For those of you interested in our recent video offloading / zero-copy playback work: I quickly put together some #livi#flatpak s to make it easy to test stuff already. Compositor offloading should work on all semi-recent Intel/AMD and a variety of ARM64 devices.
Things should generally work on #gnome45, #kde6, #sway and #weston - not sure about other compositors.
I haven't tried #kde myself yet as NV12 support was only added recently. But tomorrow there's a local #kde release party where I hope to convince some people to try on their devices.
Note that offloading currently requires HW decoding - something I hope we can change next cycle. #livi will display a little icon in the top-left if hardware decoding and thus offloading is not used.
Whenever HW decoding and offloading works I'd expect the player to be competitive to whatever other favorite player you have performance wise.
For those that are confused by the pictures in the first post because they know about the hardware limitations: yes, correct, both of them actually don't show zero-copy playback :P
One semi-surprising finding of the offloading work was that compositor offloading often pays off even when not hitting a full zero-copy path / hardware plane scanout.
In theory that gap shouldn't exist and we more or less have all APIs in place to let clients scale and pre-rotate content in a optimal way - i.e. so the compositor doesn't have to do a copy and we keep things to one single copy wherever zero-copy is impossible.
In practice there's lots of room for improvements in various stacks. With compositor offload we now have a basely of the minimal required GPU work (assuming compositors are fully optimized).
For those using HW that still uses the stateful V4L2 API for decoding - such as the #RaspberryPi4 - I uploaded another build to the link in the first post that includes a #GStreamer patch that is not close to landing, but works well enough to make playback work.
With that I can play 1080p30fps videos (the decoder limit) on my big screen smoothly, which otherwise not possible (apart from reducing the resolution).
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