Raspbian 2018-11-13 Brings Hardware-Accelerated VLC Media Player

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspbian 2018-11-13 Brings Hardware-Accelerated VLC Media Player

After releasing the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ yesterday, the Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced Raspbian 2018-11-13 as the latest update to their Debian-based Linux distribution for these low-cost ARM SBCs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspbian-November-2018

[Rccero]

Why does the MPEG-2 codec requires a license? I thought all its patents had expired.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MPEG-2-Last-Patents-Expire

[edwaleni]

Why does the MPEG-2 codec requires a license? I thought all its patents had expired.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...Patents-Expire

Still at the Pi Store.

http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/

I emailed them at Pi to ask why they still have it up.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Is there VA-API support now, or they patched VLC instead?

[chithanh]

What kind of patch would be needed? Mainline VLC supports OpenMAX.

[Gusar]

What kind of patch would be needed? Mainline VLC supports OpenMAX.

The native (closed) RPi graphics stack has its own windowing system, it does not use X. So while VLC supported both OpenMAX and MMAL (Broadcom's video API), using them you'd get the video in its own window, outside the VLC player UI, and not under the control of the X window manager. What they've done now is they import the decoded video into an X drawable, so it can be integrated into the player UI. It's a hack basically, and it does come with a performance impact, but there's no other way. The real solution is switching to the open source VC4 graphics stack, but this one doesn't have hardware video decoding support yet.

[caligula]

Why does the MPEG-2 codec requires a license? I thought all its patents had expired.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...Patents-Expire

Well, you don't need to own patents to sell software. If it's proprietary, it may be non-free (as in beer). Simple as that.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

What they've done now is they import the decoded video into an X drawable, so it can be integrated into the player UI. It's a hack basically, and it does come with a performance impact, but there's no other way.

So it's patched VLC after all?

[AndyChow]

Why does the MPEG-2 codec requires a license? I thought all its patents had expired.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...Patents-Expire

The answer is complicated, but mostly, it's the Philipines and Malaysia that are blocking the adoption of using a free MPEG-2 codec.

[Gusar]

So it's patched VLC after all?

Yes, it's a patched VLC.

And btw, Raspbian's Chromium browser is patched in the same way, so you have a hardware decoded Youtube (or any other video site) on Raspbian.