v4l2 in ffmpeg for Kodi with Mesa freedreno GPU hardware acceleration on Dragonboard 410c

Posted by – October 2, 2017

Open Source video decoding with V4L2 (Video4Linux2) hardware accelerated video playback in ffmpeg with latest Kodi 18 from master branch. Video4Linux2 support for FFMPEG means fully open source video acceleration can be available for open source distributions on ARM, here shown off decoding video with v4l2m2m (Video4Linux 2 with Memory to Memory) on the Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c, for H264 decode. Other boards with other chipsets that have video decode engines that can support other codecs such as H265, VP9 etc at 4K and etc will then also be able to support that. It means you can upgrade the kernel when you want to what you want, giving you more freedom being less locked to vendor support and if you find a bug you can actually fix it. Filmed at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017.