Re: [Gnash-dev] broadcom crystal hd support

[Jacob Beard]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Rob Savoye <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 12:17:09PM +0100, Jacob Beard wrote:
>
>> video content for the Broadcom Crystal HD chipset. You're starting to
>> see this chip show up in a lot of netbooks. Broadcom has released open
>> source drivers, an application library, and a gstreamer plugin, most
>> of which seem to have made it into Ubuntu Maverick.
>
>  Interesting... I hadn't heard of that one. If it's in Maverick, I can try
> it.

I'm still just figuring all of this out myself (having only recently
bought the hardware), but it seems the firmware is in
linux-firmware-nonfree
[http://packages.ubuntu.com/maverick/all/linux-firmware-nonfree/filelist],
and the kernel module is crystalhd.ko in the generic kernel
[http://packages.ubuntu.com/maverick/i386/linux-image-2.6.35-22-generic/filelist].
I'm not sure whether the application library and gstreamer plugin are
in apt, but the LGPL sources are available on the broadcom site,
explicitly mention Ubuntu in the README, and were no trouble to build
and install on Ubuntu Lucid:
http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/

I'm still testing it to see how well it actually works.

>
>> I know Gnash now supports VAAPI, and it also seems as though someone
>> is working on a backend for the crystal API for VAAPI, which but it
>> seems not be very mature:
>> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi
>
>  You mean vaapi or the crystal API isn't mature ?
>
I mean the Crystal HD backend of the VAAPI isn't mature. See:
http://gitorious.org/crystalhd-video
It seems quite young.

>> It would therefore be interesting if Gnash could make use of the
>> crystal API in some other way, perhaps via Gstreamer and the crystal
>> plugin.
>
>  It probably can. Right now I'm slowly (between other tasks) refactoring
> the rendering API in Gnash to better support things like HW accelerated video.
> While the current VAAPI support works, I think how it works can be improved.
> I'll look at the docs, but if this is a gstreamer plugin (OMAP is the same),
> there may not be anything Gnash has to do special to utilize this.

That's great to hear.

>
>  I'd have to find some hardware with this chipset to really know if it works.

I'd be happy to test any builds.

Thanks,

Jake