On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 8:58 AM Terry Barnaby <terry@...> wrote:
Many thanks for that info, from Internet info it looked like the gstreamer-imx package and associated lower libraries/drivers were needed, I will try another build, the gstreamer video hardware support wasn't there (as reported by gst-inspect-1.0) when I tried, maybe I got lost in a tangle of distro, kernel and bitbake targets.
The v4l2dec/enc plugins only show up if the VPU driver were successfully loaded. Make sure that the VPU (coda) driver is being loaded correctly with the associated firmware. After that, these v4l2dec/enc plugins should be reported by gst-inspect.
I discovered where I was going wrong. My Yocto/Freecale build for the Wandboard with standard fslc-x11 distro and linux-fslc kernel did have iMX8 video hardware supported and working! I was originally using a Wandboard supplied binary distro for testing that was quite old that used gstreamer modules such as imxv4l2sink, vpuenc_h264, overlaysync etc and most of the Internet documentation for iMX6's was the same. However the latest dunfell level gstreamer uses the more generally standard v4l2h264enc gstreamer module that ends up by using the iMX6 VPU's H264 encoder. Now I just need to work out if the current iMX6 video hardware API's allows me to do the video processing pipeline I want/need with suitably low enough CPU and memory bandwidth usage. Also how to get an efficient gstreamer video source for performance testing while I await a working physical camera as videotestsrc uses a lot of CPU for some reason masking the performance testing.
Good to hear you make progress!
Note I am using Fedora33 as a build platform now, and that seems fine with dunfell although not yet marked as a known working platform for building.
I also always use the latest Fedora as my development platform. It usually works without a problem (except for the warning). Only the uninative cannot always keep up with the latet glibc used in Fedora. But that is usually picked up very quickly.
For older Yocto versions, I use systemd containers with a matching OS, like CentOS 7 or Debian. Toradex has a nice write-up on how to set that up.
