two cool open video notes

December 9, 2009 in Firefox, OGG, Video | 10 comments

Today at the Mozilla all hands I saw two cool things:

1. A decent sized (600×400 or so) Theora video playing on a Nokia N900, decoding on the DSP with the main CPU kept at around 50%. (Pulseaudio is about 10-15% of that, and the rest of Vorbis decoding and some work to get the video onto a fullscreen texture.) This is based on David Schleef’s Theora-on-DSP work and it’s showing real promise.

2. With Bas’ Direct2D windows build, I’m able to play a 1080p Theora (test here) video on my Lenovo X200s and it’s smooth as butter. Fully scaled, full framerate, full screen, no drops. Pretty amazing. And he’s only doing scaling in that code, not yet doing the YUV->RGB conversions so there’s still a huge amount of room to improve here.

All good improvements for HTML5 and open video.

  1. Joseph’s avatar

    Joseph on December 9, 2009 at 9:39 pm

    I dunno what’s going on, but watching a 640×360 theora on my netbook is completely useless in Firefox, but is creamy-smooth in totem. Any fix for this?

  2. ethana2’s avatar

    ethana2 on December 9, 2009 at 9:49 pm

    the Old Republic game trailer at 854×480 in mp4 format brings my Droid to its knees..

  3. a a’s avatar

    a a on December 10, 2009 at 2:38 am

    Could you try to do a rotated playing of video? The video plays just fine for me in Firefox with a 2 year old laptop, no Direct2D. The true power of Direct2D is not that it can play full screen video, but how well it can integrate video with html content.

  4. drago01’s avatar

    drago01 on December 10, 2009 at 3:40 am

    @Joseph

    Because totem is using XV while firefox doesn’t (because it operates on RGB data).

    What it could do is to either use opengl for scaling or XV+composite (render to offscreen textured xv, composite the other element on the image and display it).

    Dunno how useable the second approuch would be but using opengl should definitly work (even flash uses that).

  5. Joseph’s avatar

    Joseph on December 10, 2009 at 10:20 am

    Whatever, as long as it stops sucking. Please. Or lemme hand the video off to totem.

  6. Christopher Blizzard’s avatar

    Christopher Blizzard on December 10, 2009 at 11:28 am

    At least one lesson here from the windows work is getting a faster cairo backend for Linux. The windows Direct2D work is just a cairo backend and all it’s doing is handling the scaling.

  7. Joseph’s avatar

    Joseph on December 10, 2009 at 11:37 am

    Is one of the problems a lack of linux love amongst mozillites (I hear it’s pretty mac-heavy there) and a lack of Mozilla love under the linuxites?

  8. Alessandro Decina’s avatar

    Alessandro Decina on December 10, 2009 at 12:08 pm

    @Joseph in the meantime you could try my gstreamer addon for firefox (http://github.com/alessandrod/gbp). It uses Xv so it should play as good as in totem.

  9. Christopher Blizzard’s avatar

    Christopher Blizzard on December 10, 2009 at 2:13 pm

    @Joseph – Lots of people here use Fedora and Ubuntu (split around 50%) and there are quite a few Windows machines. We’re a cross-platform project so we have lots of different machines. We’ve also sponsored a huge amount of the Cairo and Theora work to date and have put a lot of work into making Linux work better as well. (See the memory savings we put in place in between 3 and 3.5!) We work with Behdad on font layout issues all the time.

    I’m not sure how this post turned into some anti-linux thing.

  10. Joseph’s avatar

    Joseph on December 10, 2009 at 2:27 pm

    Didn’t mean to turn it into anti-linux; !as-pro-linux includes anti-linux, but there’s a lot of territory outside that as well.