Open Source Summit Latin America 2022

The past few years have seen the emergence of yet another Virtio device, extending the aforementioned virtualization protocol to hardware video accelerators in V4L2. The upcoming Virtio Video driver conforms to the memory-to-memory stateful interface and draws upon a mature ecosystem to speed up media workflows in a guest OS by tapping into the host’s hardware. In doing so, it is a step further in the general direction of establishing a de-facto standard for media handling in different hypervisors.

This talk goes over the upcoming VA-API virtio video decoder backend currently in the works for the CrosVM hypervisor. It explains how the flexibility of Virtio technology can be paired with a very established API in order to produce a robust solution in video decoding virtualization, effectively blending the worlds of stateful and stateless interfaces. It details how the community at large stands to benefit from it and how it both validates and helps propel the development of the work-in-progress virtio video protocol itself.

The talk will also cover the latest developments in the work in progress VirtIO Video protocol and delve in the architecture behind the Rust code implementing the decoder and parser logic for the VP8 video codec while covering the next steps for the project.