A blog of interesting technical advances.

June 23, 2013

Accelerated Video Decoding on the RPi using gst-omx and Buildroot

As a Google Summer of Code student, I have been working to add ARM multimedia features to Buildroot.  This week, I mainlined some of that work including patches, which add gst-omx for accelerated video decoding on the RPi.

Below is a video of this work in action.  In the video, you can see the RPi, decoding the Blender foundations Big Buck Bunny in 720p resolution and outputting through HDMI to a monitor.


To recreate the video, use this rpi_demo_defconfig then run the following on the RPi.  The rpi_demo_defconfig enables buildroot to build gst-omx. 

# wget http://blender-mirror.kino3d.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/big_buck_bunny_720p_h264.mov
# gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=/path/to/video ! qtdemux ! h264parse ! omxh264dec ! eglglessink