[MPlayer-dev-eng] H.264 decoder compatibility with MPlayer

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 04:29:05PM -0700, Alok Dandekar wrote:
> Could you point me a direction what we can do next with the MPlayer team on
> integrating this new hardware decoder function to your player software?

Personally I'd recommend to try to integrate into FFmpeg.
Since this is memory-to-memory decoding only as you say (no GPU
involved), minimal to no changes should be necessary to then have
support in MPlayer, VLC, xine and even gstreamer via gstreamer-ffmpeg
directly.
Also since FFmpeg contains the H.264 decoder it makes things simpler in
case H.264 needs to be preprocessed in some way for decoding (the PDF
you have doesn't say so, but some manufacturers are sneaky up to
downright lying about this aspect, and e.g. VDPAU/VA-API do need some
preprocessing to be done on the CPU first).
Some work for a more generic (i.e. not only GPU-based for direct
rendering for display) hardware-acceleration infrastructure in
FFmpeg is already ongoing as part of VA-API support, this might save
you some work, though it might also mean a bit more integration effort.