[vlc] H.264 decoding not multithreaded?

[RUMI Szabolcs]

On Thu, 7 Aug 2008 14:49:52 -0300
Diogo Franco <diogomfranco at gmail.com> wrote:

> H.264 decoding is currently not multithreaded on libavcodec. There is work 
> undergoing to do that, but it is progressing a bit slowly.

In the meantime maybe adding support for this could be considered:

http://code.google.com/p/coreavc-for-linux/

I have managed to get this working with the latest MPlayer SVN
and CoreAVC Pro 1.7.0 and it has played a captured 1080i TS file
with 60-70% CPU (both cores involved) on a Pentium D945 running
at 4GHz. This means I was able to go to a smaller overclock and
still have cookies :)

Maybe even non-overclocked Pentium D-s above 3 GHz would be
1080i capable by using that, and equivalent low-budget Core2
CPUs as well. I wonder whether libavcodec is going to improve
to this performance level until those CPUs will mostly be phased
out, e.g. within 1-2 years. And I guess CoreAVC will get CUDA
support a lot before libavcodec...

The downside of this is (besides obvious licensing issues
of CoreAVC and the ugly wrapper hack) that MPlayer has some
blocker problems with its DVB-T support I couldn't work around
yet and this is what I want to ultimately use this for...
VLC also has some inconvenience issues in handling DVB-T but
it's basically working well.

Thanks,

Sab