Re: [Gnash-dev] broadcom crystal hd support

[Jacob Beard]

It's also probably worth mentioning that Adobe Flash currently
supports the Crystal HD API, I think since 10.1, but only on Windows.
If Gnash could pull ahead in terms of hardware acceleration support on
Linux, I think that would have significant value.

Best,

Jake

On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Jacob Beard <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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
>