Mediatek Gains Stateless AV1/HEVC Codecs, Intel Atom ISP Driver Getting Fit

The Linux 6.5 media subsystem updates were merged this week for the merge window that is wrapping up this weekend.

First up, the Mediatek Vcodec driver has added support for AV1 and HEVC/H.265 stateless video codecs. Great seeing the stateless codec support continuing to expand and be handled well by more media drivers.

The other big area of work for the media code in Linux 6.5 is continuing to improve the ATOMISP driver, the Atom ISP2 camera and MIPI sensor driver used by various older Intel notebooks. This Intel Atom camera driver was resurrected back in 2020 with Linux 5.8 after falling into disrepair after Intel engineers stopped maintaining it.

Thanks to the work of Red Hat's Hans de Goede and others, the Atom ISP driver has significantly improved over the past years. Now in Linux 6.5 this driver is "starting to look into a good shape." Dozens of Atom ISP patches were merged for this cycle.

A new media driver this cycle is "ov01a10" and is a V4L2 device driver for the OmniVision ov01a10 image sensor.

Other media subsystem updates include AV1 entropy helpers for the VeriSilicon driver, Tegra-Video now handles parallel input for Tegra20, and various fixes and other code enhancements. More details on the many media subsystem changes for Linux 6.5 via this pull.