On Apr 22, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Rusty Lynch wrote:
On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 09:48 -0700, Clark Snowdall wrote:
Hello all,
The project my team and I are working on requires lots of video
embedded in clutter. We are developing on Acer Aspire, but the
target
platform is currently the Compal. I wrote a test app using gstreamer
and clutter that works reasonably well on Aspire, but brings the
Compal to its knees. I have heard that the Compal (being Menlow) has
video hardware acceleration. I'm assuming that I 'm not tapping into
that power, but would like to.
Definitely not. You have to have codec wrappers that know about the
platform hardware acceleration capabilities.
Today there is a RealNetworks product (RealPlayer for MID) and a
Fluendo
product (not sure what they call it, but it's a GStreamer codec
bundle)
that provide this.
From what I understand, the easiest
(with regards to licensing) way to get hardware acceleration goodness
is to get Helix.
To be clear... you would need to install the RealNetworks product, and
then link into those libraries in order to not have to attain your own
IP licensees.
Everyone mentions that I need RealPlayer for MID's. But I don't know
where to get this. Would this be included in the standard RealPlayer
for Linux? Or is it hidden somewhere within the Helix community
site. Furthermore, if I were to use the codecs, which libraries
specifically and where can I get the headers?
But... if you are deployed on a solution that has the Fluendo codecs
installed then, just like the RealPlayer approach, you can use the
codecs without having to re-license the codecs.
I'm starting to contact Fluendo to follow that path as well.
So here are the questions I'd like to pose:
1. Is there some sort of binding like clutter-gst that is required
to
get Helix into clutter? Documentation says that Helix is supported
in
clutter, but there isn't any explanation of how.
This capability is currently a work in process (monitor the helix
client-dev mailing list for further progress).
We do this by implementing what we call a media sink which acts a lot
like a gstreamer sink element. When combined with a the ClutterHelix
object (which implements ClutterMedia), then the helix infrastructure
parses/decodec the media, passes the data to ClutterHelix which then
renders the data into the backing 2D texture.
The ClutterHelix code exist in the clutter git repos, but has not made
it into a release since it depends on some helix code that will likely
change as we go through the helix review process.
http://git.clutter-project.org/cgit.cgi?url=clutter-helix/tree/
It's starting to sound that a better course would be to follow the
gstreamer/Fluendo route in order to get it into clutter. But regards
to the Helix code, how stable is unstable? A previous poster
mentioned a release is being worked on, but our schedule just got
shortened to get a demo up by mid-June. Think we should wait or go
with gstreamer/Fluendo?
2. Is libva required in any of this?
Yes, both the helix and fluendo solutions are built on top of libva.
3. I have downloaded the Helix source code. Is there anything
special to compile it to use hardware acceleration?
Yes, a bunch of compile options... of which i don't recall right now.
Perhaps some of the other guys can remind me what build configuration
options need to be set.
Anyone else out there know this one?
But... like i mentioned above, the code has not landed that allows you
to use helix to render hardware accelerated video into a clutter
texture.
4. If one is going to put a video in a moving rotation clutter
actor,
is it best to decode the video elsewhere in memory and then just keep
updating the pixmap on the actor (one post I read seems this gets the
most performance out of the hw accelerator)?
When using the libva interface you normally don't get the data back
out
of the hardware, but instead just get a ref id and then make
operations
on the id so that the number of copy operations is limited. In our
helix changes we pass video buffers to the media sink that are really
just the ref id and a colorspace id that lets the buffer consumer know
that this is not a real video buffer.
When you initialize the libva surface, you pass in a window or a
pixmap
for the graphics hardware to render into. In order to render into a
clutter texture, we pass in a pixmap to libva, and then use the
texture-from-pixmap operation to construct the backing 2d texture used
for the clutter texture.
But... the initial graphics driver delivered on menlow products only
supported libva operations on a window drawable, so you will need
access
to the new drivers that has not been released yet.
Does clutter-gst using the Fluendo codecs allow one to put hardware
accelerated video in a clutter actor? Or will I need to do this
pixmap transfer business myself? For that matter, if neither of these
codecs work for us, I assume we can use libva to do this sort of thing
ourselves?
As for you helix implementation, you mention using new graphics
drivers. I assume that it what allows you to do this texture-from-
pixmap operation? So even if we got the Helix codec, and got the
unstable helix-clutter bindings, we STILL couldn't get the hardware
acceleration working because we don't currently have these drivers?
Any schedule on these?
Any example code that pertains to this would be most appreciated.
Unfortunately the clutter-helix code only implements the software
based
rendering (i.e. you can see in clutter-helix-video-texture.c where we
check for the special colorspace that indicates that the data in the
buffer is really just a libva id, but we haven't added the libva calls
to blit the data into the texture.)
Again, sounds like gstreamer/Fluendo is going to get me further along
with this.
Thanks,
Snowdall
P.S. On a side note ... I'm also having trouble compiling Helix from
source (probably am fat-fingering something). Anyone ever seen this
error?
BUILD_ROOT="`pwd`/build" PATH="$PATH:$BUILD_ROOT/bin" BUILDRC="`pwd`/
buildrc" python build/bin/build.py -m hxclient_3_1_0_atlas -P helix-
client-all-defines all_clients
[#-00000001][2009-04-20 19:11:17][-1212057920][INFO ] : Ribosome
v2.4.8
[#-00000002][2009-04-20 19:11:17][-1212057920][INFO ] : Using Python
v2.6
[#-00000003][2009-04-20 19:11:17][-1212057920][INFO ] : Log dir: /
home/
snowdall/Documents/all_clients-hxclient_3_1_0_atlas-20090419/
ribosome_logs
[#-00000005][2009-04-20 19:11:17][-1212057920][INFO ] : Running tool:
build
[#-00000009][2009-04-20 19:11:17][-1212057920][ERROR] : --- Build
System Error ------------------------------------
You have found a Ribosome bug.
-----------------------------------------------------------
--- Python Traceback --------------------------------------
------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/snowdall/Documents/all_clients-
hxclient_3_1_0_atlas-20090419/build/bin/launcher.py", line 116, in
__runTool
tool = __import__("%s_exe" % self.toolName)
File "/home/snowdall/Documents/all_clients-
hxclient_3_1_0_atlas-20090419/build/lib/build_exe.py", line 74, in
<module>
import branchlist
File "/home/snowdall/Documents/all_clients-
hxclient_3_1_0_atlas-20090419/build/lib/branchlist.py", line 78, in
<module>
import cvs
File "/home/snowdall/Documents/all_clients-
hxclient_3_1_0_atlas-20090419/build/lib/cvs.py", line 119
def update_checkout_list(self, tag, module_list, as, dir):
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
-----------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "build/bin/build.py", line 67, in <module>
tool.run()
File "/home/snowdall/Documents/all_clients-
hxclient_3_1_0_atlas-20090419/build/bin/launcher.py", line 97, in run
self.__runTool()
File "/home/snowdall/Documents/all_clients-
hxclient_3_1_0_atlas-20090419/build/bin/launcher.py", line 116, in
__runTool
tool = __import__("%s_exe" % self.toolName)
File "/home/snowdall/Documents/all_clients-
hxclient_3_1_0_atlas-20090419/build/lib/build_exe.py", line 74, in
<module>
import branchlist
File "/home/snowdall/Documents/all_clients-
hxclient_3_1_0_atlas-20090419/build/lib/branchlist.py", line 78, in
<module>
import cvs
File "/home/snowdall/Documents/all_clients-
hxclient_3_1_0_atlas-20090419/build/lib/cvs.py", line 119
def update_checkout_list(self, tag, module_list, as, dir):
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
make: *** [all] Error 1
oh, yea... you have a modern python. ribosome (a.k.a
build-system-of-doom) is using the long since deprecate 'as' keyword
which is now moved from deprecate to error in the latest stable
python.
I meant to submit a patch but I guess that fell off the plate. I've
attached my patch to ribosome.
Cool ... thanks, I'll try this out soon.
--rusty
<python-2.6-port.patch>
Sorry to pepper all of you with so many questions. I hope you'll be
easy on this newbie. And thanks for all of the answers thusfar.
Thanks,
Snowdall
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