[Arm-netbook] Sorry state of Linux hardware video decoder libraries / lack of single API

[Alexey Eromenko]

>although libav/FFmpeg is mainly a native codec and container library
>it does have a few wrappers to external codecs - again most of them
>native CPU libs.

I guess VP8/WebM is not built-into ffmpeg, but is using libvpx.

>   .... pretty much all of which have plugin support, pretty much all of
> which boil down to ffmpeg.  so it's not as bad as it looks - just
> fucking irritating that cedarx is proprietary.

Keep in mind, that some distros (Red Hat) are not shipping ffmpeg due
to patent reasons.

Red Hat ships with gstreamer-->libvpx (VP8/WebM codec) stack,
bypassing ffmpeg in the middle.
So patching libvpx will likely be necessary.
(according to A10 diagram, AllWinner claims to support hardware VP8 decoding)
Since Fedora 17 for ARM released, we should keep it in mind. (myself
mostly Debian user)

What about "libva" ? (Video Acceleration (VA) API for Linux)
Can it help solve our issues ? Or is it useless piece of the puzzle ?

-- 
-Alexey Eromenko "Technologov"