New Vlc Player With Hw Acceleration


fusion_power

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Good news everyone!

New Version of VLC does not only comes with HW Acceleration for Windows but also for mobile Devices. :)
http://www.videolan.org/

Sounds very interesting, especialy the following stuff:

  • GPU decoding on GNU/Linux, using VAAPI for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
  • DSP decoding using OpenMax IL, for compatible embedded devices
  • More assembly optimizatinons, especially SSSE3/SSE4 and ARM Neon
I hope our talented coders can take benefit from this for usage onto the Pandora :) At least, it SOUNDS incredible fast :D
 
Gonna be flamed for this but what the heck....

Great! Now I might be able to use VLC to play my HD content through the power of hardware powered down conversion, thus not having to re-encode my material to lower resolution versions.
 
Why would you get flamed for that? That's exactly what such hardware decoding is meant to do.
 
sounds great,but i must ask at the risk of sounding stupid - does the pandora currently have a hardware excelerated graphics driver in the current OS ? if it does then why is it soo poor,currently enable full windows display(dragging a window and seeing the window move) is quite slow but i get the feeling from using the desktop there are no drivers installed for the gfx chip.If it is in the OS then why cant we have things like playing media in a window,also what does it take to get gnome glgames working,i take it they would have to be ported to work with gles ?

I dont know what i am talking about so if am wrong please correct me.
 
Mqark: enjoy your 2.5gb HD movie that outputs only SD resolution. Good luck streaming that over wireless and although you can play it, I am quite sure it will use more power so enjoy your sad 6hr of battery life!

Is that the flame you were thinking you would get? I do agree it is nice to have when you only have HD and you want to watch it 'now'. Also I assume using DSP to do all the work instead of the ARM CPU should extend your battery time by 25%, just guessing though.
 
Paddy, you're confusing yourself. There's different accelerations going on that do different things.
There's graphics hardware acceleration, which is used by games. It's the OpenGLES drivers that allow 3D rendering to be fast (and 2D, if you use it right). We have this, it isn't perfect yet though, apparently, but that's not any problem you should be noticing.
The hardware acceleration being added to VLC is usage of the DSP for decoding. It's not accelerating the drawing of the graphics in any way, just taking the encoded frames of the video and making a raw frame that can be drawn to the screen.
The window manager isn't being accelerated by either of these. It's just raw video drawing. There aren't any "drivers" so to speak, because there doesn't need to be. You need drivers on a PC because every graphics card is different, and the drivers help make things uniform and easy for the OS. On the OMAP, you want to draw something to the screen, you just draw it to the framebuffer, no need for intermediary drivers.
On that note, if things are slow, it shouldn't be because of the graphics or anything. If it's slow, it should genuinely mean that it is just slow, and hardware accelerating the window drawing won't make a difference. I don't know why you would say it's slow though. I don't have mine yet, so I can't see what it's like right now, but when I played with skeezix's prototype, it was pretty smooth.
 
^ Afaik yes. It works on Beagleboard if I'm not mistaken and should come with the newer kernel.

edit:
http://felipec.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/gst-openmax-demo-on-the-beagleboard/
 
WizardStan said:
Why would you get flamed for that? That's exactly what such hardware decoding is meant to do.

I just thought that watching HD content on an SD device would be considered stupid. If the additional processing power makes it possible then I can weigh up the benefits of the convienience of being able to watch HD content without reingesting (which takes time and can be a pain to ensure lip-sync) against the (I assume) shorter battery life through the use of more silicon and that magical electron hole flavour gogo juice that powers the Pandora.
 
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Mqark said:
the (I assume) shorter battery life through the use of more silicon
the DSP is actually much more efficient at these sorts of things then a general purpose processor. It actually takes less energy to decode things on the DSP (despite it being "more silicon") than it would to get it from the raw CPU. At least it would be if the CPU were scaling properly; there's some suggestion that it may not be active in the kernel right now, in which case it would be using a little more power, but should be fixed with the next kernel upgrade (which needs to happen for this hardware acceleration to work anyway)
 
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Cracking good news. I was actually worried of being restricted to using gstreamer for playback. Not that I had much of a problem with it, but right now I'm using vlc for playing back things (it is somehow faster) and like it better (despite the qt ugliness).
The new kernel can't come soon enough.

I have some h264 at 800x480 videos that shutter real bad using cpu alone, even at 875 mhz but it should be a piece of cake. Sure, in this case it may consume more battery, but at the same time, mp3 decoding at 14 mhz is no longer that far off.
 
WizardStan so if the drivers are in place does this mean we could get compiz fusion desktop effects in the future in say running ubuntu on the pandora ? i ask as my old dell mini could do ubuntu with desktop effects no problem all running off a flashdrive,yes the cpu was faster but the intel graphics were poor and it had 512 ram,i also understand you can get away with desktop effects on a low end desktop,this is why i don't get the pandora's sluggish response time,scrolling a webpage moving a window around all seem slow and have tearing,when i see this i think ohh no display drivers as i come from a windows desktop and this is the main sign of no display driver installed.I have no idea how the omap works so this would explain why i think like this,cheers for the explanation i want to know more so i can understand better what the pandora is really capable of.


The other thing that confused me was all the talk from Craig in regards to emulation would say how good it is even tho the pandora has no exceleration yet and how the new kernel would speed everything up,this is also why i assumed we didn't yet have driver support,then i read about gles and neon with the n64 emulator and how it was the first ? emulator to have hardware driver support.
 
Compiz has been mentioned before. Yes, it's possible, in theory. Someone needs to take up the task of porting OpenGL code to OpenGLES and getting it running in little RAM, but it's possible.
The new kernel is needed for DSP support, but OpenGLES and NEON have been available for a while.
 
2D graphics like window dragging can be optimized even without OpenGL. Think xaa/exa. I'm thinking the video driver just doesn't support this or doesn't support much of it.

To see the difference in x11 on a pc, change your driver to "vesa". Even on a high end crazy 8 core CPU, it'll crawl in comparison to a working driver. This seems to be what he's describing and it's not just in Windows.
 
paulguy said:
To see the difference in x11 on a pc, change your driver to "vesa". Even on a high end crazy 8 core CPU, it'll crawl in comparison to a working driver. This seems to be what he's describing and it's not just in Windows.
Even vesa contains some dirty tricks to speed things up. I've used it for some weeks because there was no other driver available while I was using some Ubuntu Beta, compared to certain other drivers specially designed for the hardware vesa can be bloody fast, I didn't see any point where it "crawled".
 
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HW acceleration on the Pandora would be great, I don't want to take the time re-encoding my 720p videos just to watch them on my Pandora once then throw away. If the battery is severely drained even with HW acceleration then I think I would re-encode it but it won't will it?

VLC is the only video player I use, I've already got tons of windows and OSX users to switch to it. VLC couldn't be easier, it just plays every media file type in existence, the best choice for the Pandora in that regard.
 
paulguy said:
To see the difference in x11 on a pc, change your driver to "vesa". Even on a high end crazy 8 core CPU, it'll crawl in comparison to a working driver. This seems to be what he's describing and it's not just in Windows.
That's a very unfair comparison. Vesa is limited to 64K "blocks" of memory. That's enough for a 320x200x8 display. If you want to display to anything larger, you need to make an interrupt call to "move" the window to a different block. Not only is writing to this memory window "slow", but the interrupt call is even slower. A 1024x768x24 resolution screen needs to make 36 calls per frame, 60 frames per second.
With proper video drivers installed, you (by you, I mean the X server) can get more direct access to the video cards memory, allowing you to draw the full screen without the need to break it into separate memory blocks. Faster memory access plus no interrupt calls obviously makes the entire thing faster. There's no special acceleration going on thanks to the video driver, it simply gives more direct access to the video memory. This is what the Pandora should be doing right now: full access to the entirety of video memory.
 
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Ok well then just disable xaa and exa and you get a similar experience, it's slow. I got the same problems when I was trying to get an ATI card working in Linux. When I use a bad driver that just didn't want to work right, I got jerky window movement and scrolling, when I was using one that worked right, windows moved smoothly and everything else was smooth.
 
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