Having Fun with OpenGL, Android and Hardware Decoding

OpenGL is a good technology, and playing around with it on Android can be real fun! :-) By streaming a video to texture it is possible to create interesting effects, like it is possible to do with Qt. With a simple shader, for instance, lightning effects can be added:

#extension GL_OES_EGL_image_external : require

precision mediump float;

uniform samplerExternalOES u_Texture;

uniform vec3 u_LightPos;      // The position of the light in eye space.

varying vec2 v_TexCoordinate; // Interpolated texture coordinate per fragment.

varying vec3 v_Position;      // Interpolated position for this fragment.

varying vec4 v_Color; 

varying vec3 v_Normal;        // Interpolated normal.

void main()

{

   float distance = length(u_LightPos - v_Position);

   vec3 lightVector = normalize(u_LightPos - v_Position);

   float diffuse = max(dot(v_Normal, lightVector), 0.0);

   diffuse = diffuse*(1.0/(1.0 + (0.10*distance)));

   diffuse = diffuse + 0.3;

   gl_FragColor = v_Color*diffuse*texture2D(u_Texture, v_TexCoordinate);

}

This is the result on a couple of different devices (Nexus 7 with Qualcomm Snapdragon and an Allwinner A31s chip):

Qt on Linux i.MX 6

i.MX 6 is a good device. Qt runs pretty well on it. Also a plugin for hardware accelerated and zero-copy rendering seems to work pretty well. Simply building Qt for i.MX 6 makes it possible to use the Qt Multimedia plugin. This is the result (on Linux):

I also tested a provided Android port but the result was not as good.