Let's start this new year (best wishes) with some RDP stuff, in this post I will talk of an implementation to resize the window in xfreerdp.

Context

FreeRDP already had the smart-sizing option, it allows to see the window with a given aspect ratio: 100, 150 ou 180 percent.

With the MS-RDPEDISP specification, the client can send its monitors layout to the server in real time, that allows the server to react when an output is plugged or unplugged, or when the resolution changes. You can experiment that with mstsc in fullscreen mode, if you change resolution while the mstsc window is iconized, when you uniconize, it is supposed to resize.

You can also use that specification to make the RDP window resizable: you announce a monitor that has the size of the client window.

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For some project I had the opportunity to look at H264 decoding and the hardware decoding using VAAPI. An ideal excuse to write a post on that subject...

What is VAAPI ?

Taken from Wikipedia:

The main motivation for VA API is to enable hardware-accelerated video decode at various entry-points 
(VLD, IDCT, motion compensation, deblocking) for the prevailing coding standards today (MPEG-2, MPEG-4 
ASP/H.263, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, H.265/HEVC, and VC-1/WMV3). Extending XvMC was considered, but due to its 
original design for MPEG-2 MotionComp only, it made more sense to design an interface from scratch that 
can fully expose the video decode capabilities in today's GPUs.

This API is also usable directly with a DRM device, a DRI render node for example: very neat to offload the GPU decoding without a X server. You can also use it from Wayland of course.

The idea is to feed the GPU with a video stream (H264, VP9 ou MPEG) and the GPU will do the decoding and the rendering in a surface.

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