Accelerating video playback on OMAP2 & OMAP3

[Tom Cooksey <thomas.cooksey@trolltech.com>]

I cam currently looking into accelerating video playback on the OMAP2420, OMAP2430, 
OMAP3430 and eventually the OMAP3530 (once we recieve some hardware).


>From what I understand, we can use the v4l2 interface to send buffers to the display
hardware, which will do the scaling & YUV->RGB conversion in hardware. However, I was
wondering what the options are for doing mpeg decode in hardware too. I believe the
DaVinci platforms ship with GStreamer elements which will do MPEG decoding on the DSP
and provide the output to a seperate GStreamer video sync. Are there any gstreamer
elements avaliable to do the same on the OMAP2 & OMAP3 processors? If not, how can we
accelerate the MPEG decode?

We eventually want to be able to switch to rendering video frames into off-screen buffers.
We hope this will allow us to upload them as a textures, which our compositing system can 
use for window animations. Once the animation has finished and windows are static, we'd
then switch back to using the v4l2 overlay.


Help & advice is greatly appreciated! :-)


Cheers,

Tom


PS: This is a repost ater the original was sent to the old mailing list. Sorry if you get it twice.