[FFmpeg-devel] hwaccel infrastructure in libavcodec

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Gregor Riepl <onitake <at> gmail.com> writes:

> Over the last 12 months or so, the support for hardware accelerated
> video in PC platforms has improved considerably. Apple released VDA[1],

I was under the impression that the "right" API for OSX would be VideoToolBox:
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/01/20/xbmc-for-ios-and-atv2-now-available/
(It supports more hardware and more features, iiuc.)

> AMD has finally opened up XvBA to the public[2].
> 
> Having tried (and given up for now) to integrate VDA support into
> MPlayer and libavcodec, I'm coming forth to ask for some help improving
> the hwaccel parts of ffmpeg. This would facilitate integrating the
> various APIs (notably DXVA, VDPAU, vaapi, XvBA, VDA, XvMC and
> Openchrome) into existing video players that already rely on libavcodec
> for video decoding.

(I can only speak for VDPAU)
I am not sure if this is what the users of the players would find helpful.
Decoding alone is nice, but - imo - not what makes VDPAU so (very) useful: The
De-interlacer is the important part, especially since it is not easy to find a
system where decoding with VDPAU is faster than with the CPU.
(Disclaimer: I - still - did not test this but I would be surprised if that were
wrong.)

Carl Eugen