Decoding glitchy on GM45 - MR has been pending since 2020

[Robert Mader]

Ubuntu 24.04 will ship with Gstreamer 1.24, which finally promoted many "va*" plugins to primary, i.e. enabled them by default and will thus be used by more apps than in the past.

I tested this on an old Thinkpad T400 / Intel GM45 and ran into a glitch. Fortunately there's pending MR (see below) fixing that - but Intel does not seem to maintain https://github.com/intel/intel-vaapi-driver any more, so it will likely never get merged or released.

I'd thus like to request to add the MR in question to the Debian/Ubuntu package. However, while on it, it might sense to add a few more fixes that have accumulated:

 - All new commits on the master branch (~7?)
 - https://github.com/intel/intel-vaapi-driver/pull/566, which will be needed for upcoming Wayland compositor changes.
 - https://github.com/intel/intel-vaapi-driver/pull/514 which fixes glitches for e.g. Gstreamer based players on very old generations (GM45). I tested/verified this one myself.
 - Potentially: https://github.com/intel/intel-vaapi-driver/pull/530 - unfortunately I don't have the hardware to verify this one.

If you prefer, I can also try to open a MR at https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/intel-vaapi-driver/-/merge_requests - but I'm not very used to the debian packaging workflow.

Thanks for considering :)

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Can you narrow down the list of pull requests to just those associated with Launchpad bugs? Or open additional bugs if required? The requirements feel too vague otherwise, and we're only weeks away from release at which point all changes will need bug IDs anyway.

[Robert Mader (robert.posteo)]

So the MR fixing the particular glitch I'm seeing on my Thinkpad T400 / GM45 is https://github.com/intel/intel-vaapi-driver/pull/514 . Including that would be enough to close this bug - it's pretty small and straight forward.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Here's the MR:
https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/intel-vaapi-driver/-/merge_requests/5

But it looks like no one has done a release of it for a couple of years. You might need to request Debian developers look at it (I'm not officially one of them).