VIDEO: Hardware accelerated scaling of video

[henke37]

Games that play video scale the video on the CPU. This is stupid. Even if the GPU is unable to decode the obsolete format, it is perfectly able to scale the decoded video.

[criezy]

I can see at least two aspects to this tasks:

• The SCI engine can indeed scale videos when rendering them on the game surface, and it indeed happens on the CPU. I am not aware of any other engines scaling videos.
• The backend can then scale the game surface to the screen/window. Part of this may already be done on the GPU (e.g. by SDL2), however the scaling performed by the SurfaceSDL graphics modes are done on the CPU. This is not specific to videos though.

[bgK]

What would be interesting IMO is going one step further with a small 2D rendering API, like the one in SDL2, where it's possible to define textures and do render calls with an affine transform and a color compositing mode applied. This API could be implemented in hardware or in software depending on the capabilities of the backend. This would help when re-implementing more recent games, and could also be leveraged in the GUI.

[sev-]

This ticket uses disrespectful language.

And using hw acceleration is not pretty much portable.

Closing.