GPU video acceleration made possible by Apple?

Ayla Wrote:Davilla, does this new Apple API in 10.6.3 look like something that could ("easily") be implemented in XBMC on OS X and would it provide hardware acc. playback of for example h.264 .mkv's and VC1 Blu-ray rips?

I know you haven't had much time to look at it, but your initial impression at least

Thanks
Martin

h.264 in any container, yes. VC1 no.

Humm, the VideoDecodeAcceleration.framework is only 48K in size suggesting it's just a wrapper to other frameworks. Otool -L under 10.5 surprisingly shows the other dependent framework versions are valid under 10.5. I wonder if with a bit of manipulation, this decoder API would work under 10.5 as well as 10.6.3. Lots to ponder

Count me in for testing. (If there is something to test)
I would happily ditch linux in favour of OSX from my Nvidia Mac Mini. (working resume from standby using remote, long button remote press support etc....)

Z3rO Wrote:Count me in for testing. (If there is something to test)
I would happily ditch linux in favour of OSX from my Nvidia Mac Mini. (working resume from standby using remote, long button remote press support etc....)

Me too :-) Wondering if the RAM requirements would be the same, I'm still at 2GB on the 9400M Mini.

I'll be getting my 2010 MBP next week with the 320M. I'd definitely be in for testing. So far I've run and messed with XBMC on everything except OSX.

davilla Wrote:Humm, the VideoDecodeAcceleration.framework is only 48K in size suggesting it's just a wrapper to other frameworks. Otool -L under 10.5 surprisingly shows the other dependent framework versions are valid under 10.5. I wonder if with a bit of manipulation, this decoder API would work under 10.5 as well as 10.6.3. Lots to ponder

Buzz, roadkill on 10.5, VideoDecodeAcceleration.framework API uses a new VideoToolbox.framework that's only available under 10.6.x

Great news to see you working on this. If Im understanding this correctly, this will enable gpu acceleration on h264 video in any container. That includes x264 mkv scene releases, isnt that correct?

RckStr Wrote:Great news to see you working on this. If Im understanding this correctly, this will enable gpu acceleration on h264 video in any container. That includes x264 mkv scene releases, isnt that correct?

Any h264 video flavor that the decoder supports. There are many, many flavors of h264 and it's not clear what VDADecoder supports and what it does not support.

Is the goal to get this in the next release of XBMC?

smush420 Wrote:Is the goal to get this in the next release of XBMC?

The goal is to get it working and into svn trunk. Since trunk builds against 10.4 SDK, there are build issues to resolve as this needs to link with VideoDecodeAcceleration.framework which is only available on 10.6.3 and is a 10.6 SDK linkage. In addition, the header include is not public yet and it's an Apple developer violation to expose it right now. So besides implementing a factory codec to support this in xbmc (trivial), there are other details that will need to be worked out.