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An Interview With the Developers of FFmpeg
An anonymous reader writes "Following the long-awaited release of FFmpeg 0.5, Phoronix has conducted an interview with three FFmpeg developers (Diego Biurrun, Baptiste Coudurier, and Robert Swain) about this project's recent release. In this interview they talk about moving to a 3/6-month release cycle, the criteria for version 1.0, Blu-Ray support on Linux, OpenCL and GPGPU acceleration, multi-threading FFmpeg, video APIs, their own video codecs, and legal challenges they have run into."
It works VERY well. Decoding a 1080p H.264 video using software on my dual-core 3GHz machine pegs the cores back and forth to around 80-90%, but plays fairly well. Using an mplayer build patched to support VDPAU, my CPU remains idle (clock drops to 1GHz, and 1-3% CPU usage) and plays equally as well, if not better. Furthermore, I was still able to go about my business with no noticeable impact on performance, even when using hardware-dependent Compiz. I have not though, tried this on multiple streams.
Oh, and this is using some cheap NVidia 8600 something-or-other card that I picked up new for ~$50. I, for one, was truly impressed by VDPAU and what it means for low-cost HD content.