Notes On The Future of Video on Linux

Dina's Dream points out two interesting articles currently running on LinuxPower, and linked from Gnotices (GNOME news site) as well. "The first article is a really good summary of the current state of affairs of video under Linux and the direction we should take. Questions are bounced back between a few very knowledgeable people, including GStreamer developers, SGI people and Alan Cox. The second article is a set of lessons learned by Chris Pirazzi while working at SGI. Chris was involved in a lot of Video API programming at Silicon Graphics, and raises a few very good points based on his experience. All people even remotely working on video drivers or software should read these points and take them to heart."

Comments

The Future Is Here for me already

[anewsome]

My pvr production is running slick as can be, now that I have ditched all the capture card madness (WinTV, Buz, etc). All I need now is a $30 firewire card and my trusty Canopus ADVC-100 and I capture full frame 720x480 video in better than DVD quality. If you are considering doing a lot of capture/encoding of anything, I highly recommend this setup. dvgrab running under linux seems to be very stable and the captured video is virtually identical to the source.

Re:DivX ;-)

[Alan Cox]

DivX is waste of energy and programmer time. Its so patent trapped that one yawn from the movie industry to the patent holders and it'll be gone except in very limited form

Something like VP3.2 holds more promise (and hey I got the lib to actually -compile- on a non windows/mac box two days ago)

Now combine VP3.2 video with Ogg audio and you have a credible media format. Add xhtml navigation and you have something really cool

My experience with Video on Linux

[lkaos]

Video on linux has always been one of my favorite things.

The biggest advance in v4l was essentially the XFree86 4.x release since it encorporated an Xvideo extension allowing for really nice video play back in Linux.

There are a couple cards that are extremely well supported. I personally use an ATI AIW and the MPEG playback in incredible. In fact, I prefer MPEGs in Linux verses Windows simply because I think Linux does a better job at using the RGB conversion stuff at the hardware level than Windows does.

Of course, the biggest foe to video in Linux has been the fact that many of the best accelerations (iDCT) are simply not supported because card makers fear releases 'techinical secrets.'

Another problem is the split in video display APIs. Prior to the Xv extension being released, the Linux kernel had a video4linux API. The second version of that API is incredible as it has so many features that would allow for truely pluggable components.

Unfortunately, all X stuff is implemented in user space so cards that have integrated display and video stuff end up supporting everything in user space and then providing a loopback mechanism to work with the kernel API. It's a little messy but hopefully everything will get worked out as things progress.

Otherwise, hats off to all the hard work of the gatos project, the v4l2 project, and linuxvideo. If you haven't tried all the really cool stuff available for video on linux, you really should.