Cedrus Is Making Progress On Open-Source Allwinner Video Encode/Decode

The developers within the Sunxi camp working on better Allwinner SoC support under Linux have been reverse-engineering Allwinner's "Cedar" video engine. Their project is being called Cedrus with a goal of "100% libre and open-source" video decode/encode for the relevant Cedar hardware.

The developers have been making progress and yesterday they published their initial patches that add a V4L2 decoder driver for the VPU found on Allwinner's A13 SoC.

So far this open-source sunxi-cedrus decoder driver is able to decode MPEG2 and a subset of MPEG4, but more formats are supported by the hardware and their reverse-engineered support is said to come eventually.

This Sunxi Cedrus video decode driver so far is around two thousand lines of kernel code and the current patches can be found on the kernel mailing list. In user-space there's a libVa VA-API interface for taking advantage of this driver and its limited format support so far.

Those wanting to learn more about the Cedrus project can also visit the linux-sunxi.org Wiki page.