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Enhance video experience by Multi-plane

Session Summary: 
TV box customers expect more and more video experience such as viewing several videos at the same time, viewing videos from the internet in one browser with lots of graphic elements. This is is putting added pressure on video and graphics performance. The famous traditional way is using Hardware Overlay. But the used color key may cause unexpected holes on the screen and do not support translucency. Intel’s CE4100 provides multiple pipelines (Multi-plane) to decode videos and handle graphics. This presentation will introduce multi-plane HW solution and provide one software solution to make good use of multi-plane and enable translucency.
Session Abstract: 

Some embedded system provides more than one pipeline (multi-plane) to get better performance. Video and window system run on separate planes. Intel CE4100 platform belongs to this kind. Hopefully, users could see though the window to enjoy the video underneath. For example, for hardware accelerated flash/html5 playback, video is rendered on the back plane. Generally, video needs to be copied to current plane. This operation is expensive for rapidly changed frames. One famous solution is hardware overlay. Color key is used to mask the video area. But the specific RGB color may be used by other applications and caused unexpected holes on the screen. Besides, this method cannot support translucent elements above the video which is one feature in HTML5. We provide a good solution without that copy and could enable translucency features.
In this talk we will present:
a) Comparing Multi-plane solution to HW overlay solution to get good video performance.
b) Our findings on support Multi-plane in Xorg and browser.
c) Providing one easy-implement and less-cost solution by window manager.
d) Demo one user case to show its capabilities.
Multi plane is becoming a natural soc method in embedded system especially suitable for TV boxes. In the near future, most STB will be powered with this feature. So this will be an interesting and attractive topic. We have been doing a lot of investigation and implementation on it, and could provide a demo (on the hardware of DHG’s CE4100 board) to show its capabilities.

Sessions Details

Session Presenters

Xie, Danming

The conference organizing committee has put together slide templates for presenters to use if they so choose. Feel free to take and modify as you like!