[linuxtv-softmpeg] Current project status

[Michael Hunold <hunold@convergence.de>]

Hello,

I've recently overhauled the internals in "libsoftmpeg", so I'd like to 
give all of you a little status update.

Non-50Hz vertical refresh modes are now supported. It's not recommended 
to use them, so a big fat warning is printed upon startup.

I've put all DirectFB and FusionSound dependend stuff into separate 
modules and put a thin Video / Audio-APIs around it. In theory, it 
should be possible to add other output devices now (like Xv output, SDL 
output, native ALSA), although I'm not particularly interested in that.

Some arguments against other outputs: DirectFB with multiapplication 
core is exactly the thing you want to use for libsoftmpeg. Just have a 
look at the vdr plugin: it uses libsoftmpeg for the video rendering and 
the osd windows are rendered *independently* and nicely alpha-blended on 
top of the video. The same goes for FusionSound: although ALSA provides 
multi-application playback through the "dmix" interface, you just want a 
small and simple sound mixing "daemon" in the background -- but not a 
bloated thing like "esd" or "arts". FusionSound is exactly that: you can 
easily start multiple FusionSound applications and have them render all 
to the same output device, but without any "daemon" in the background. 
This is small but powerful technology ideally suited for usage on a 
small x86 platform.

Ok, enough commercials done. 8-)

I added pause and a very cheap skip functionality, which are only 
available on "seekable" filedescriptors (ie. with "dfb_ts" and playback 
from a file, not from within the vdr plugin)

You can now use recent ffmpeg CVS versions, too.

I haven't been able to get my hands on a transport stream with an audio 
stream with 44100kHz sampling rate, so I couldn't fix the problems one 
user has reported with 44100kHz sampling rate. If you know an Astra or 
Eutelsat service which uses that sampling rate, please let me know.

The next big step is to add real trickmode capabilities, ie.
- realtime reverse playback
- fast forward and rewind (user configurable, up to 8x)
- user defined skips

I need to play around with libavcodec first, because these things need a 
lot of cooperation within the mpeg decoder. If you know the structure of 
mpeg video, just think of the horror around realtime reverse playback. ;-)

Colin Paton is already working on the integration of the cle266 hw-mpeg 
decoding stuff, so hopefully we will be able to use that in the near 
future, too.

If you have any suggestions, ideas or bug reports, please tell them to 
the mailing list.

CU
Michael.


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