Hi guys, I'll have to work with an Intel consumer electronics soon (CE2110, [1]) so I started to investigate its capabilities and found that it provides video overlays optimized for media playbacks, so you can provide nice OSD (on screen display) without wasting much CPU, also this board have some hardware decoders for h264 and mpeg2 and I guess these do output to these overlays.
They provide video drivers with their own library called GDL - Graphics Device Library [2], with backend/engines for SDL and DirectFB. This GDL seems to be pretty decent in hardware support, with 2D including primitives like line, rectangle and blits (alpha, scaled too [3]). This library itself is a tiny convenience library to issue ioctl() to their kernel driver. I could not find CE2110 SDK, but there is one for the 854 chipset [4] that contains sample programs with the GDL, just download it, uncompress 8xxpsp-GDL-1.1-135.i386.rpm and then see ./usr/local/gdl-8xx/samples/ Now to Evas part: we have an outdated DirectFB which AFAIK nobody is using or willing to maintain and we (more specifically Cedric) have SDL almost integrated. I know SDL is really bare bones, so overhead of it should be minimum, however due it being bare bones I fear it not exposing primitives we could benefit. I couldn't find any source code or patch for SDL, so I'm not sure what they optimized. I don't know DirectFB more than reading their website some years ago, but looking at their code and the patch provided by Intel, looks like they do optimize some things. They have a README.txt with: """ """ 3. Current supported GDL accelerated features of DirectFB """ 1) Overlay surface source color key is supported.. """ 2) Below drawing functions are accelerated via GDL for all video system surfaces: """ draw lines; """ draw rectangles, fill rectangles, fill triangle with single color; """ strecth blt with alpha blending and alpha scaler. """ So I'm not sure on how to proceed. Would it be better to get DirectFB in shape, use SDL or write Evas GDL engine? Maybe my requirements can help somehow: - basic usage will be a digital tv set top box, so it's full high definition video with eventually some nice OSD on top of it. - it would be great to have semi-transparent OSD. - CPU is ARM/Xscale at 1Ghz, so fancy on-cpu graphics may not be possible (ie: emotion). - future will require me to run more things than just my application, maybe having Firefox and some other programs. This may be a good point for DirectFB? (I don't know if they compiled with the multi-app support, but given they provide a patch, it may be possible to recompile with this support). If you have any knowledge of this topic, please help. I'm still a bit confused about this overlay thing, maybe it's very helpful, as if you can have a ARGB overlay with my GUI so I port Evas to it, run it as ARGB surface and play the video on the background from another place. But maybe it's not like that and it's just a way to get hardware to output to some region directly (like h264/mpeg2 decoders writing to it) and I'd have to draw my surface on top of it using colorkey or retrieving the pixels (possible slow) to do alpha blend, making things more difficult. What's the state of DirectFB? Was it running fine one day (ie: directfb part is okay, it just lag behind Evas api changes)? [1] http://www.intel.com/design/celect/2110/index.htm [2] http://www.intel.com/design/celect/2110/tools.htm [3] gdl_int32 gdl_blt(gdl_context_t* context, gdl_uint32 src_surface_id, gdl_rectangle_t* src_rect, gdl_uint32 dest_surface_id, gdl_rectangle_t* dest_rect, gdl_uint32 num_clip_rects, gdl_rectangle_t* clip_rect_list, gdl_uint32 chroma_range_low, gdl_uint32 chroma_range_high, gdl_uint32 global_alpha_scalar, gdl_uint32 flags) [4] http://www.intel.com/design/celect/swd/linux854.htm -- Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri http://profusion.mobi - Embedded and Mobile Software Development -------------------------------------- MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Skype: gsbarbieri Mobile: +55 (81) 9927 0010 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
