Hardware acceleration

[prog-amateur]

Hello, another hardware acceleration topic ! ^^

That's because I am trying to understand something.
The Oneplus one :

• CPU : Quad-core 2.5 GHz Krait 400,
• Chipset : Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AC,
• GPU : Qualcomm Adreno 330

and the Nexus 5 :

• CPU : Quad-core 2.3 GHz Krait 400,
• Chipset : Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, MSM8974AA,
• GPU : Qualcomm Adreno 330

have almost the same hardware, as you can see above.
But Oneplus One supports hardware acceleration, and Nexus 5 not.

So what is the blocking point, where lies the incompatibility, does the 800 to 801 iteration change the game?

Thank you for your clarifications.

[Keneda]

Nothing to do with this thread, are you the same prog-amateur : https://www.minimachines.net/actu/asus-pn51-98486 ?

[prog-amateur]

@keneda Hello, yes it is me, and I guess you are Keneda from https://www.minimachines.net/actu/asus-pn51-98486 ? ^^

[Keneda]

@prog-amateur I guess, lol ^^
World Wide Web's not so wide after all :face_with_tears_of_joy:

[dobey]

@prog-amateur said in Hardware acceleration:

But Oneplus One supports hardware acceleration, and Nexus 5 not.

Can you elaborate what you mean by hardware acceleration here? QtWebEngine is not accelerated on either device. Both have hardware accelerated rendering of native widgets though.

[prog-amateur]

@keneda on peut renommer ça "Small World Web" ! As you are in this forum and Minimachines too, I think you have good hi-tech taste ^^

@dobey said in Hardware acceleration:

Can you elaborate what you mean by hardware acceleration here?

Yes, you can see the Oneplus One's What's work page that Hardware video playback is ticked in green, while it isn't in Nexus 5 page (red cross).

In the same webpages we can see both share almost the same hardware in terms of SoC.

@dobey said in Hardware acceleration:

QtWebEngine is not accelerated on either device. Both have hardware accelerated rendering of native widgets though.

1. What do you mean by widgets ? Is the OS animations like carousel, or just simple widgets such as clock widget ?

2. You say that QtWebEngine is not accelerated, (and in another thread that it was due to Chromium which can't handle libhybris). Is QtWebEngine theorically capable for that for Android devices (could it be achieve one day) or only pure Linux phones like Pinephone can take benefit of this feature ?

Thank you very much

[dobey]

@prog-amateur said in Hardware acceleration:

that Hardware video playback is ticked in

Yes, this doesn't have anything to do with SoC really. There is a problem with playing back video content in mediaplayer-app, which relies on the hardware decoding to be able to play H264 and other content, on Nexus 5. This is an issue in the Android HAL part I guess, and nobody has figured out the exact cause yet. The Halium 7.1 images for Nexus 5 no longer have the issue though. They are still in testing. I think the OnePlus 1 is already based on Halium builds, and so this already works there. The Nexus 5 is currently not using Halium as a base, but is using the older porting method. Some things are magically fixed in switching to Halium, though some other things also magically no longer work.

What do you mean by widgets ? Is the OS animations like carousel, or just simple widgets such as clock widget ?

Then general components that make up the user interface. Qt/QML is rendering most things on the GPU already.

You say that QtWebEngine is not accelerated, (and in another thread that it was due to Chromium which can't handle libhybris). Is QtWebEngine theorically capable for that for Android devices (could it be achieve one day) or only pure Linux phones like Pinephone can take benefit of this feature ?

Yes, there is no GPU acceleration of QtWebEngine, as it's not built to use libhybris, and targets traditional GNU/Linux rather than GNU/Linux running on top of Android. The audio/video playback in it also does not support hardware decoding, because it doesn't use the standard QtMultimedia things for this, nor libhybris. Likewise, this is also why camera doesn't work for web, on Android based devices. All of this except for hardware decoding should already work on Pinephone.

[prog-amateur]

@dobey thank you very much. This is now very clear for me, I appreciate the detailed feedback, thank you again !

I have received my N5 today and I can't play above 720p on YouTube even if the video title is "1080p 60fps xxxxx" but this is not a big issue due to the 5 inch screen size, and there is no freeze so far so it's OK for me.

[AppLee]

Congratulation @prog-amateur
It's always nice to see a new Ubuntu Touch user.
Yes streaming works even if there is no hardware acceleration.
Playback of videos locally stored is another story.

You can play small videos with UTmedia for example, big files won't play in my own experience.
The preinstalled media player will inform you that videos are not supported on this port.

Hopefully Halium7 port won't be long until release :crossed_fingers:
Praise Florian :folded_hands: .

[domubpkm]

@applee With Pavel Prosto uVideo, i can read 250 MB videos on N5 without any problem.

[prog-amateur]

@applee @domubpkm : thank you very much for sharing your experience. This uVideo seems to be new to me, I don't remember there was another movie player than UTmedia and the original Media player, I have to test it !

There is also some issues I meet currently (mainly Nextcloud CalDAV), I think I may post a new thread if I don't succeed to solve the issue.

EDIT : I confirm that my videos taken from my camera can be played on uVideo, this app handles .mp4, .webm, and .ogv extensions so that's cool ! I don't know if this app handles subtitles, but with this and support of .mkv, then, it would be a perfect app.