Hi,

Does anyone know if the H.264 decoder and encoder in the N900 makes use of the DSP of the OMAP3430? The OMAP3430 is quite powerful when it comes to video encoding and decoding, if used correctly you can decode and encode 24fps QVGA h.264 simultaneously, in real time. This could be useful for video calling. However, this only works if you make use of the DSP. It would be a shame if the N900 just uses ffmpeg via GStreamer and does everything on the ARM core.

If the N900 does everything on the ARM core, we should keep an eye at the upcoming Droid phone, which as well uses the OMAP3430 with Android. It can be expected that the Droid phone will use the DSP for video decoding and encoding. It should be quite easy to use the video codec from Droid in maemo. At a low level (underneath the OpenCore Multimedia framework) Android uses OpenMAX to interface to the codec. In theory it should be possible to directly use the codec in maemo via gst-openmax.

At this point it is unclear if the codec used in Droid will be open source. It could very well be that they supply a binary blob, in which case it wouldn't be as desirable to use it in maemo.