An Interview With The Developers Of FFmpeg

Mar 15, 2009, 22:02 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Michael Larabel)

[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for this link. ]

"Blu-ray On Linux

"Blu-ray movies are playable on Linux right now, but there is no broad support, some movies will lack audio support, and a lot of manual intervention is required. If there is Digital Rights Management on the Blu-ray disc, the end-user must install a utility to dump and decrypt the high-definition files, manually input the DRM AACS key, and take other steps to watch a legally purchased movie. When it comes to FFmpeg support, Blu-ray discs using DTS-HD MA for their audio format do not work. A few months back there was some code proposed to the FFmpeg project that would partially address this problem, but FFmpeg developers rejected the code. Neither Diego, Baptiste, nor Robert have a Blu-ray drive, so at this point they have no personal interest in Blu-ray support. Diego reiterated they are interested in supporting "every format under the Sun and thus certainly Blu-ray," but their bar to accept patches is quite high and they will only reject patches if there are technical issues. All three of the developers though agree that Blu-ray support will appear in FFmpeg, but are unsure of when there will be proper support. OpenCL & GPGPU Computing

"After talking about Blu-ray, the discussion turned to another new standard: OpenCL. The Open Computing Language is an emerging C99-based industry standard for parallel programming and particularly targeting GPGPU computing. NVIDIA, ATI/AMD, and Intel are all working on making their graphics cards and drivers compatible with OpenCL that will transform their graphics processors into powerful processors exposed to OpenCL code. With GPGPU support via OpenCL, audio/video encoding could be done much faster by leveraging a modern graphics processor. At this time, however, they are unaware of any developers working on such support."

Complete Story

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