Videos w/ sound

[smp500]

Would it even be possible get an already developed engine like xine to work? It plays everything imaginable.

[gnu]

The problem isn't the program that plays the video, but the CPU: it's simply not fast enough to decompress video AND sound!

[smp500]

The people at apple found a way to do it with the h.264 codec.

[Llorean]

The iPod with Video (that plays h.264) uses a special chip just to decode it. We don't know how to access this chip yet, and it doesn't help any other iPod except the Video ones.

[tychver]

Shouldn't we be able to use the 2nd core for audio once it works? I saw that some preliminary work had been done with the 2nd core but it was far from functional.

[dan_a]

As I understand it, the plan is to use the coprocessor for audio decoding.  Unfortunately, for several reasons, I've not been able to get any further with using the coprocessor for a while.  If nobody picks up the baton, I'll get back to it sometime soon.  That make things fast enough, but I've got no idea what complications are involved with decoding audio in sync with video.

[Noxneo]

How about getting in touch with MV developers to see how they managed to run both audio and video on one chip ? Or did they find out how to work the second chip ?

[Bagder]

How about getting in touch with MV developers to see how they managed to run both audio and video on one chip ? Or did they find out how to work the second chip ?

I don't think the problem is how they or we would do it using one chip. We would still do it using one chip on all the targets that only have a single CPU core.

The main problem here is that there's nobody (dev or other person) working on making this happen.

The MV developers would be much welcome to join in and help us, but somehow I doubt they will...

[gnu]

(What the [profanity deleted--please do not use profanity on the Rockbox forums]is MV :oops:)

The people at Ipodlinux did it; but they used uncompressed audio.

[Noxneo]

They use uncompressed video as well, as far as I know.

And MV is a video player rockbox ipodlinux (sorry, lapsus ) plugin  for the iPod nano and photo.

[markun]

They use uncompressed video as well, as far as I know.

And MV is a video player rockbox plugin  for the iPod nano and photo.

from http://ipodlinux.org/Mv_player

The MV Player is a compressed video player.

And of course it's for ipodlinux not rockbox, but I guess that was just a typo.

[Bagder]

from http://ipodlinux.org/Mv_player

The MV Player is a compressed video player.

Yes, but you should get the full quote:

The MV Player is a compressed video player. It is an external application that can be run through podzilla. A compressed video is a video format that is smaller (in mega bytes) than the original size. IPL currently only plays decompressed videos so they are fairly large.

(my emphasis added)

[markun]

ok, now that I read it again I see Noxneo and gnu might gave been talking about the current video player for ipodlinux. I just assumed it was still about MV.

[gravedigg154]

Ok does it matter if videos don't have sound? If you have a video you can still view it if you switch to the original firmware then switch back if you want to play doom or something.

[Yotto]

Ok does it matter if videos don't have sound? If you have a video you can still view it if you switch to the original firmware then switch back if you want to play doom or something.

That attitude could be taken to an extreme.  Why should Rockbox play music?  They can just boot into the normal firmware for that.

(I personally don't care about movies, and if the choice was between core functionality and battery life on the iPods, or getting movies to work, I'd pick the first every time)