Is FFMPEG native now? Are Media Kit Encoders/Decoders dead?

dcbeckman

Somewhat of a serious question. With FFMPEG being a core component of Haiku, and the apparent preference of using FFMPEG over their own encoders/decoders due to better performance, is FFMPEG considered native now?

Although I think I saw one of the Haiku devs mention the posibility of wrapping the Media Kit encoders/decoders around FFMPEG to improve performance, I am pretty sure it is not really on their radar. Would this be worth doing?

Shaka444

dcbeckman
Whats your opinion? You are probably the most involved with the Media kit.
Does using ffmpeg mean we abandon the BeOS way of handling media? (passing and processing buffers to and from producers and consumers etc..)

How can performance be benchmarked when the Media kit is incomplete? Its my understanding that using ffmpeg was a band-aid until the Media kit was complete. -Another thing we waited 20 years to happen, that maybe now can actually happen.

I would rather complete and expand the Media kit and explore what we can do with it. Instead of doing things like everybody else for convenience.

Atomozero

dcbeckman wrapping the Media Kit encoders/decoders around FFMPEG to improve performance

Some testing should be done to measure the actual performance gains.

dcbeckman

Shaka444 I honestly have not touched the Media Kit yet other than the multi audio add-on. That will probably change after I delve into audio latency for my next phase.

I kind of like the simiplicity of the BeAPI, and Media Kit translations modules is one of the features that always drew me to BeOS. So yes, as a Haiku programmer, I would rather use native Haiku API whenever I can in my applications. I also believe that simple translation modules based on FFMPEG code could possibly give better performance than using the entire library at hand. But that remains to be seen. Obviously, those translators would have to carry FFMPEG's GPL/LGPL licensing, but if FFMPEG is already considered a core component of Haiku, who cares if the translators carry the same license. Better than just abandoning the concept.

TmTFx

Shaka444 Does using ffmpeg mean we abandon the BeOS way of handling media? (passing and processing buffers to and from producers and consumers etc..)

Afaik, this behavior is not changed. The inner decoding/encoding engine is changed.

My opinion is that these projects (widely used like openssl) are super optimized.

On the other side, the implementation done by Haiku is quite a fallback instead being done properly.
One of the shocking issue, that I discovered by implementing the overlays in sm750 video card, is that all videos are colorspace coverted to B_RGB32.
This forbids hw acceleration for yuv420 or yuv422 clip's color formats or any other colorspace the video card supports.

Shaka444

TmTFx
Then let's do it properly. 😉👍

Shaka444

Do we use ffmpeg with multiple threads? That is a consideration as well.