://www.epiawiki.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=EpiaMpeg


I am also interested in seeing this work and willing to
contribute code to make that happen. Anybody else interested
in seeing this and willing to collaborate?


Dermot.
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