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

[Vladimir Pantelic]

Alexey Eromenko wrote:
>>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.

VP8 decoding is, encoding not.

>>   .... 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.

I think that is pretty pointless, libvpx is a dedicated software
VP8 codec. if you want to support a hardware VP8 codec, patch
the framework that will use it.

> (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 ?
>