High performance Theora codec for Firefox on OMAP3 previewed

Matthew Gregan is employed by Mozilla and is currently working on improving video and audio support in Firefox.On his blog, Matthew Gregan reports that there has been some success in shifting the major part of the processing load caused by decoding Theora videos into the DSP (Digital Signal Processor) core of Texas Instruments' OMAP 3 processor.

Using Nokia's N900 Linux smartphone for the tests, Matthew Gregan was able to play full-screen videos at 800x480 pixels and a rate of more than 30 frames per second. The colour-space conversion and painting was offloaded to the OMAP 3's graphics core, and video decoding to the DSP, which left the CPU core as good as idle. The remaining processor load only amounted to 20%, with the PulseAudio driver for sound output alone causing a load of 10% to 15%.

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