Entries from October 2009 ↓

While preparing the video hackfest I realized Google maps is still not the best guide for walking: “Please stay clear of pedestrian precincts“.
 
Google’s suggested way from the accomodation to the venue on the left, my suggestion on the right. I guess I’ll do it my way.

Also, for everyone living behind a rock: The video hackfest is officially announced, lots of video goodness for everyone ahead.

This is the result of applying my recent gstreamer-cairo hacking to a real-world application – Webkit. It’s very fast here and could record that video you see there while playing it without breaking a sweat. If you want to run the demo yourself, try http://people.freedesktop.org/~company/stuff/video-demo.html. (Be warned: That link downloads roughly 200MB of movie data. And it’ll likely only run in recent Epiphany or Safari releases.)

Also, thanks to the X foundation funding and Collabora hosting, we will be doing a video hackfest in Barcelona from 19th to 22nd next months. GStreamer, Cairo, X, GL and driver hackers will focus on stabilizing these features so that movies will be first class citizens in the future of your desktop, no matter what you intend to do with them, including doing video browsing lowfat style.
I’m both excited and anxious about this hackfest, I’m not used to being in charge when ots of awesome hackers meet in one place.

Here’s the pipeline:

gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=/home/lvs/The\ Matrix\ -\ Theatrical\ Trailer.avi ! decodebin ! queue ! cairomixer sink_0::xx=0.5 sink_0::xy=0.273151 sink_0::yx=-0.273151 sink0::yy=0.5 sink_0::alpha=0.6 sink_0::xpos=72 sink_0::ypos=48 sink_2:xx=1.38582 sink_2::xy=-0.574025 sink_2::yx=0.574025 sink2::yy=1.38582 sink_2::alpha=0.7 sink_2::xpos=20 sink_2::ypos=150 sink_2::zorder=10 sink_1::xpos=300 sink_1::ypos=100 ! video/x-cairo,width=800,height=500 ! pangotimeoverlay ! cairoxsink filesrc location=/home/lvs/the_incredibles-tlr_m480.mov ! decodebin ! cairocolorspace ! video/x-cairo ! queue ! cairomixer0. filesrc location=/home/lvs/transformers.trailer.480.mov ! decodebin ! cairocolorspace ! video/x-cairo ! queue ! cairomixer0.

Here’s the result:

CPU utilization when playing this is roughly 30%, which I attribute mostly to the video decoding. The Intel 945 GPU takes 25% doing this. If I use the sync=false property, the video is done after 59s. It’s also completely backwards compatible when no hardware acceleration is available. In fact I used the same pipeline to record the video, just replacing the sink with a theoraenc.

Implementation details are here and here. Total amount of code written is roughly 10.000 lines, put into the right spots in gstreamer, cairo, pixman and the xserver. Of course, the code is not limited to GStreamer. I expect Webkit and Mozilla will use it too, once it’s properly integrated. And then we can do these effects in Javascript.