Why external Frame Buffer is not supported in VP8 ?

[(Daniel.L) Byoungchan Lee]

Hello, I am a user of libvpx and WebRTC libraries. Recently, I found that VP9 decoder has a VPX_CODEC_CAP_EXTERNAL_FRAME_BUFFER capabilities so WebRTC provides preallocated Frame Buffers [1] to libvpx, but there are no such capabilities in VP8 decoder.

I'd like to know why VP8 doesn't support such capabilities. Is it okay to submit a patch for implementing it?

[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:third_party/webrtc/modules/video_coding/codecs/vp9/vp9_frame_buffer_pool.cc;l=41

[James Zern]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 9:07 PM (Daniel.L) Byoungchan Lee
<dani...@hpcnt.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hello, I am a user of libvpx and WebRTC libraries. Recently, I found that VP9 decoder has a VPX_CODEC_CAP_EXTERNAL_FRAME_BUFFER capabilities so WebRTC provides preallocated Frame Buffers [1] to libvpx, but there are no such capabilities in VP8 decoder.
>

There's no technical reason, support was added to vp9 to improve
performance in chrome and other applications as vp9 was being
deployed.

> I'd like to know why VP8 doesn't support such capabilities. Is it okay to submit a patch for implementing it?
>

Yes, absolutely. If you plan on working on this it would be good to
file a bug to track the progress [2].

> [1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:third_party/webrtc/modules/video_coding/codecs/vp9/vp9_frame_buffer_pool.cc;l=41
>

[2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/webm/issues/entry?template=Codec+Feature+Request+%28libvpx%29