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adrianl · Posted: Sat May 28, 2005 12:51 am Post subject: Cino development

Since I'm working solely on Cino at the moment, there should be quite a bit of progress over the next fortnight or so (unless I can find a way to distract myself and invent a new project - a la Geminus the last time I was supposed to be working on just Cino Rolling Eyes

)

So, rather than bore the #netsurf folk by yacking about it there, I've decided to start a new thread and just post mini progress reports here.

Since the show, nearly a week ago (eek! it doesn't feel like it), I've tidied up all the code after the A9home diagnostics/hackery at the show itself (on Sunday) and therefore done a bit more work on the ARMv4 build of Cino.

Currently I'm extending the code to support playback of multiple streams - not something that's very useful for Cino itself, since it's going to be enough fun getting one DVD stream to play smoothly, but the code is intended to have uses in other projects. (When I eventually give up on DVD playback! Wink

The restructured code should also multitask better and will facilitate proper lip-synching later.

At the same time I'm sorting out the Geminus support, which we prototyped at the SouthEast show last autumn and which I broke before the next show by improving Geminus.

In other news, I've got a little more performance information on the IOP321/Iyonix memory system which should help in tuning the motion compensation code.

Back soon....

PS. A public thank you to John-Mark Bell of NS fame for fixing the textareas; I have now lost my fear of composing and editing large posts directly in NetSurf. (Readers, you have been warned!)

adrianl · Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 4:58 am Post subject:

Got sidetracked wanting to listen to some music, so I've just about finished DVDFS's audio CD support. Now, if you pop in an CD-DA disc (audio CD to the rest of us), the Filer window brings up the tracks as files numbered '1', '2', '3' etc... and you can just copy those tracks to HD or, better, drag them into DigitalCD and play them directly. Very Happy

adrianl · Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 1:18 pm Post subject:

now with added picture http://freespace.virgin.net/a.m.lees/images/acd.jpg

aemulor · Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 2:20 pm Post subject:

Now all we need is dynamic track title lookup Wink

http://www.freedb.org/modules.php?name=Sections&sop=listarticles&secid=2

-Neil
_________________
Aemulor - the 26 bit ARM emulator for XScale

adrianl · Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2005 2:10 pm Post subject:

Optimised the IDCT code for ARMv4 now (no prizes for guessing which machine I'm aiming at!). Latest code manages about 4fps on SA RiscPC playing from RAM disc, out of interest.

adrianl · Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2005 10:55 am Post subject:

Cino runs for first time on A9home. Thanks to Matt at Ad6 for trying it. Very Happy

Interestingly the performance seen is definitely enough to warrant targetting Cino at A9home machines as well as the Iyonix, and there's on-board hardware that we can recruit to accelerate the code as well Smile

Postscript: thinking about it, Cino should now run on the Omega too; does anybody want to give it a try?

adrianl · Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 7:56 pm Post subject:

I have an interesting black-and-white build of Cino which cuts out the currently rather-intensive YCbCr->RGB stage (including chroma subsampling and brightness/contrast adjustments).

So, running in a 256-grey screen mode, I'm getting almost full rate video*, especially if I disable the audio which is currently still rather CPU-intensive. I've never seen Cino running this fast before and it's looking very good Very Happy

This may sound like a pointless experiment, but I believe it approximates the performance we'd see if I decided to use the YUV overlay hardware of the nVIDIA, which may be the next thing to try. It also points at the YUV->RGB conversion and AC3 (audio) decoding as appropriate stages to tune next.

* just judged visually for now; this build doesn't report frame rates.

adrianl · Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 3:00 pm Post subject:

Prototype YUV overlay code for nVIDIA now included in Cino. Looks promising, though curiously what you notice most is that Cino sounds much better, the audio now streaming smoothly even during action scenes with fast motion.

I think I'm allowed to reveal that I have an A9home on loan from STD, which they've kindly sent me so that I can get Aemulor, Cino and friends running. We also got the latest build of NetSurf running last night - yay! - and I'm exploring the new hardware with application to speeding up Cino Wink

Aemulor seems perfectly happy, but I'll probably need to run a large number of 26-bit apps through it to discover any differences between the RO5 and RO4.40 that Aemulor needs to handle & hide from the 26-bit world.