[linux-dvb] Re: Adding V4L interface to budget cards

[Holger Waechtler <holger@convergence.de>]

Ralph Metzler wrote:
> Holger Waechtler writes:
> 
>  > Maybe at the end we will stay stuck with the proprietary firmware 
>  > libraries which do essentially the same, but they are 'politically more 
>  > accepted', just because there is much more black voodoo around them and 
>  > you can't get rid of them so fast...
> 
> 
> But the question was about plugging the current ffmpeg libraries into
> the DVB driver to provide a V4L interface and not about a general DSP 
> hardware interface infra-structure. The former is not really a good idea. The
> latter is useful only if hardware (including documentation) for such purposes
> is actually available. Currently access to such hardware is mostly 
> proprietary and companies do not even use available standard
> interfaces with their binary drivers (see e.g. DRI and nVidia or the
> once promised ATI hardware iDCT libraries).

Well, the TI OMAP documentation looks pretty complete on the first look, 
first samples and evaluation kits are available, mass production is 
announced for spring 2003. AFAIK the first people have running a linux 
kernel on this chip. Comparable chips from other vendors have basically 
a similiar architecture.

ffmpeg fits well in a kernel codec infrastructure because it's pretty 
clean splitted in a high (codec-) level and a low level DSP library.

You only need to achieve a good performance for the DSP functions and 
get MPEG1/2, H263, DivX, AC3, MP3 and other codecs for free.

When we modify this DSP library in a way that allows dynamic replacement 
of partial functions (or entire function sets) at device open time for 
every decoder instance by hardware accelerated functions we get what we 
need.

The Budget V4L software implementation would be a neat side effect, 
nothing more.

Holger



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