Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:26:51 +0200 From: Stefan Ehmann <shoesoft@gmx.net> To: freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Which Userland Interface for USB Video Class Driver? Message-ID: <200809260926.52192.shoesoft@gmx.net> In-Reply-To: <200809251834.SAA00096@sopwith.solgatos.com> References: <200809251834.SAA00096@sopwith.solgatos.com>
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On Thursday 25 September 2008 12:34:25 Dieter wrote:
> > <snip>
> >
> > > As a driver writer, the AV encoding standard concerns me. For,
> > > the driver must be able to decode compressed frame into plain bitmap
> > > if the chip cannot decode frame on its own. Of course, the Chinese
> > > standard is so cheap that many hardware vendors are willing to
> > > integrate decoder into chips, I believe.
> > >=20
> >
> > I'm not sure this is necessarily true anymore. From a European view
> > point, the vast majority of DVB-{S,T,C} cards on the market are 'budget'
> > cards; they simply demodulate an MPEG-2 Program Stream from the signal.
> > Certainly, under linux, neither of my DVB-T tuners (pci saa based, usb
> > dibcom), nor my DVB-S card (also pci saa based) can decode a single
> > frame of actual video data.
> >
> > Even when the actual video is not MPEG-2, like HD streams encoded in
> > MPEG-4 AVC, it is contained in an MPEG-2 PS. All the drivers do is to
> > setup and tune the device to the appropriate channel, and provide a
> > device to read the PS from. It is up to whatever userland program which
> > is using the device to decode the data, if that is even required. I
> > certainly wouldn't like a driver to decode high bitrate MPEG-4 AVC if
> > all I am trying to do is record a show to disk.
> >
> > As far as I can tell, ATSC tuners do precisely the same thing.
>
> I suspect you mean MPEG-2 TS (transport stream), not MPEG-2 PS
> (program stream)?
>
> Yes, ATSC is the same way, at least in the US. The "tuner" provides
> a mpeg2 ts. You can write this to disk and/or decode it and view it.
> You don't *want* the tuner to decode it, because the decoded video
> is gigantic and would quickly fill your disks. And a PCI bus isn't
> fast enough for a single stream of uncompressed HD video. The
> compressed version eats enough disk space as it is.
>
> Decoding is a bit of a problem. To decode HD in real time, you need a
> recent fast CPU (and PCIe), or a GPU that supports Xv and XvMC, or some
> hardware decoder. As far as I know, *BSD has no support for hardware
> decoders. There are Ethernet to TV bridges, but they seem to all have
> significant limitations (counterexamples welcome). ATI may have released
> enough documentation to allow using some models of their GPUs for decoding,
> but no one has written the code yet. They have not released docs for the
> UVD/UVD2 on the R600/R700 yet, and might never release it. Supposedly VIA
> Chrome GPUs have open source Xv and XvMC support, does this work on *BSD?
mplayer supports xvmc:
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-docs/2003-November/000301.html
The post also lists other cards supporting xvmc, but it's probably outdated.
I got this working with my old graphic card + nvidia binary driver. While the
speedup was noticeable it was rather disappointing. IIRC for videos needing
about 40% CPU, with xvmc it was maybe 30%.
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