XVideo extension

This text is related to the use of the XVideo extension as implemented by the XFree86 X-Server project.

Please see Tesseract page on Digital Video for other potentially useful material.

References from the XFree86 suggest that XVideo has been included in XFree86 servers since XFree86 4.x release. Also, it's important to keep in mind that not display drivers (and display cards) have XVideo acceleration (and, so, xv support) available.

XVideo related documents

• Some Tesseract authored material regarding XVideo
• Querying Xv capabilities
• Where to start coding Xv
• Xv documentation and design notes

  • Xv Man page is the canonical man page from XFree86 for said extension; review of demo xv code suggests that XFree86 really should spend a bit of time completing xv docs
  • XVideo Extension Protocol Description v.2 dated from 25-Jul-91; author's affiliation with DEC and Project Athena suggest that this is pretty early work. Note URL refers to documentation on XFree86 4.4 version, but this document is consistently quoted at least as far back as XFree86 v.4.0.
  • XFree86 Design Notes (in Postscript) describe lots of XFree86 design issues including XVideo components. Useful if lengthy reading.
  • XFree86 X Video Extension (Xv) Device Dependent Layer may have some material that overlaps Design Notes in previous link.
  • XFree86 Xv Client Library docs addendum which may or may not be part of latest XVideo docs in latest XFree86 release.
  • Article on TV support in Mozilla/XFree86/Linux is not specifically about Xv, but contains nice discussion of its benefits, as well as a useful enumeration of API

• XVideo API and other extensions
  • X-Video Motion Compensation API Specification 1.0 describes API for use in motion compensated enabled video display and decoding. Advanced for starters, not reviewed yet.....

• XVideo general performance optimizations
  • Synchronizing Xvideo to the Vertical Retrace paper discussing XVideo and OpenGL/GLX driver and graphics contexts
  • Here are some comments on smoothing displays under XFree86. Interesting site in general....
  • Some notes on refresh under X with techniques to remove image tearing. Interesting site again....lots of goodies above this page..
  • Smooth animations under XFree86

• XVideo software tools and toolkits
  • XVWindow in C++ class is encapsulated object for Xv output. Handy...
  • Mark Vojkovich's page on Xfree86 with a bunch of Xv and XvMC tools. I get the impression that Mr. Vojkovich is important player in Xv-land.

• XFree86 display driver tweaks and expertise on Xv

  Here are some XFree86 driver tweaks and sources that are well considered for the Xv savvy. I am particularly interested in the implementation details of the S3 Savage driver since this will say a lot about what is expected in good Xv (other sites rave about this driver's performance at high resolutions).

  • neomagic Xv tweak which seems to be used in a lot of laptops. There is also a discussion of Laptop Linux tweaking for Xv on neomagic silicon here
  • S3 Savage driver for XFree86 that has nice Xv support at high resolution. This person seems to know their drivers for video well.....
  • Using Xvideo on Nvidia cards has an interesting discussion on blitting vs. overlay of Xv on NVidia cards (Thanks again, Martin)
  • DRI and Xv on Mach64
  • Matrox Marvel G200 Video 4 Linux infos is for older card but has interesting technical notes.
  • Matrox Marvel G200/Rainbow Runner Addon and support in Linux via Video 4 Linux 1 and 2 also has lots of useful info
  • Matrox Xv patches and documentation for XFree86 4.2 Matrox Millenium II driver that will allow higher performance in Xv extension. Worth studying.

• Interesting XVideo and X-based video projects
  • GATOS GATOS project provides enhanced drivers for many videocards made by ATI (in particular All-in-Wonder series) and a TV player/recorder application AVview
  • EffecTV EffecTV is a real-time video effector. You can watch TV or video through amazing effectors.
  • Video For Linux Two (v4l2) API specification. Quite useful for some things to think about...
  • LinuxTV is an interesting set of tools with ambitious goals
  • Kino and dvgrab have a lot of notes on 'LinuxDV'
  • KVDR KDE-based DVR program
  • Linux based Video Disk Recorder is another Digital Video Recorder project that gets good marks from other sites
  • vic - Video Conferencing Tool is a video conferencing application developed by the Network Research Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley.
  • MPlayer - The Movie Player is a fairly comprehensive media player project; there is lots of useful technical content on site via docs regarding video and graphics playback
  • tvtime is a high quality television application for use with video capture cards on Linux systems. tvtime processes the input from a capture card and displays it on a computer monitor or projector.
  • gstreamer Open Source multimedia framework
  • VideoLAN allows streaming over a network
  • Cinelerra is a non-linear video editor
  • NMM (Network MultiMedia) is an attempt to unify an audio/video framework under Unix

• Assorted video and video-programming links
  • fourCC.org which is lots of info on video codecs and other useful info on video-in-data.
  • The Lurker's Guide to Video is a most excellent reference from a fellow that is ex-SGI, and so has a kinda good sense of things computer-graphics related.....most useful.
  • DVD info on sourceforge has lots and lots of useful information on digital video, data encoding, and other relevant materials
  • Linvid Links: Imaging has many, many links to X and Unix related video programming and such
  • Video data streams and format and lots of other useful links

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