Amlogic S905 VPU Support for H.264

[mfitch]

Hello,

I am using an Odroid C2 for my Zoneminder server. It is a small SBC that includes the Amlogic S905 ARM processor. At the moment, it runs ok with my one camera setup with a few caveats:
- mysql runs on a different computer
- The event files and httpd log storage is over NFS to another computer as well
- The camera pre-encodes the video feed in H.264 because the Odroid will choke if I set it to encode video
- The video feed glitches a bit and ends up sending false alerts. I think the glitches are because the CPU is struggling to decode the video; the CPU is maxed out

The Amlogic S905 includes a VPU that is able to decode H.264 video in hardware, thus relieving stress from the CPU. My question is, if I were to try and provide support for this VPU into Zoneminder (like Kodi 17 does), would that be of interest to anyone? Would it be accepted as a patch? I'm not saying I can successfully do it, but I can give it a try as long as I'm not wasting my time on something that won't make it upstream and nobody but me wants.

[iconnor]

It would definitely be accepted. It might not be as hard as you think though. Does ffmpeg already have support for it? look into that first. We already support hw decoding in 1.33.14.

I'm here to help.

[mfitch]

Very cool! It turns out you are correct; ffmpeg has included support since 3.4 for the v4l2, which is what the SoC includes. I appreciate your support and I'll give it a try. I'm sure I'll have some questions for you!