GStreamer Hackfest 2016

Yes, it happened again: the Gstreamer Spring Hackfest 2016! This time in the beautiful city of Thessaloniki. Thanks a lot, Vivia and Sebastian, for making it happen.

Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki’s promenade

My objective this time was to work with dma-buf support in gstreamer-vaapi. Though it is supported already, it needs a major clean up, and to extend its usage for downstream buffers (bugs 755072 and 765435).

In the way I learned that we need to update our internal API (called `libgstvaapi`), when handling dma-buf, to support mult-plane formats.

On the other hand, Nicolas Dufresne and I talked a bit about kmssink, libdrm and dma-buf. He managed to hack his Odroid U (Exynos3) to enable its V4L2 mem2mem video decoder and share buffers with kmssink. It was amazing. By the way, he promised me to write a blog post with the instructions to replicate his deed.

GStreamer Hackfest
Photo by Luis de Bethencourt

Finally, we had a preview of Edward Hervey‘s decodebin3. It is fun his test of switching the different audio streams in a media container (the different available dubbings) in every second or less. It was truly a multi-language audio!

In the meantime, we shared beers and meals, learning and laughing.

GStreamer Hackfest 2015

Last weekend was the GStreamer Hackfest in Staines, UK, in the Samsung’s premises, who also sponsored the dinners and the lunches. Special thanks to Luis de Bethencourt, the almighty organizer!

My main purpose was to sip one or two pints with the GStreamer folks and, secondarily, to talk about gstreamer-vaapi, WebKitGTK+ and the new OpenGL/ES support in gst-plugins-bad.

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About gstreamer-vaapi, there were a couple questions about some problems shown in downstream (stable releases in distributions) which I was happy to announce that they are mostly fixed in upstream. On the other hand, Sebastian Drödge was worried about the existing support of GStreamer 0.10 and I answered him that its removal is already in the pipeline. He looked pleased.

Related with gstreamer-vaapi and the new GstGL, we tested and merged a patch for GLES2/EGL, so now it is possible to render VA-API decoded video through glimagesink with (nearly) zero-copy. Sadly, this is not currently possible using GLX. Along the way I found a silly bug that came from a previous patch of mine and fixed it; also, we fixed other small bug in the gluploader .

In the WebKitGTK+ realm, I worked on a new functionality: to share the OpenGL context and the display of the browser with the GStreamer pipeline. With it, we could add gl filters into the pipeline. But honour to whom honour is due: this patch is a split of a previous patch done by Philippe Normand. The ultimate goal is to ditch the custom video sink in WebKit and reuse the glimagesink, with it’s new off-screen rendering feature.

Finally, on Sunday’s afternoon, I walked around Richmond and it is beautiful.

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Thanks to Igalia, Intel and all the sponsors  that make possible the hackfest and my attendance.