This week started with the preparation of a new revision of the Cedrus VPU driver, after significant feedback was received on the version posted two weeks ago. Thanks to the careful testing carried out by community member Jernej Škrabec, a number of decoding issues were discovered in version 6 of the driver. This includes issues related to MPEG2 decoding but also to the use of the VPU untiling block, that affects all codecs indifferently.
The latest version of the driver (that was posted on Thursday) brings-in the required fixes for properly supporting the videos for which decoding errors were spotted.
Some updates were also included on the MPEG2 controls side, in order to bring them closer to the raw bitstream parameters. Some parameters (that are not exposed by VAAPI) were also added, making the V4L2 controls broader than what is strictly required for our VPU.
Regarding H265, progress was slow this week due to a mismatch between values provided by VAAPI and what our VPU expects. More specifically, VAAPI provides a byte-aligned value for the offset to the coded video data in the slice (which also includes a header with metadata) while our VPU expects a bit-aligned value that does not match the value provided by VAAPI. We are hard at work to figure out a solution to this issue, but it is not straightforward. In addition, the reference libvdpau-sunxi code does not set that offset explicitly, as it is reached after parsing the header through the VPU itself. In our case, the parsing is done in userspace so the use case differs.
