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Charlotte 🦝 therian

average microcontroller datasheet: here is a 1000 page documentation documenting every single register in detail, with some example code included. also we have an sdk on github

average soc datasheet: yeah it supports h.264 decode at 4k60Hz. no we won’t provide any further info

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@charlotte
It makes me sad because I *want* to know how it decodes it's h264... and I would want to implement say VP1 in the same microcontroller language bluefox_mad
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@miifox basically you could only use an h.264 decoder for decoding h.264 and maybe minor changes to it

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@charlotte the soc "sdk": a zipfile with the source code of a 3+ year out of date linux kernel with a bunch of obfuscate driver bits, if your lucky it also includes some firmware blobs, and closed source user space. Also no documentation on how that all needs to be put together (i.e. just the bare minimum to comply with the GPL)

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@charlotte
Such a waste of perfectly good transistors smh
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@deetwenty luckily the jh7110 has an actually open source linux kernel, based on linux 5.10? or 5.15, one of the latest LTSes. also no binary blob nonsense

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@miifox the decoding hardware is partially shared with other codecs

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@charlotte that isn't bad, have in the past looked into upgrading my phone to newer kernels (to e.g. able more recent android versions), but alas often not possible due to the above reason. Contrast to microcontrollers, who are well documented enough that the user base can just write support for rust (or micropython or something similar) from scratch, and it is just night and day. (Though IMHO a large part of the blame here is on qualcom)

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@deetwenty most vendors are like that, qualcomm, mediatek, allwinner, probably also rockchip, and technically also apple

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@charlotte true tough it doesn't help that qualcom has/had a stranglehold on phone SoCs (thanks to their patents on 4G/5G modems), I think if that wasn't the case one of the others might have tried a more "open" strategy to gain marketshare ("with our SoCs you can have support for more than 3 years, since all the drivers are upstreamed!"), though to be fair that is just speculation

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