H.264 Decoding Tackled For Reverse-Engineered "Cedrus" Allwinner Video Decode Driver

The Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) developers working on the Cedrus open-source, reverse-engineered Allwinner video decode driver have posted their patches for enabling H.264 video decoding.

Earlier versions of their Sunxi-Cedrus driver patches had just supported MPEG-2 with other codecs to be tackled, but hitting the kernel mailing list this week were their patches for enabling H.264 decoding on Allwinner hardware.

This preliminary H.264 video decoding with the Cedrus driver works with multimedia programs in user-space via the libvdpau-sunxi user-space component for offering up the well-supported VDPAU video decode API to media players, etc.

These early H.264 decode patches for Cedrus can be found via this kernel patch series. Ultimately Bootlin wants to get this Cedrus driver into the mainline Linux kernel, but it still appears to be a ways before hitting that mark.