Realizing hardware accelerated AVS video playback on the Godson Platform

Hardware accelerators are widely employed to alleviate CPU´s burden in video applications. Playing high definition videos encoded in popular standards such as H.264, MPEG4 and VC-1 has already gain significant speedups on Intel, AMD and NVIDIA platforms. In this paper, we realized fluent playback of 720p AVS video on the Godson Platform. We made that possible by expanding the VA-API (Video Acceleration API) specification, developing Godson´s backend driver, and implementing hardware accelerated AVS decoder for MPlayer-vaapi. In the playback tests, significant speedup (10x against the software decoder) and much lower CPU-usage-rate (around 5%) were achieved at the same time. And the final 30.282fps frame rate proved the effectiveness of our design and implementation. The methods presented in this paper can be referred to as a model for readers who want to expand the VA-API framework to accommodate new video compression standards, and those who want to add new hardware accelerators into MPlayer-vaapi.