[Cbe-oss-dev] Fw: Will Linux for the PS3 ever progress far enough to be able to play HD movies?

[Stefan Wald]

> Re: [Cbe-oss-dev] Will Linux for the PS3 ever progress far enough to
> be able to play HD movies?
>
> John Lange
>
> to:
>
> cbe-oss-dev
>
> 05/26/2009 04:17 PM
>
> Sent by:
>
> cbe-oss-dev-bounces+wald=de.ibm.com at ozlabs.org
>
> On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 11:23 +0200, Hector Oron wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Haven't you tried spu-medialib, libps3fb, mplayer-ps3 ?
>
> The original post might have sounded a bit like flamebait but it's
> actually a good question. What is the status of (HD) video on the PS3?
>
> The projects you mention above all will not do h.264 which is the
> defacto standard for HD video.
>
> The PS3 does not give linux access to the video hardware effectively
> crippling it for anything that requires X. My understanding is the above
> projects simply optimize the cell processor to drive the Frame Buffer
> faster.
>
> So I suppose a more specific question would be; is there any hope on the
> horizon that Sony will allow access to the Video hardware in the PS3 or
> that some other solution will be found to optimize video?

I don't think that Sony will allow access to the rsx chip.
However, the Cell Chip is powerful enough to decode H.264 full HD video
using 3-4 SPEs.
The question is, whether somebody will spend the effort to optimize the
X264 open source codec or develop a codec specifically for Cell.
Fixstar demonstrates that it can be done (Encoder though):
http://us.fixstars.com/news/2009/2009-04-20.shtml
Stefan