This patch provides basic support for video on the Sony PS3
Linux framebuffer. Scaling, format-conversion, and drawing is
done from the SPEs, so there is little performance impact to
PPE applications. This is by no means production quality code,
but it is a very good start and a good example of how to use the
PS3's hardware capabilities to accelerate video playback on
the box.
The driver has been verified to work with ffplay, mplayer and xine.
This piece of software has been developed at the IBM R&D Lab
in Boeblingen, Germany and is now returned to the community.
This is cool, but that it took this long kind of underlines how much of a disappointment PS3 Linux has been so far. Sony has put a lot of manpower into Linux on Cell, but it seems like the vast majority of it is on stuff like MARS, with even their "partner" YDL/Fixstars pretty much left out in the cold in terms of anything that would make the user experience better.
Maybe someday linux on the ps3 ill be good for something other than crunching numbers. It's still a neat tool for researchers and schools though, that's a whole lot of power for pretty cheap.
