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• Launchpad Entry: mobile-hw-decode

• Packages affected:

Summary

Future chipsets will have the ability to do hardware accelerated video decode of MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (part 2), H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10) and VC-1 (WMV) This spec provides a new API and associated infrastructure to support these new abilities.

Release Note

The end user impact is improved performance of H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video playback with media players that use the new API compared to playback using a pure software implementation.

Rationale

Mobile Internet Devices have less powerful processors than current desktop or laptop systems. To provide end users with a video playback experience that is comparable to a desktop or laptop system, hardware acceleration is needed.

Use Cases

The media player described in the MobileAndEmbedded/MediaPlayer spec will make use of the new VA API to make use of hardware accelerated video decode on systems that support this feature.

Assumptions

Design

Video Acceleration API Definition

The following API has been proposed on the X.org email list:

mobile-hw-decode-va-api

Implementation

Implementation of this spec will require a new package to provide the generic VA API in the form of libva. This library communicates with the X server to find out which hardware specific driver will be needed and will then load that hardware specific driver to do the actual work. libva will be open source licensed under a MIT style license.

The hardware specific driver that libva will open will be provided as part of the graphics driver.

This section should describe a plan of action (the "how") to implement the changes discussed. Could include subsections like:

Test/Demo Plan

The video hardware acceleration can be tested by running the multi media application described in the MobileAndEmbedded/MediaPlayer spec.

Intel is looking into porting an additional media player/test application to the VA API in order to make testing easier. Details to be provided.

Related Specs

The DRM kernel module and the userspace video acceleration driver required for hardware acceleration will be provided as part of the graphics driver as outlined in the MobileAndEmbedded/Graphics spec.

The VA API that this spec provides will be used by the multi-media codecs for the Helix framework as outlined in the MobileAndEmbedded/MediaPlayer spec.

Outstanding Issues

There are currently no outstanding issues.

BoF agenda and discussion

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CategorySpec