What resolution of video are you looking at ? For the best performance at anything around or greater than VGA decodes, you would need to use a part like DM3730 or DM81xx.   Arago image from TI does not support Xorg, but it should be possible to add with some effort. BeagleboardUbuntu will work without acceleration.

Hi Prabindh,

Thank you for your reply.

Prabindh Sundareson said:

What resolution of video are you looking at ?

The touch screen we are trying to get to work is 1280x800.

Prabindh Sundareson said:

For the best performance at anything around or greater than VGA decodes, you would need to use a part like DM3730 or DM81xx. 

The BeagleBoard-xM RevC has a DM3730.  Running a single OpenGL or single VGA video decodes seem very smooth.  I also have a Z3-DM8168-RPS-LITE I may use for the final demo but for now the BeagleBoard-xM is easier to work with, has better support, although not as fast. 

I want to demo to our customers a full Linux GNOME desktop, decoding h264 video, and 3D core rendering simultaneously in side-by-side windows.  Basically I want to replicate the short 20 second video from BeagleBoard LinuxTag 2010 demonstration.  Finding an image with a Linux Gnome desktop *and* SGX support has been a hard and unsuccessful  struggle for the past 3 weeks:

Beagleboard LinuxTag 2010 demonstration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jqPAkASp0I

Prabindh Sundareson said:

Arago image from TI does not support Xorg, but it should be possible to add with some effort. BeagleboardUbuntu will work without acceleration

I assume BeagleboardUbuntu uses something similar to a Mesa software driver for OpenGL support.  Something like I use in my x86 Linux VM's which work but can hardly keep up with even 25FPS of PAL video.

Robert Nelson says regarding SGX support for BeagleboardUbuntu that it is "still a work in progress, but so far all the basic sgx demos seem to work on my Beagle xM C".

http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu#SGX_Video_Acceleration

I think I will search for the BeagleBoard LinuxTag 2010 demonstration and see if I can find any information on how that image was built.  But I expect even if I find it I will have SGX PVR issue with my BeagleBoard-xM revC.

Thank you for your assistance.  Discussing this has been helpful,

-Ed

Hi Ed,

• About this demonstration on BeagleBoard-xM:

As Prabindh pointed out, for playing the video this Ubuntu release will not use the hardware acceleration (I am not talking about the SGX), the ARM Cortex-A8 will be used. You should discuss with local TI representative/ field engineer what are the possibilities for appropriate distribution release.

• About this demonstration on DM816x:

The problem here is the desktop environment. It should be possible, but hard to bring up GNOME here. As you know EZSDK is based on Arago and Arago is a minimalistic system. It doesn't have native gcc and X server (but it has many other things, it was meant to be like this). I think this would be a significant effort; I personally cannot predict what would be required to achieve this. EZSDK has Qt support; you could try to use Qt windows for the demonstration instead of GNOME; this should be easier.

As you see, this platforms are different, so if you achieve this demonstration on BeagleBoard-xM you wont be able to move to DM816x directly. Keep in mind that DM816x has:

"Up to Three Programmable High-Definition
Video Image Coprocessing (HDVICP2) Engines
– Encode, Decode, Transcode Operations
– H.264, MPEG2, VC1, MPEG4 SP and ASP"

BR

Vladimir