RFC: Video decode acceleration API

[Roderick Colenbrander]

I wonder if we need a new extension at all. Modern videocards from ati/nvidia/s3 and perhaps intel too which support formats like mpeg4, vc-1 and others all utilize the fragment shader engine of the gpu. They don't have dedicated decoding hardware for specific compression schemes. Perhaps it is a smarter idea to implement such a library using lets say GLSL. You could have code which works on all cards with fragment shader support. (For modern card this is being worked on).

Regards,
Roderick Colenbrander


> Hi,
> 
> Attached is a proposal for a video decode acceleration API that I would
> like to get feedbacks from the X.org community. The main motivation for
> this proposal is to enable hardware accelerated video decode at various
> entry-points (VLD, IDCT, Motion Compensation etc.) for the prevailing
> coding standards today (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264/AVC and VC-1).  After
> looking at extending XvMC but due to its original design for MPEG-2
> MotionComp only, it seems making more sense to design an interface from
> scratch that can fully expose the video decode capabilities in today's
> GPUs.
> 
> The current interface is focused on video decode only and is window
> system independent, so that potentially it can be used with graphics
> sub-systems other than X.  In a nutshell it is basically a scheme to
> pass various types of data buffers from the application to the GPU for
> decoding a compressed bit-stream.  This is very much a work-in-progress
> and the current draft only defines data structures for MPEG-2 and VC-1
> decode at the VLD (or slice level) entry-point.  I would like to get
> this out for critic and feedback before going too much further, and also
> hopefully make it a community collaborative effort.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jonathan Bian
>   

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