[FFmpeg-devel] Anyone needs HW or other things that require money, please open a ticket on trac

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 08:26:01PM +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 02:18:59PM -0400, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> > Yeah, let's get all devs an avx2-capable laptop. I'd love a new macbook pro
> > :)
> 
> https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/3636#ticket
> 
> any other ideas? anyone ?

To start with a caveat: Hardware on its own is only of limited use.
Having time to actually make use of it is a bigger problem.
And I don't open a ticket since the following are too vague and money
isn't really the primary issue. I'd rather hear ideas from others if
you have some (particularly on 1 and 2).
That said, some of the larger annoyances/missing things hardware-wise
from my point of view:

1) Some actually _fast_, well-supported ARM based hardware. Even better
if 64 bit.
For most devices, both the CPUs and especially the flash storage
performance are a bad joke.
And the driver code is only available for 10 kernel revisions back and
makes you weep when you look at it (average time to find a bug just by
reviewing it, as someone who is clueless about the kernel code: maybe 
10 minutes?).
Possibly doesn't exist.

2) Some fast big-endian hardware. The public PPC servers seem to have
disappeared and since then I only have an ancient and slow Mac Mini.

3) Systems that allow testing OSX (also VDA then) and VA-API.
In principle easily solved, but Apple hardware is too expensive
given I don't actually like the hardware they offer (notebooks
are all too large, Mac Mini is underpowered, ...).

Note: Most of the time just shell access to such systems would be
good enough, possibly even a plus since then others can use it as
well I don't have to admin it...