The Allwinner "Cedrus" Video Decoder Supports H.265 On Linux 5.5

The Cedrus video decode driver developed by Bootlin after successful crowdfunding for creating an open-source Linux video decoder for Allwinner SoCs now has H.265 support!

Cedrus was merged back in Linux 4.20 after raising over thirty-six thousand dollars from crowdfunding to have an intern work on the project. Initially it supported the Allwinner A10/A13/A20/A33/R8/R16 SoCs and supported MPEG-2 and H.264 for video decoding. H.265/HEVC support was in the works but only with Linux 5.5 is now completely wired up.

Since the initial merge more Allwinner SoCs have been added and other improvements made. The Sunxi Cedrus video decode driver developed without the support of Allwinner is a nice example of a Linux media kernel driver. In addition to working H.265/HEVC decode, Cedrus in the Linux 5.5 kernel also has fixes to its H.264 decoding for some content, fixed H.264 4K support, and other improvements.

The Cedrus work was sent in as part of the media updates for Linux 5.5 along with new user-space documentation on stateless decoders and other media documentation improvements, a new HDMI CEC ioctl, and other driver work.