On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:52 PM, Rob Clark rob@ti.com wrote:
To allow the potential use of overlays to display video content, a few extra parameters are required:
+ source buffer in different format (for example, various YUV formats) and size as compared to destination drawable + multi-planar formats where discontiguous buffers are used for different planes. For example, luma and chroma split across multiple memory banks or with different tiled formats. + flipping between multiple back buffers, perhaps not in order (to handle video formats with B-frames) + cropping during swap.. in case of video, perhaps the required hw buffers are larger than the visible picture to account for codec borders (for example, reference frames where a block/macroblock moves past the edge of the visible picture, but back again in subsequent frames).
Current solutions use the GPU to do a scaled/colorconvert into a DRI2 buffer from the client context. The goal of this protocol change is to push the decision to use overlay or GPU blit to the xorg driver.
In many cases, an overlay will avoid several passes through memory (blit/scale/colorconvert to DRI back-buffer on client side, blit to front and fake-front, and then whatever compositing is done by the window manager). On the other hand, overlays can often be handled directly by the scanout engine in the display hardware, with the GPU switched off.
The disadvantages of overlays are that they are (usually) a limited resource, sometimes with scaling constraints, and certainly with limitations about transformational effects.
The goal of combining video and dri2 is to have the best of both worlds, to have the flexibility of GPU blitting (ie. no limited number of video ports, no constraint about transformational effects), while still having the power consumption benefits of overlays (reduced memory bandwidth usage and ability to shut off the GPU) when the UI is relatively static other than the playing video.
Note: video is not exactly the same as 3d, there are a number of other things to consider (scaling, colorconvert, multi-planar formats). But on the other hand the principle is similar (direct rendering from hw video codecs). And a lot infrastructure of connection, authentication, is same. So there are two options, either extend DRI2 or add a new protocol which duplicates some parts. I'd like to consider extending DRI2 first, but if people think the requirements for video are too much different from 3d, then I could split this into a new protocol.
...
+┌───
- DRI2SetAttribute
- drawable: DRAWABLE
- attribute: ATOM
- value: INT32
- ▶
+└───
- Errors: Window, Match, Value
- The DRI2SetAttribute request sets the value of a drawable attribute.
- The drawable attribute is identified by the attribute atom. The
- following strings are guaranteed to generate valid atoms using the
- InternAtom request.
- String Type
- -----------------------------------------------------------------
- "XV_ENCODING" ENCODINGID
- "XV_HUE" [-1000..1000]
- "XV_SATURATION" [-1000..1000]
- "XV_BRIGHTNESS" [-1000..1000]
- "XV_CONTRAST" [-1000..1000]
- "XV_WIDTH" [0..MAX_INT]
- "XV_HEIGHT" [0..MAX_INT]
- "XV_OSD" XID
- If the given attribute doesn't match an attribute supported by the
- drawable a Match error is generated. The supplied encoding
- must be one of the encodings listed for the adaptor, otherwise an
- Encoding error is generated.
- If the adaptor doesn't support the exact hue, saturation,
- brightness, and contrast levels supplied, the closest levels
- supported are assumed. The DRI2GetAttribute request can be used
- to query the resulting levels.
- The "XV_WIDTH" and "XV_HEIGHT" attributes default to zero, indicating
- that no scaling is performed and the buffer sizes match the drawable
- size. They can be overriden by the client if scaling is desired.
- The "XV_OSD" attribute specifies the XID of a pixmap containing
- ARGB data to be non-destructively overlayed over the video. This
- could be used to implement subtiles, on-screen-menus, etc.
- : TODO: Is there a need to support DRI2SetAttribute for non-video
- : DRI2DRIVER types?
- :
- : TODO: Do we need to keep something like PortNotify.. if attributes
- : are only changing in response to DRI2SetAttribute from the client,
- : then having a PortNotify like mechanism seems overkill. The assumption
- : here is that, unlike Xv ports, DRI2 video drawables are not a limited
- : resource (ie. if you run out of (or don't have) hardware overlays, then
- : you use the GPU to do a colorconvert/scale/blit). So there is not a
- : need to share "ports" between multiple client processes.
Are you targeting/limiting this to a particular API (or the customary limitations of overlay HW)? I ask because VDPAU allows clients to pass in an arbitrary colour conversion matrix rather than color standard/hue/sat/bri/con, so it wouldn't be possible to use this in that context. Also in general, their compositing API is a lot more flexible and allows for a background + multiple layers, rather than just a single layer. I suppose you could pre-flatten the layers into a single one, but the background would be problematic.
VA on the other hand lets clients query for matrix and h/s/b/c attribute support and seems to have a simpler compositing API, so it seems doable with this, and of course Xv does.