Microsoft Looking To Add Windows Media Foundation Transforms "MFTs" To Mesa

In addition to Microsoft enabling OpenGL 4.6 over Direct3D 12 via Mesa, Microsoft engineers have also been working on some video improvements within the Mesa code-base.

Merged yesterday into Mesa 24.0-devel was implementing several optional video features into the Direct3D 12 video acceleration code. Among these new features wired up for the D3D12 Gallium3D driver were intra-refresh coding, VUI header writing, missing codec seq/pic parameters, supporting multiple VA coded buffer segments, and supporting other features as well.

With the merge request that added these new D3D12 video acceleration features, the concluding remark is perhaps the most interesting bit:

"Part of the reason for some of these changes is also staging new features for adding a new frontend, for Windows Media Foundation Transforms (MFT) that we can contribute in the future if upstream is interested."

Microsoft is looking at adding a Windows Media Foundation Transforms front-end to Mesa.

Microsoft documentation describes the Windows Media Foundation Transforms as:

"Media Foundation transforms (MFTs) provide a generic model for processing media data. MFTs are used for decoders, encoders, and digital signal processors (DSPs). In short, anything that sits in the media pipeline between the media source and the media sink is an MFT."

Interesting although this MFT support would likely not be of use outside the confines of Windows. In any event, it will be interesting to see ultimately what the Mesa developers think of this possible addition to the code-base.