i.MX515 Project
Gnash optimizations for ARMin category Multimedia
proposed by rsavoye on 17th August 2010 (accepted on 1st September 2010)
Project Summary
I've had Gnash, the GNU flash player (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash) running on the ARM since the Sharp Zarus, but now I'm adding an OpenVG and OpenGLES rendering backends, as well as support for thumb2 optimizations for the ARM. Gnash already supports many flash based web sites like YouTube, OpenStreetMap, etc... Up till now I have to use software rendering on the ARM, which seriously impacts performance for video, so this project is to make Gnash perform better on the ARM than the Adobe player.Project Blog Entries
The OpenVG renderer for Gnash has been released in Gnash 0.8.10. It currently supports my Babbage board, since I can't seem to find OpenVG support for other ARM platforms. Currently an OpenGLES2 renderer is under development as a Google Summer of Code project.
I've been hard at work on adding an OpenVG renderer to Gnash to improve the performance on the ARM. Currently on the ARM, Gnash uses software renderering, which kills performance. I've been doing this currently on a Babbage board using the ltib cross build system. The plan is to have OpenVG support in the next Gnash release, currently scheduled for Feb 2011 sometime. You can see my full notes on the progress of this work at this link:
http://wiki.gnashdev.org/Building_for_ltib.
Now that I have Gnash building on an i.MX515 based SmartTop, I uploaded Debs for Ubuntu Maverick to the Gnash repository at: http://www.getgnash.org/packages/. You can grab these by adding this to your /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://www.getgnash.org/debs/ubuntu maverick main
Just for grins, here's a screenshot of Gnash handling YouTube video on the SmartTop/ Next task is to work on the OpenVG/OpenGLES rendering backends to improve performance.
This isn't too exciting, but I've got the current Gnash 0.8.8 release working fine on the i.MX51. This version still uses software rendering till I make more progress on the OpenGLES/OpenVG support. But even with using software rendering, the video performance is adequate. So now i/.MX51 users can waste their time watching YouTube like everyone else. :-)