Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Binaries for POT 5.5.0-beta1 on Qt 5.8.0-rc1 and Experimental Accelerated QtWebKit

A new version of Qt is out and some interesting changes are being developed. Interesting work was done on WebEngine. This package contains an experimental build of Qt 5.8.0-rc1 with the POT driver to provide hardware acceleration to video decoding and rendering. POT was updated to build on the new plugin architecture of Qt and includes ffmpeg 3.2.2. For info on the content of the package refer to this article. The youtube player still runs on WebKit 1 and so is still hardly useful.

Please report issues on github. Have fun ;-)

Download POT 5.5.0-beta1 for Raspbian Jessie Lite Pi2 (also tested on Pi3) here (md5: 7ca1b961ab8c70176f6aeb13d0bc4f9a).

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Binaries for POT 5.4.0 on Qt 5.7.0 and Experimental Accelerated QtWebKit

So far, no real complains about POT 5.4.0-beta1 so I suppose it is sufficiently safe to consider it POT 5.4.0. Refer to this article for more info.

Monday, July 25, 2016

Binaries for POT 5.4.0-beta1 on Qt 5.7.0 and Experimental Accelerated QtWebKit

This is a new binary package including the same content of POT 5.3.0-beta1 package, with some updates:

  • new improvements in POT taken from omxplayer code;
  • bump to ffmpeg 3.1;
  • based on Qt 5.7.0.
The build includes support for network protocols and WebKit 1 supporting video html5 elements (including youtube).
This version is still experimental. Please report bugs on github.
Have fun! Bye! ;-)

Download POT 5.4.0-beta1 for Raspbian Jessie Lite Pi2 (also tested on Pi3) here (md5: e6b6a1f92b71ac2bdd3d9756efd7669c).

Monday, June 27, 2016

Streaming from VLC to a Qt App on HTTP Using POT

The latest version of POT (5.3.0-beta1) implements some kind of buffering which makes it also possible to do some streaming. ffmpeg provides what is needed to work on protocols like HTTP. This video is a little demo showing how simple it is to stream from VLC on HTTP, remuxing to mpeg-ts, and decoding/rendering on Raspberry Pi in an accelerated Qt application using POT.
Such feature can be useful when dealing with streams coming from many sources, like an IP camera for instance.
Have fun! Bye ;-)

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Binaries for POT 5.3.0-beta1 on Qt 5.6.0 and Experimental Accelerated QtWebKit

This is an experimental version of POT that includes a few new features. The driver now includes an experimental version of playback of remote content including proper buffering of the media and the QtWebKit library is able to play videos using proper hardware acceleration.

Features

The driver can now be used through the regular Qt/QML interface to play content over protocols different from file://. I only tested HTTP but others should be available.
This new feature allowed me to also implement a new player in QtWebKit using the POT driver to stream content to the regular Qt QWebView. Unfortunately I could only find the time to implement this in the WebKit 1 branch, not in WebKit 2 which requires more work. This makes the implementation hardly useful, but it is a start. If anyone wanted to contribute this is where to start. This video shows the new implementation in action:
As QtWebKit now uses the GPU properly, I could also implement a YouTube player app using the same QWebView with just a few lines of code of regular Qt code:

In the video you can also see an application I wrote to implement a YouTube fullscreen player using the YouTube iframe API. Such a sample app is also included in the package.
Of course the real target would be to implement this in QtWebEngine. I was never able to find a version of QtWebEngine with video acceleration for Pi. Anyone who knows one?


Package

The package now includes:

  • build_valgrind.tar: a build of valgrind to analyse your code;
  • libpiomxtextures_qmlutils.so: QML plugin to provide a video probe in QML;
  • piomxtextures_browser_we: an application that tests the QtWebEngine module (run passing a URL, ./piomxtextures_browser_we http://www.youtube.com);
  • piomxtextures_browser_wk: an application that tests the QtWebKit module:
    • you can run on WebKit 1 like ./piomxtextures_browser_wk http://www.youtube.com;
    • or you can run on WebKit 2 like ./piomxtextures_browser_wk --wk2 http://www.youtube.com;
  • piomxtextures_pocplayer: a sample QML player;
  • piomxtextures_pocplayer_yt: a youtube sample player (run passing a video ID like ./piomxtextures_pocplayer_yt 71UvXMzVgx4);
  • qtdeps.tar: the usual libs needed by Qt and POT;
  • Qt-rasp2-5.6.0.tar: a build of Qt 5.6.0 stable including:
    • regular Qt 5.6.0 modules;
    • untested bluetooth module including BLE support;
    • untested MySQL plugin;
    • untested QtFtp module;
    • untested Qt hat tools module;
    • QtWebEngine;
    • QtWebKit.
Please report any bug you find on github. Don't use in production. Sources will be available shortly. Have fun! ;-)

Download POT 5.3.0-beta1 for Raspbian Jessie Lite Pi2 (also tested on Pi3) here (md5: edbe0ad2a552a5c8280e3876d16b237d).

Saturday, March 19, 2016

Binaries for Hardware Accelerated Qt 5.6.0-rc1 Multimedia Backend on Raspbian Jessie Lite (POT 5.2.2)

This is a new build including a video probe to monitor frames being rendered. I also included a plugin to access video probe functionalities from QML. You can use it like this:

POT_VideoProbe {
   source: mediaPlayer
   onVideoFrameProbed: console.log("Frame probed!")
}

where mediaPlayer is an element of type MediaPlayer. Modifying the frame is not probably possible at the moment.
Have fun! Bye ;-)

Download PiOmxTextures 5.2.2 for Raspbian Jessie Pi2 here (extraction code is: 2bd6, md5:
   8be82eee7498e63e63ecbe17cb3eb7ef).

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Binaries for Hardware Accelerated Qt 5.6.0-rc1 Multimedia Backend on Raspbian Jessie Lite (POT 5.2.1)

This the same build provided in the firmware from the previous post. It includes a couple of fixes over 5.2.0 and the new Qt 5.6.0-rc1. Refer to this article for more information.
Please file issues on github if needed.
Bye! ;-)

Download PiOmxTextures 5.2.1 for Raspbian Jessie Pi2 here (extraction code is: 62c9, md5: 356e2004dfeb9017a482e2448750121e).

Fully Optimised Raspbian Jessie Lite with Accelerated Qt Multimedia Backend (Pi2)

This is a follow-up to the image provided in this article. The concept is identical, but in this case this firmware is smaller, it is based on Raspbian Jessie Lite and includes updated software. The firmware was 1.9GB while now is 759MB. This is the current setup (but I encourage to update to the latest possible firmware):

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ vcgencmd version
Feb 25 2016 14:25:47 
Copyright (c) 2012 Broadcom
version dea971b793dd6cf89133ede5a8362eb77e4f4ade (clean) (release)
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 4.1.18-v7+ #846 SMP Thu Feb 25 14:22:53 GMT 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux

Download the image here (torrent) (md5: 06d75d03f63674350be6cb807850bf09).
(Please be patient while downloading and decompressing)

The image includes:
  • Qt 5.6.0-rc1: built for armv7 with neon optimisations, including support for touch screens, gstreamer, libinput, tslib, and Bluetooth/Bluetooth BLE using bluez (complete configuration below).
  • QtWebKit 5.6.0: includes WebKit 1 and WebKit 2.
  • QtWebEngine 5.6.0-rc1: multimedia only based on ffmpeg.
  • Dependant libs: evdev, icu (not the one provided by raspbian), mtdev, libts.
  • Samples: samples from the repo to test POT.
  • POT: POT version 5.2.1 including ffmpeg 2.8.6.

Samples

To have a quick look at multimedia in Qt/QML test with this commands:
  • /usr/local/Qt-rasp2-5.6.0-rc1/bin/qmlscene "some_video_file" samples/video_simple.qml
  • /usr/local/Qt-rasp2-5.6.0-rc1/bin/qmlscene "some_url" samples/webkit_simple.qml
  • /usr/local/Qt-rasp2-5.6.0-rc1/bin/qmlscene "some_url" samples/webengine_simple.qml
  • /home/pi/piomxtextures_pocplayer --multipleanimtest "720p_video_1" "720p_video_2"
Please let me know if you find something wrong and file a bugreport on https://github.com/carlonluca/pi.
Have fun! ;-)

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Binaries for POT 5.1.0 With Remote Streaming Support

This is an experimental build of POT 5.1.0 including support for remote streaming. I tested it for HTTP/HTTPS with YouTube but it should work with other protocols supported by ffmpeg as well.

In case someone is interested in testing it please let me know. This is a build for Pi2 on Qt 5.6.0-beta1. To quickly test you can use POCPlayer:

./piomxtextures_pocplayer "https://something.com/..."

The streaming should start right away.

Download here the build for Pi2 on Qt 5.6.0-beta1 (extraction code is: bfc7).

Have fun! Bye ;-)

Binaries for Hardware Accelerated Qt 5.6.0-beta1 Multimedia Backend on Raspbian Jessie (POT 5.2.0)

This new build is identical to the previous one but includes a few changes in the library:

  • Bump to ffmpeg from 2.7.2 to 2.8.5 to fix some rare crashes.
  • Multiple fixes that were causing bug #51.
  • Other minor fixes.
Download PiOmxTextures 5.2.0 for Raspbian Jessie Pi2 here (extraction code is: cd4f).

Please file bug reports in case of issues and have fun! Bye ;-)

NOTE: If you need to test the samples please keep in mind that Qt 5.6.0 seems to have changed the order of the params to provide to qmlscene: the qml file must appear at the end.