Demo of OMAP5 playing video.

[Hồng Thất Công]

Heh, you could't take a joke

 

[TrashyMG]

I rather deflect a bad joke than "take it".

 

[notaz]

I doubt we will have hardware video decoding, it'll be the same as with OMAP3 where TI's blobs are old and incompatible with most software or just too difficult to use to bother with them. And the decoding hardware is undocumented again, so not much hope for open implementation (even if it was documented, it's very unlikely somebody would do it anyway).

 
As far as I understood, the OMAP3 doesn't really have hardware video decoding; the TI decoders use the DSP afaik, which is probably quite a bit more efficient than using the CPU, but probably not hugely so.


The OMAP5 does however have dedicated video coding/decoding hardware (called IVA-HD), which should be capable of doing very fast and low power encoding and decoding of a.o. h264.

Like others said, OMAP3 has IVA2.2 which has video decoding blocks that are probably earlier iteration of what's in OMAP5. There is even an ARM9 CPU called sequencer to look after those blocks (in OMAP3). Only the DSP can talk to them all through it's special instructions, so it's difficult to even experiment with them.. In OMAP5 they made some blocks accessible by main CPUs so it should be easier, but I still don't expect we'll be able to use them, only in similar limited way as that .pnd that I linked before.


Annoying thing about video is that there are too many video formats and variations of those formats, every one of them would need it's own hardware accelerated codec. What's worse, different players use different decoder plugin systems, for example vlc, mplayer, gstreamer are all different video decoding systems, so you can't just stick a decoding library and have it decode some format on all players, you have to almost code a decoder for each player specifically.

It does have hardware decode blocks for DCT, motion estimation, and loop filtering. They just have zero documentation aside from mention that they're there.

The newer TRMs have full register documentation, like M-HT mentioned, but it still doesn't help much as there is little explanation on how to program them to achieve something.. Maybe some video codec expert could make sense out of all that, but I doubt we have anyone with such knowledge around here.

No one has done it on the Pandora.

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=gst_dsp_pkg

Somebody just needs to update it to not insist installing it's own kernel and just run op_dsp.sh script instead.

How much work would that be and what is the potential gain? Would we possibly see better .h264 decoding, and could it be utilized by XBMC for higher quality streaming?

Not much, just changing a few scripts inside of that .pnd, and gstreamer demo inside that pnd should work. I don't know if XBMC can decode through gstreamer, if it can it theoretically should work.


But from what I heard the results of that demo are disapointing, if you manage to find a video that it supports it will be slightly faster, otherwise it's slower than other CPU based players.

 

[TrashyMG]

650mA is still quite a lot (about 2.5 Watt, right?)

Just thinking about this, I was playing those videos off a 2.5" 120GB HDD via the SATA port.. It was powered using an external power supply, but wonder if it still would draw a bit more current vs just using the eMMC or SD card. something to try out when I get home.

So I played around a bit, and made a video comparing the current draw of the Pandora vs the OMAP 5 using an external amp meter, instead of some internal measurement method... I ran my Rebirth Pandora sans battery using the same video I used yesterday... sorry no nudity this time either.. 

https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=UU91ni0JkWjQzJ2L09B1z4Bw

sorry a bit tired, so I was stumbling on my words a bit.

 

[Kiga]

Thanks for the videos.

Can you continue the film at 1:32 please ?

You still can see some boobs just after she started to undress... they are hairy tho :mellow:

 

[TrashyMG]

You still can see some boobs just after she started to undress... they are hairy tho

Rose Leslie(Plays Ygritte) in that video is a ginger they're incapable of having body hair, souls.

 

[thatgui]

You still can see some boobs just after she started to undress... they are hairy tho

Rose Leslie(Plays Ygritte) in that video is a ginger they're incapable of having body hair, souls.

I hope I don't step on anybodys toes, but I guess he is reffering to the reflection of your torso on the display (due to the screen beeing almost black) right after you stopped the GoT video, not very polite though (if I'am right).

BTT: Was the Video file residing on another storage device in the second video (instead of the SATA drive) ?

 

[_wb_]

650mA is still quite a lot (about 2.5 Watt, right?)

Just thinking about this, I was playing those videos off a 2.5" 120GB HDD via the SATA port.. It was powered using an external power supply, but wonder if it still would draw a bit more current vs just using the eMMC or SD card. something to try out when I get home.

So I played around a bit, and made a video comparing the current draw of the Pandora vs the OMAP 5 using an external amp meter, instead of some internal measurement method... I ran my Rebirth Pandora sans battery using the same video I used yesterday... sorry no nudity this time either.. 

https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=UU91ni0JkWjQzJ2L09B1z4Bw

Thanks for the informative reply.

It's amazing how much stuff they put it in their SoC without making it easy/possible to actually use it. Too much spare die area I guess? Or perhaps they want to be able to charge extra for telling companies how to actually use the hardware?

This stuff feels like an awesome car that can do 500km/h and it can also be a submarine and an airplane, but if you buy it, the car company will only tell you how to drive 500 meters in a straight line at 20 km/h, and if you want to do more, sure, you can, but you're not supposed to drive yourself: a driver appointed by the car company will take the steering wheel, goes halfway to your destination and then promptly dies of old age.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Extra charge and probably military use.

 

[TrashyMG]

How much CPU power is the OMAP5 using while doing that? Maxed out or not? Is that player using both cores or just one?

Sorry forgot to mention that in the video and was going to write it in the post, but slipped my mind.. I manually set the OMAP5 board to 1Ghz just the same as the Pandora, looking at htop when it's running just a minute ago it looks to be using both CPUs.

 

[_wb_]

Could you do "time <whateverplayercommand>" to get an idea how much cpu time per real time it uses?

 

[TrashyMG]

Ran it for about a minutes, running out the door to work so didn't have too much time...:

real    1m6.570s

user    0m55.230s

sys     0m1.210s

Also missed this question:

BTT: Was the Video file residing on another storage device in the second video (instead of the SATA drive) ?

I put it on the SD card the OS resides on instead of the SATA drive.

 

[rygD]

sorry no nudity this time either.. 

Poor Jon Snow.

Pardon my ignorance, but can we expect the Pyra to draw less (or more) power for the same task since it will be different hardware than the devboard?

 

[TrashyMG]

Pardon my ignorance, but can we expect the Pyra to draw less (or more) power for the same task since it will be different hardware than the devboard?

Hard to say at this point. My setup is using USB for the keyboard/mouse  and the kernel and modules I'm using I compiled myself so I'm not entirely sure I did that all properly.. there isn't any CPU throttling, USB/sound disabling or any of the painstaking work done which makes the Pandora so power efficient.


I'm not officially doing any development work on the OS and most of what I do is for my own curiosity, I wouldn't mind testing things for the OS guys.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

.. probably military use.

Ooh!  I am sure some people are going learn how to use these capabilities in the Pyra to control the missles to aim at Craig's house

 

[fusion_power]

This stuff feels like an awesome car that can do 500km/h and it can also be a submarine and an airplane, but if you buy it, the car company will only tell you how to drive 500 meters in a straight line at 20 km/h, and if you want to do more, sure, you can, but you're not supposed to drive yourself: a driver appointed by the car company will take the steering wheel, goes halfway to your destination and then promptly dies of old age.

That's the usual fate of indie devs when it comes to actualy awesome hardware it seems. I hope we can make usage of at least some HW features of the OMAP5 for batteries sake. The Pyra may be able to run even HD Movies without much trouble, but for a mobile device the battery is not an unimportant factor. So it would be nice if there is good accesss to powersaving features that can be done in hardware instead of pure software modes...

Extra charge and probably military use.

Hey, ED could pretend that the Pyra is a super secret military project so he gets everything he needs.

 

[rygD]

Extra charge and probably military use.

Hey, ED could pretend that the Pyra is a super secret military project so he gets everything he needs.

If it worked like that he could wouldn't have to pretend the military part if it would be used by/with/for military personnel and purposes.  The problem, though, is that primarily military projects usually come with typical military level funding, which here seems to be far more than a similar project for other purposes.  That is understandable, since the condition military equipment is used in is not so forgiving.  It would be great if the Pyra meets military specifications.