VisualOn provides ARM Powered video playback without hardware acceleration

Posted by Charbax – November 10, 2010

VisualOn is demonstrating that they can provide solutions for ARM9, ARM11 and ARM Cortex-A8 and -A9 processors, where the playback of all video codecs, in certain cases at up to 720p can be supported by using the ARM part of the processor only, not even needing to use a DSP to hardware accelerate the video playback. It is still to be confirmed exactly what resolutions and bitrates are supported for each specific level of ARM Processor performance. For uses like adding support for RMVB, WMV and certain types of video streaming on top of regular HD decoding hardware, then this could be a good solution for those types of people. It integrates seemlessly as a Native SDK based application on top of Android.

  • Ominous

    Excellent :) Tnx for sharing these videos.
    You should consider additional microphone plugged in :)

  • Anonymous

    Now that we have playback how far are they from applying the same concept to video editing ;)

  • Alexudal

    I have posted here once (yesterday), and I want to ask for the same favor again: Mr. Charbax, could you please make yourself a collection of HD clips with all different bitrates, up to blurays’ high quality rips, in different containers, on your USB flash stick?
    Then please walk again to the same VisualOn booth and copy your collection to ANY of these phones. I’d prefer the weakest of them all, with ARM11 SoCs. See what happens. Otherwise, it smells of very weird trash talk that DSPs are just a waste of silicon and the VisualOn software decoders can do much better.

  • http://ARMdevices.net/ Charbax

    Can you refer me to a bunch of easy to download video sample packs that I could load on a MicroSD card or USB stick to do some testing? I didn’t bring enough HD MKV samples with me here to the conference. It would be cool to test high profile high bitrate HD samples out.

  • http://www.netbooknews.com/13521/hd-video-playback-on-arm-devices-without-hardware-acceleration/ HD Video Playback on ARM Devices without Hardware Acceleration | Netbooknews – Netbooks, Netbook Reviews, Smartbooks and more

    [...] So look out Android tablets because this is available as a Native SDK based application. Via ARMDevices.net [...]

  • Alexudal

    As examples:
    http://forum.doom9.org/~forum.test/showthread.php?t=135034, check the links in the whole thread;
    http://www.kickasstorrents.com/killa-sample-x264-1080p-hd-mkv-test-clip-t3989153.html
    http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1009-page4.html
    http://www.highdefforum.com/high-definition-movies-video-clips/6537-official-hd-video-clip-list.html <— tons of "official" test HD clips

    You may want to check how these play on your note-/netbook first, the moment some of them start stutter, choke, lose frames, pixelate, block on fast pano's, you would know you need to put exactly these clips on your USB flash stick, to check what is true in VisualOn guys presentation. My "personal" interest is to see any phone based on Samsung S3C6410 (like Samsung Moment, or Spica) playing these high rate clips: I have a Pandigital Novel cheapo eReader tablet which might have another, better life to it, quite unexpectedly…

  • A5IT

    Uh oh, looks like Archos might be losing the one feature that makes their tablets stand out, video playback.

  • Squid

    There’s also the perpetually delayed CorePlayer for Android (http://twitter.com/corecodec). They have one of, if not, the most efficient CPU based H.264 decoder. Their decoder for Windows is the only way for older netbooks to play quite a few 720p videos without hardware acceleration. The performance of their Android implementation is still TBD though.

blog comments powered by Disqus